| dbo:abstract
|
- Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman". According to Wilderson, the scholar who coined the term as it functions most popularly today,Afro-pessimism theorizes blackness as a position of, using the language of scholar Saidiya Hartman, "accumulation and fungibility", that is as a condition of, or relation to, ontological death, as opposed to a cultural identity or human subjectivity. Jared Sexton locates the foundational thread of Afro-pessimism in the "motive force of a singular wish inherited in no small part from black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival". As opposed to humanist anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists who engage the history of black subjectivity as one of entrenched political discrimination and social ostracization, Afro-pessimists across disciplines have argued that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of modernity. Wilderson writes that "Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers' agendas." (en)
|
| rdfs:comment
|
- Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afro-pessimism can be understood as "a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society's dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society". They argue this violence "cannot be analogize (en)
|
