The Argument of “Afropessimism”

July 18, 2020 5:44 PM

Frank B. Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded. [slTheNewYorker]
posted by Ahmad Khani (3 comments total)

It’s possible to regard Wilderson’s manner of spinning toward and away from the particulars of a story without ever fully telling the thing as a critique of the Black autobiographical tradition—which, in America, begins with the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and includes Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and the autobiographies of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. Common to the genre, even in its most radical iterations, is a narrative thrust that accentuates the forward movement of the writer. (“Narratives of ascent,” the literary theorist Robert B. Stepto called them.) Douglass learns to read and escapes slavery; Malcolm finds God and Elijah Muhammad; Davis, wanted by the government, goes on the run and gets put in prison but ends up free. Even if progress isn’t the message, it insinuates itself into the rhythm of this kind of book and becomes a quiet component of its logic. Wilderson obliterates that logic. What happened to him yesterday is what will happen to him today, only more loudly. Nothing has really changed: Black people still occupy the position of slaves, and what matters in the story of Frank and Stella is the nature of the forces arrayed against them, not how and whether they get away. (No one gets away.)

posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:54 PM on July 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is timely for me--I've been participating in a feminist theory reading group and heard about Afropessimism for the first time last week.
posted by hoyland at 7:59 AM on July 19, 2020

Wilderson contends that “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic Slave, who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line.”

For me, that sentence resonates with the end of this essay(slyt)

If we can't relate to people who have little control over their lives, how could we ever tell stories about capitalism?

posted by otherchaz at 10:03 AM on July 19, 2020 [3 favorites]