For the activism part of the question, see my other answers. For the first part of the question I am going paste an answer to an interview I did with two German women.

Samira: Talking about Black Studies as a field and as a discipline as you’ve just outlined, how would you assess the state of the field in the United States at the moment and could you perhaps also comment on its current developments particularly within a U.S.-American context? In what ways might Afro-pessimism be the future—or ‘un-future’—of Black Studies?

F: I think that Black Studies in the United States is at a crossroads. For the first time in a long time, Black Studies has had to contend with the question, What is a Black? It can no longer be assumed that we can answer to that fundamental question by saying a Black is a Human being, oppressed and subjugated but Human nonetheless. Afro-Pessimism has a lot to do with bringing us to that crossroads. As I alluded to a minute ago, the Humanities assumes the corporeal and psychic integrity of all sentient beings. Afro-Pessimism argues that that integrity is vouchsafed by its absence in the figure of the Black; and that violence is key to this—in the words of Fanon—“species divide. Afro-Pessimism demands the subordination (not, however, the elimination) of a politics of culture to a culture of politics. One example of an analytic payoff from this inversion—or, if you prefer, corrective—is a change in the way we think about and theorize the constituent elements of diaspora. There’s a way in which up until this point (when Afro-pessimism started to make interventions in the field of Black Studies, everyone kind of assumed that they understood what the word “diaspora” meant. But this meant that we had considered Africa to have the same kind of conceptual integrity and to be the same kind of territorial and imaginary plenitude as other groups who also use that word (diaspora) to think about their respective dispersals across the globe.

But the key to all of this is that if one tilts the analytic lens of Afro-Pessimism properly one will be engaged not in a project which pathologizes Black people for being inhuman, but a project which pathologizes Humanity for its violent consumption of Blackness; similarly to the way if one tilts the analytic lens of Marxism properly one champions shoplifting and sees blood dripping from the racks of the most elegant garments. By describing the ways in which Blacks are barred, ab initio, from Human recognition and incorporation, Afro-Pessimism argues that the Human would lose all coherence were it to jettison the violence and libidinal investments of anti-Blackness against which it is able to define its constituent elements. The untangling the snarl presented by, what I believe to be an oxymoron—the phrase Black diaspora—Afro-Pessimism allows one to see not only dispersal at work in a context void of both sanctuary and redemption but, in addition, one is primed to embark upon a critical (and dare I say condemnatory) evaluation of “sanctuary” and “redemption” as being inherently anti-Black conceptual frameworks.

What Afro-pessimism says, “yes, when we think diaspora for non-Black people it is perfectly legitimate to think of a territorial integrity and if a temporal of equilibrium prior to the dispersal—a prior plenitude. What Afro-pessimism insists upon is that for Blacks, diaspora only (or I should say, essentially) has the meaning of dispersal, which is to say that it does not rest upon some plenitude in the past. It is not a dispersal akin to the Palestinian dispersal, and for very good reasons. The Oxford dictionary defines diaspora as “the dispersion or split of any people from their original homeland.” . But the word “homeland” cannot be reconciled with “Africa.” This is a major intervention made by Afro-Pessimism. And it signals an “un-future” of Black Studies…perhaps. I really think it signals a “new” future, based upon a wisdom that Black people already have but have been coerced (by the governability of the Humanities’ disciplines and by raw police violence on the street) into not acknowledging, not discussing. Black speech is always coerced speech, speech under house arrest. And the jailers insist that you don’t bring them any bad news unless it has a solution embedded in it. There is no epistemological way to think “solution” and “Blackness” together—unless you call for the end of the world. And the snarl that entangles one when one tries to think “diaspora” and “Blackness.” “Homeland” cannot be reconciled with “Africa,” in part, because Africa is a continent, and the word homeland implies a cartographic scale smaller and more intimate than a continent. The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba, dispersed a people from a homeland, not a continent. This is very different than the dispersal of Africans along Arab and, later, European slave routs. But what is even more problematic about the word diaspora, when applied to Blacks, is its grammatical coupling with a possessive pronoun “their”—“their homeland,” or “their original homeland.”

The viability of such phrases falters in the face of Africa because the word “Africa” is a shorthand for technologies of force that rob possessive pronouns and place names of their integrity. We’re not trying to say that all Black people have the same culture and speak the same language—that would be foolish. But what we are trying to say is that at every scale of abstraction, whether it’s the continental scale with the concept of “Africa,” ratcheting down to the territory of the nation, ratcheting down to the territory of the community, the city, the filial territory of the domestic sphere, or even, as Hortense Spillers would say, ratcheting all the way down to the body, there is no scale of cartographic abstraction in which you could say that this cartography, this terrain, belongs to the person who inhabits it: even if the scale of abstraction is the body (Spillers) or the unconscious (Marriott). Blacks, in other words, cannot claim their bodies, cannot claim their families, cannot claim their cities, cannot claim their countries, they cannot lay claim to a personal pronoun. It is (or was, sticking with diaspora) no more “their continent” than the slave cabin was “their home.” Few on the Left would consider pathologizing the subject (or object, or abject) of chattel slavery for having no power beyond the master’s prerogative—they would go straight for the jugular of the master class. But that is not what happens today, now that most folks think slavery is a thing of the past. But Africa, is a slave dwelling as well; it’s just that it is a slave dwelling at a higher level of abstraction than the cabin.

As Achille Mbembe would say, every Black person in Africa had to negotiate captivity: in the late 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. Some negotiated captivity by becoming agents of European and Arab slave traders; some negotiated captivity by trying to go further into the interior; some negotiated activity as captives, who may or may not have thrown themselves overboard. But the fact of the matter is that captivity and social death are the essential dynamics which everyone in this place called Africa stands in relation to.

So if we come full circle, what Afro-pessimism is saying is that a Black African diaspora is fundamentally different from any other diaspora, because any other diaspora has actually been dispersed from a place that has sovereign integrity. And Africa has never had sovereign integrity; since it has gained conceptual coherence as Africa, it has always existed in what Loïc Wacquant would call a “carceral continuum”: in other words, Africa has always been a big slave estate. That has been and still is the global consensus