Afropessimism

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Title:

Afropessimism

Author:

Wilderson, Frank B., III, 1956- author.

ISBN:

9781631496141

Edition:

1st ed.

Physical Description:

xi, 352 pages ; 24 cm.

Contents:

For Halloween I washed my face -- Juice from a neck bone -- Hattie McDaniel is dead -- Punishment Park -- The trouble with humans -- Mind the closing doors -- Mario's -- Epilogue: The new century.

Personal Subject:

Wilderson, Frank B., III, 1956-

Subject Term:

African American intellectuals -- Biography.

African American college teachers -- United States -- Biography.

African Americans -- Race identity.

Political activists -- United States -- Biography.

College teachers -- United States -- Biography.

Discrimination in education -- United States.

Racism.

Summary:

In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of the non-analogous experience of being Black. A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, Afropessimism presents the tenets of an increasingly influential intellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting slavery through a Marxist framework of class oppression, Frank B. Wilderson III, "a truly indispensable thinker" (Fred Moten), demonstrates that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive, anti-black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but an almost necessary force in our civilization that flourishes today, and that Black struggles cannot be conflated with the experiences of any other oppressed group. In mellifluous prose, Wilderson juxtaposes his seemingly idyllic upbringing in halcyon midcentury Minneapolis with the harshness that he would later encounter, whether in radicalized, late-1960s Berkeley or in the slums of Soweto. Following in the rich literary tradition of works by DuBois, Malcolm X and Baldwin, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. --

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	378.12 WIL	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	378.12 WIL	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	378.12 WIL	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.

Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."

And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.

Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.

Author Notes

Professor and chair of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson III lives in Irvine, California.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Racism is a virulent, intractable feature of modern society, argues this vehement memoir-cum-manifesto. Wilderson (Incognegro), a professor of African-American studies at U.C.-Irvine, recollects his experiences of living while black through the lens of Afropessimism, a radical philosophy that, in his telling, views all relationships between blacks and other races--including Wilderson's own mixed-race marriage--as forms of master-slave domination, and sees antiblack racism at the mystical core of all social ideologies. ("f Black people were recognized and incorporated as Human Beings," he writes, "Humanity would cease to exist; because it would lose its conceptual coherence, having lost it baseline other.") These ideas frame a loose-limbed memoir of racial antagonisms great (battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s), small (growing up amid microaggressions in Minneapolis) and mysterious. (He and a girlfriend fled their apartment believing that a white neighbor deliberately contaminated it with radioactive material.) Wilderson's academic theorizing can be turgid and overwrought--"he very paradigm of electoral politics is predicated on sexualized violence against Black people"--but when he sticks to his personal experience of racial alienation, his writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical. ("Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs," he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.) Wilderson's passionate account of racism's malevolent influence is engrossing, but not always convincing. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes thatby designmatters will never improve for African Americans.To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, "slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power." No other ethnic groupnot Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americansin the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through ("blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whima disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon"). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that "has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper."An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Wilderson, a professor and chair of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine, blends expressive accounts of his experiences from adolescence through middle age, a roller coaster of highs and lows, with an intellectually sophisticated exposition of his philosophy of life, race, and the world. He describes his development of a metatheory, which he calls "afropessimism," and which he defines "as a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism." The result is a highly charged combination of memoir, criticism, and reflection. On the personal side, Wilderson shares memories of Minneapolis, Berkeley, and South Africa, and candidly recounts his mental breakdown while in graduate school. On a larger scale, he charts the endless repercussions of slavery within Black lives. Looking to literature, film, and philosophy, he traces the profound impact of violent subjugation, the role of the enslaved in building nations, and how pervasive and profound the damage remains. A hard-hitting and mind-expanding introduction to a new way of viewing the past and the present.

Acknowledgments	p. ix
I
Chapter 1 For Halloween I Washed My Face	p. 3
Chapter 2 Juice from a Neck Bone	p. 19
Chapter 3 Hattie McDaniel Is Dead	p. 55
Chapter 4 Punishment Park	p. 147
II
Chapter 5 The Trouble with Humans	p. 191
Chapter 6 Mind the Closing Doors	p. 231
Chapter 7 Mario's	p. 253
Epilogue: The New Century	p. 309
Notes	p. 341

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

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