Frank B. Wilderson

First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critical intervention from scholars of color is needed. Moreover, we should be aware that not only were Foucault’s deficient of political ideas or a vision of what the world ought to be, but in neglecting question of the human he indirectly made a very ontological statement “only white lives matter”. His ideas are well-known already and I don’t want to site them there or spend a lot of paper space discussing them, what is more important is who and what he represent. Secondly, I want to turn my focus on Marx, to argue that Marxism and Marxist do not and cannot provide us a solution to black suffering. I am not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I am against it, but the ontological question “what and who is human?” when answer by the Marxist is always the white, worker, male. So if blacks are outside of human whose racial experiences are not relevant then how can we understanding the student slave, the worker slave, when chattel slavery has already ended? If black people are surplus, therefore disposable, then what is left of Marx? If black people do not have function or purpose within capitalism? I want to follow up with offering an alternative, the work of black feminist Sylvia Wynter is vital to understanding the racialization and the category of human in western modernity (Weheliye, 2014), I will attempt to piece together her call for a new humanism, alongside and relation to work by Afro-Pessimist and Critical Race Theory to gain a perspective of racialization and what does that mean for black students in the Afterlife. In all, I want to argue that the afterlife should be a more proper way of looking at history and progress here in the West. This will cause us to rethink slavery and freedom. Hopefully I will be able to messy picture of schooling where black children are posted to a social death but life is also worth living. To life a life in death or black life is not white social life.

In this essay, I provide a synthesis of three authors at the forefront of black studies: Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, and Alexander Weheliye (respectively). This essay has three primary objectives. The first objective is descriptive. I use Spillers' thesis on the metaphysics of antiblackness to frame the essay and offer a description of the current institutions and how they proactively work to erase black being and many integral parts of black culture. The second objective is expository. I offer an explanation (using the thesis of Calvin Warren) as to why antiblackness exists as it does and how it is perpetuated in the status quo as such, contending that the infusion of political thinking into academic spaces hijacks rhetoric and weaponizes it against black bodies. The third objective is speculative. I offer Alexander Weheliye's strategy as a potential mode of resistance to the current world order. Using Weheliye's analysis of diaspora, I theorize that a weaponization of black studies in academic spaces through a strategic move to subsume other forms of knowledge could potentially cause a rupture in the fabric of rhetorical humanism. The contents of this essay are the intellectual property of the authors that I cite, and I take no credit for the creation of these ideas. The purpose of this work is to draw a useful connection between three influential black studies authors and apply it to the issue of rhetorical antiblackness in academic spaces.

An examination of how Afrosurrealism (in each of its three waves) functions in poetry and narrative: as a dream and a joke, respectively. This paper examines the poetry of Étienne Léro, Henry Dumas, and Will Alexander; the plays of Aimé Césaire and Amiri Baraka; and the films of Jordan Peele, Janicza Bravo, and Boots Riley.

Written in Spring 2021 for a graduate Independent Study at the University of Texas at Austin. It was presented at the University of Texas at Austin Ethnic and Third-World Literature Sequels Conference and The University of Texas at Austin Comparative Literature GRACLS Conference.

Last update 11/16/22

O objetivo da disciplina é estudar uma parte da extensa bibliografia sobre racismo e antinegritude produzida pelo pensamento crítico negro nas últimas décadas, com ênfase, neste módulo, em autoras e autores anglófonos (lidos em traduções ao português). Terão destaque textos recentes associados ao Afropessimismo e ao Afrofuturismo (livros e ensaios de Frank Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva e Kodwo Eshun) e obras mais antigas (de Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Frantz Fanon e W. E. B. Du Bois) que são referências importantes para as discussões contemporâneas. Em diálogo com os textos teóricos e filosóficos, estudaremos algumas narrativas ficcionais (os romances Kindred: Laços de sangue [Kindred] de Octavia Butler e Amada [Beloved] de Toni Morrison, o conto “O cometa” [“The Comet”] de Du Bois e o filme Nós [Us] de Jordan Peele). Tanto no caso das obras ficcionais quanto no dos textos teóricos, historiográficos e filosóficos, o objetivo será entender melhor como as criações e o pensamento desses autores e autoras responderam às dificuldades narratológicas instauradas pela história da escravidão e pela violência antinegro.

Dans l’histoire africaine-américaine, le pessimisme ne porte pas sur les Noirs, mais sur la capacité de la société blanche à dépasser sa négrophobie. Et si les idées et réformes que nous tenons pour progressistes n’étaient que des métamorphoses du racisme ? À l’ère de Black Lives Matter, la permanence de la déshumanisation et de la mise à mort des Noirs apparaît comme un socle de nos sociétés civiles.
Ce livre s’oppose aux visions simplistes, lisses ou iréniques de la pensée africaine-américaine actuelle. L’intersectionnalité n’est pas la seule manière de penser race, genre et classe d’un point de vue noir. Noirceur présente un ensemble de théories iconoclastes, de débats contemporains et de stratégies politiques pour repenser radicalement l’avenir des vies noires en Amérique et dans le monde.

This paper will examine these racial formation processes by situating the spaces and places poor blacks congregate US and Brazil within the global racial regime of domination, in which carcerality plays a central role (Alves 2012, 2016). I will draw from the literature of African Diaspora as an analytical framework articulated by Alves (2012, 2016) as he extends the work of Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Paul Gilroy, Henri Lefebvre and others. The literature on black genocide is essential to suggest a “supra-national geography of death” (Vargas, 2010, as cited in Alves, 2012) and geography of resistance forged by people living under a racial regime of terror (Gilroy, 1993, as cited in Alves, 2012). The spatialized nature of antiblackness is what I am primary concerned as is circulates across oceans and large land masses to establish a global white supremacy can be easily located within different territories where black life is in a permanent state of siege, whether in Brazil, the United States or elsewhere. In Brazil and the US, statistics illustrate the deadly consequences of these economies of violence. They have evinced a historical pattern of black vulnerability to death energized by state technologies of confinement such as racial segregation, police violence and mass incarceration (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; James, 1996; Nascimento, 1989; Russell-Brown, 1998; Silva, 1998; Vargas, 2010 as cited in Alves, 2012). Conceiving the African Diaspora as mutually constituted through death, space and resistance is to account for its ghastly, yet, promising outcome: the anti-black project that constitute the nation state also provide the context in which a transnational black politics may emerge (Alves, 2016). It is both theoretically and politically relevant to reclaim black urban life and to account for a transnational black subjectivity produced in such deathly spatialities, since if blacks are always and already marked as socially dead (Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2003). Drawing on these insights, let me offer then a conceptualization of the African Diaspora we can speak of “black spatialities”, I am also referring to the geographies of death generated by the state—such as the prison, the favela, the cemetery, the (necro)polis—which have profoundly shaped black urban lives (Alves, 2012; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2006).  In discussing black bodies and blackness, I want to continuously articulate that nothing can relate to blackness and if therefore outside of relation to humanity and possibility, at least in this current historical epoch.  Nothing protects blacks at the end of the day against anti-blackness, as the social and economic indicators objectively prove that life changes are related to once racial positionalities and that the closer you are to blackness the greater level of disadvantages (Paixao, 2010; Telles, 2006; Winant, 2001, as cited in Vargas, 2012). Therefore, we should view the deteriorating boundaries between geo-political borders as one planetary system as they are woven together not by different racial formations separated by space and place but as bounded by ontologies and material structures that shape and over-determine the experience of black bodies on the planet.

Artigo presente na coletânea "Pensamento afrodiaspórico em perspectiva: abordagens no campo da História e Literatura" - Volume 1: História.  Fernanda Rodrigues de Miranda; Marcello Felisberto Morais de Assunção (Orgs.) -- Porto Alegre, RS: Editora
Fi, 2021.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

Here, we intend to tell an impossible story of a black girl, a suicidal black girl, in hopes of listening closer. In our investigation, we center those Afropessimist ‘facts of blackness’ (natal alienation, gratuitous violence, general dishonor) as crucial to any discussion of the Black, and as paradigmatic conditions present and pressurizing the case of Naika Venant in specific. The inability to ground a sense of commonsense to Naika Venant’s actions produces in an anti-Black World - a crisis in empathetic identification. This paper attempts to dwell in this crisis of empathetic identification, the incapacity through which one can ‘feel for’ the suicidal Black girl as a means of outlining the problem Black suicide presents for the Human when the Human’s humanity is attached to notions of ‘honor’ and ‘recognition’ disabused of the Black.

This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political
thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as modernity’s singular constitution, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s fundamental structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic non-relation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness is “the position of the unthought” that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World. My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses, which reveals what I call "the Black messianic." I argue that if it is still possible, in the wake of racial slavery, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic existence and outlaw justice, then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its paradigmatic mode of fidelity.

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times.

This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, ‘peace’ and ‘liberation’, and renewing what it means to decolonize today’s world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the world, arguing for an understanding of the ‘present’ as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. And it calls for a disruption of the "everyday politics of expediency" in the guise of neoliberalism and security.

This volume reorients the ethical and political assumptions that affectively, imaginatively, and practically captivate us, simultaneously unsettling the familiar, but dubious, promises of a modernity that decimates political life. Re-animating an international political, the authors evoke people’s struggles and movements that are neither about redemption nor erasure, but a suspension of time for radical new beginnings.

This paper was presented at the American Comparative Literature Association 2016 in the seminar “Utopia Renewed”. It was born from a desire to resist the commodification and aestheticization of Afrofuturism and to critically explore the feelings of fascination and suspicion that the more apocalyptic strain of Afro-Pessimism engenders in me. I look at the form utopia takes for the seemingly most anti-utopian and self-avowed blackest corner of Black thought, Afro-pessimism. I argue that the old utopian impulse for radical rupture is at work in Afro-Pessimism, however, given the analysis of Blackness that these thinkers undertake, the whole ethico-political terrain through which we might attempt to realize a utopian project is barred in advance, being complicit in the anti- Blackness that is the object of destruction. Since on this view the world is structured by anti-Blackness, if we can detect anything at all like a utopianism here, it can only be that of the world’s annihilation. The end of the world is therefore the only possibility for what is currently impossible: a world that does not have anti-Blackness as its guarantor of coherence. The extent to which this is an echo of the pattern of the current hegemonic model of utocalypse hinges on the way in which we understand world. I suggest that we find two ways of reading world in the corpus of Afro-Pessimism. Frank Wilderson detaches ‘the world’ from its historical, geographical and material coordinates, so that it becomes something like the totality of all possibilities of being on a planetary scale. I critique this understanding of world because it entails an apocalyptic vision that hypostasizes Blackness as a destructive force of death. Alternatively, reading Hortense Spillers suggests a second sense of world. This is world as the episteme of the ‘New World’ which retains its situatedness, despite having an especially longue durée and almost global scope. Rejecting the first sense of world allows us to remain committed to radical rupture and self-annihilation without lapsing into recycled patterns of apocalyptic desire. We can retain the destructive force of ending the world without betraying it by positing a barely secularized ontology. By situating world as episteme, we open up the task of thinking the “unthought” such that the unthinkable might become possible. To conclude I indicate the way in which some Afrofuturist works begin to do this and attend to the radical destructiveness operative in this movement with the aim of making it slightly less amenable to cooption.

The culture of white supremacy includes what Saidiya Hartman calls a “nexus of pleasure and possession.” Whites are free to enjoy their property, which of course includes their slaves. At the same time, enslaved Black people are compelled to dissimulate enjoyment of their bondage. The nexus of pleasure and enjoyment also has an epistemic component. If truth is not enjoyable, whites are free to choose something else. Both ethical and epistemic responsibility are subordinated to affect. The pursuit of happiness is never marred by concern with the plight of the slave. Afropessimism demands a challenge to the epistemic hegemony of affect, rescuing affectively uncomfortable but historically well documented truths from the oblivion of acquiescence to fragility.

I am sitting in the backseat of a Van Gogh blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, thin but healthy. A guy who calls himself "Mohawk John" is behind the wheel. His orange spikes touch the roof, testifying, one hopes, to a commitment to something deeper than just a nickname. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. Like so many of the white youth out in search of freedom that I have encountered since going ABD and hitting the road, he is reckless, eager, and his feet are made of lead. Leaving Chicago we skirt Lake Michigan as the sun begins to set. Rhizomes: issue 29: Dalton Anthony Jones

In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of African people brought to America involuntarily as “articles of merchandise” could be, or was ever intended by the framers to be, a citizen under the US Constitution. I argue that Blacks still occupy this questionable “non-human/non-citizen/slave” category which allows the police to suspend their obligation to the law when it comes to policing Black communities. Using the personal testimonies of Black people’s experiences with police in the 2017 Chicago Department of Justice report, I demonstrate how and why Black peoples struggle against the police in the afterlife of slavery. This struggle, moves black communities to united against the police who are experienced as an “occupying force,” that exemplifies the myth of “post-emancipation” as the police function as 21st Century field hands and slave catchers. Only without the police would a free society be possible.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being--especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence--work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of new media and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the Black allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

This paper uses Jacob Taubes, Catherine Malabou, Ernst Bloch and Frank B. Wilderson to develop a philosophy understanding of apocalypticism as a hope indistinguishable from nihilism. This apocalyptic perspective is then used to analyse climate change and discuss the concept of the Anthropocene.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times. This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, ‘peace’ and ‘liberation’, and renewing what it means to decolonize today’s world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the wor...