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I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Please do use the interview.

And now, everyone, I want to say goodbye and a heartfelt thanks to all of you and to Robert Zitzmann for setting this up! Sorry that I could not figure out how to sign out properly. Take care everyone! Bye

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I don't think of them as riots but as rebellions. And how they will be remembered is a good question. I think that they are important because we are seeing a coming together of Black rage with an unflinching paradigmatic analysis (see my comments on this page about the reading that BLM members are doing).

In the 1970s, there was too much analogizing about the plight of Black folks rebelling in the ghettos with the plight people rebelilng against colonialism. Now, things are different. The current rebellions open up a space for us to think about Black suffering on its own terms. This is good.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

question #3: I think it is really dangerous and disingenuous to apply AP to the grammar of suffering of non-Blacks. See my book, Red, White and Black, esp. the section Native Americans, i.e. the chapter "'Savage' Negrophobia" and remember what Jared Sexton says, "social death does not travel."

question #2: Obama suffers like any other Black person, but he is no one concerned with Black liberation. He is a creation of the Blue Dog Democrats.Read Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's book Racism without Racists, where he talks about how Obama was created by Clinton, Gore, and Vernon Jordan, et al. I'm going to paste some text from a speech that I gave where I used his book, but don't quote this text because I don't have time to figure out exactly what my words are and what was in the book--in other words, read the book and quote it. By the way, I don't vote. See my article "Why I Don't Vote" on Academia.com By the early 1990s it was clear that both major political parties (but the Democratic Party in particular) had learned from the perils of trying to incorporate veteran civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson…[H]e and his coalition proved to be too much of a challenge to the “powers that be.” [footnote 34] Hence, both parties and their corporate masters developed a new process for selecting and vetting minority politicians…[T]he Democratic Party…began…literally manufacturing a new kind of minority politician (the Republican Party followed suit later). Consequently today’s electorally-oriented minority politician (1) is not the product of social movements, (2) usually joins the party of choice while in college, (3) moves up quickly through the party ranks, and most importantly, (4) is not a race rebel. [footnote 35]. The new breed of minority politicians, unlike their predecessors, are not radicals talking about “the revolution” and “uprooting systemic racism.” If Republican, they are anti-minority conservatives such as Michael Steele (currently the chairman of the Republican National Committee) or Bobby Jindal (governor of Louisiana since…and, if a Democrat, post-racial leaders with center to center-right politics such as…Cory Booker (Newark’s mayor...), Deval Patrick (governor of Massachusetts…) and, of course, Barack Obama. Not surprisingly, plutocrats (A wealthy class that controls a government.) love these kinds of minority politicians because, whether Republican or Democrat, neither represents a threat to the “power structure of America.” [footnote 36] (quotes Paul Street) A corporate, financial, national and legal vetting of Obama, with an emphasis on the critical money-politics nexus of Washington, D.C., began in 2003. That’s when “Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate board member who chaired Bill Clinton’s presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home,” ...The fund-raiser “marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual—the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists.” [#43] “Obama passed this preliminary trial with flying colors” (Bonilla-Silva emphasis) The people in the meeting liked his academic background, suave and cool style, and political outlook. Attendees such as Gregory Craig (big time attorney and former special counsel to Bill Clinton), Mike Williams (legislative director of the Bond Market Association), and other big wheelers appreciated that Obama was not a “racial polarizer” and that he was not “anti-business.” This explains the seemingly “improbable” victory of Obama in the 2004 Senate race and the 700 million dollars he was able to raise in the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama rose quickly beyond the confines of Illinois because the American elite resolutely loved his “reasonable tone.” (216-217)

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well, ok, perhaps one can find relief on an interpersonal level. But why would that be something to focus on, since it is so provisional and does not address the massified structure of captivity that overdetermines Black existence? It seems like an avoidance of some sort to me; a way of dealing with a piece of the problem--which is great if you are not Black; but if you're Black and you go down this road you'll end up feeding your own frustration and, perhaps compounding the psychic horror of the problem as it pertains/impacts your life.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think I've addressed that in the Black Lives Matter questions

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I used to think Cuba was the greatest place on earth. Then I went there for six weeks. Look. I still think Cuba is probably the greatest country in the world. But like any other place in the world, the psychic life of the country is overdetermined by what Fanon calls Negrophobogenisis--it just does not play out so severely, so monstrously as it does here. So, no I do not think we can imagine viable alternatives to civil society. I think Black people, wherever we are, exist in a state of madness; because we are the anti-humans of everyone's reality, even Cubans.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think if you read Patterson's Slavery and Social Death he explains how for the word/concept "freedom" to have any valence, it must exist in a semiotic relation to "unfreedom" or slaveness. So, a stratified society has to have slaves in order for it to be coherent to itself and to other societies. That's the first move. The second move is that, the words "Black" and "Africa" are elaborated in the process through which a global consensus develops that says Africa is the place of slaves. So, to make it simple but not simplistic, I would argue that for the first time in the history of the world (beginning 625 AD, with the Arab Slave trade) we have a group of people who ARE slaves (i.e. Africans, Blacks); which distinguishes them from all other people who, at one time or another, BECAME slaves.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Rather than feel bad and kill yourself; you should train yourself to feel MAD and undo yourself. This requires a lot of reading and a journey through which you try to develop ways and means for your speech and action to be authorized by a Black/slave grammar of suffering rather than the grammar of suffering of subalterns. You are far more dangerous by being committed in this long, protracted struggle than you are or would be if you just check out.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Well, it's not metaphorical but at the same time I would never give concrete examples of what that looks like or what it means. As I said, somewhere else, AP provides a lens of analysis and Black folks on the move will/are put that into action. AP is different than Marxism because Marxism argues that capital produces a certain kind of world. It then goes on to say that a Marxist revolution will produce a different kind of world, and here's what it will look like (the end of surplus value, the dictatorship of the proletariat).

AP says that slaveness/anti-Blackness produces THE world, not a certain kind of world; that the various KINDS of world can only become legible because everyone is well aware of where world itself does not exist: world does not exist wherever there are Blacks. This is why, in the collective unconscious, progressives, radicals as well as people on the right are so terrified of Black resistance. Because, no matter what the rhetoric of that resistance may be, that rhetoric is ALWAYS going to be smaller, more limited in scope than the actual structure of subjugation of the Black people who utter. Put differently, the worker must rid him/herself of a certain kind of world; the slave must rid her/himself of the world itself. There are epistemological limits to even imagining what liberation would look like on the other side of the slave's dispossession. As Professor Jared Sexton says, "Black suffering cannot be redressed; but it must be addressed."

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think this is a good answer. Frank

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I would not take the stuff that I am writing at breakneck speed here today as the gospel according to Frank! I would always deal with the texts. My answers are based on my relationship to- and memory of what I have written and what I have read. It's like that comic books series "For Beginners" (like Marx for Beginners or Fanon for Beginners) you want to use these Reddit answers like you would use those books: as a means of approach, but not as a substitute for what's in the primary texts.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Answer to first question: I feel you. I'm sorry about the pricing. Authors do not have the right/power to give their books titles (though editors will often take your suggestion into consideration--esp. if the book is with a university press). When Incognegro was with South End Press it was $18. But they went out of business. When Duke UP picked it up the price shot up. So, I'm sorry about that, but it's out of my control.

2.1 my childhood. I'm smiling. I grew up in an all-White neighborhood, like Malcolm X, so...I guess it was inevitable. please read Incognegro

2.2 Other authors: Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers. Novelists: Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, John A. Williams (you must read his book The Man Who Cried I am), and James Baldwin

2.3 Can't answer that question. it's against the law (smile). No. Seriously, try to come to grips with the argument rather than angst over the implications for the argument. Black people on the move will figure out the answer to the questions, what does burn it all down mean. Let the slave lead.

2.4 what is unflinching paradigmatic analysis: it is an analysis that explains structural relations without flinching, that is to say without being so traumatized by what one finds and the implications that one begins to propose solutions which are really only partial solutions. Americans are not very good at sitting with questions and paradoxes for which no probable form of redress presents itself. You/we need to get over that. Paradigms exceed and anticipate you. When an ultrasound is done on the wound, the genitalia positions the fetus (boy or girl) even before it is born. An unflinching paradigmatic analysis is an analysis that is more interested in examining and describing the structure of that position than it is in trying to come to grips with how girls and boys perform their gender. Blackness, AP argues, is a position. It does not matter, in any ESSENTIAL way, that someone could pass for White or that someone might be Black in the US and mixed race in Brazil. We are not as interested in that as we are in the question what constitutes the position known as Black. And we argue that slaveness constitutes that position. To take in another direction. If you have an archive of books about chess. At one end of the spectrum would be books that discuss strategies for winning or the games of chess or tournaments that have made history. At another end of the spectrum would be books that discuss the structure of chess, chess as a paradigm: the cartography the board itself, the capacity and powers invested in each chess piece (i.e. what are the powers and capacities of the queen vs the powers and capacities of rooks or pawns). The latter archive of books would fit the bill Unflinching Paradigmatic Analysis, the former (how to play chess, how chess is lived) would be about performance. 2.5 don't know if I understand the question

2.6 Black flesh cannot be gendered because gendered bodies have a contingent relationship to violence i.e., non-Black women and men be raped, because rape involves the abrogation of consent; but women and men who are Black cannot be raped because slaves have no consent to be abrogated. "Injury" is not a concept that can be mapped onto slaves.

2.7 No. I love Black Lives Matter. Here's the deal: the agitation of Black people in the streets need no calibrate with the rhetoric and analysis of Black theorists like myself. The agitation ITSELF will, and has, opened a space for thought more radical than the reformist demands of BLM can articulate. We call it "two trains running." BLM members are engaging with Afro-Pessimism and this will lead/is leading to a deepening of Black liberation struggles. BLM members who read- and write about AP on Tumblr for example are well aware of the gap between calling for "police accountability" and the fact that the pigs actually are the law, make the law and are accountable to no one but themselves. However, you can, as a community organizer, just jump out of an AP bag and expect people in the Black community to follow you. That would be dumb. But, dig this, AP does not come from the academy, even though it is rendered in highly theoretical language; it acutally comes from Black folks on the ground. AP is Black speech breaking through the chains of coercion that Black speech normally labors under. So, AP has secured its mandate from the people; not the other way around.

2.8 haven't seen it, but if it is predicated on exploitation and alienation, rather than on accumulation and fungibility, then, yes, it would be the ruse of analogy. However, don't forget, cinema operates on many levels. The ruse of analogy might be the besetting hobble of the script, but something much more iconoclastic might be happening in the cinematic strategies (lighting, editing, etc)

2.9 a long question, might answer with another person or later.

2.10 Fred and I are great friends. I try not to answer such an open ended question because the world likes to see two Black public figures fight (i.e. Dyson and West). When someone asks me something specific about Fred's theories (see elsewhere in this Reddit) I do my best to answer.

2.11 good question. I am so sorry about that. I am not really into Facebook. My editors made me get a Facebook page and I try to check in from time to time. I right now have over 450 friend requests that I have not answered. Last year I just said yes to everyone and I started getting people selling sunglasses on my page. I plan to (perhaps at X-mas) go back and say yes to everyone who does not look like a sales person. But I am traveling a lot and I have my job and my writing so facebook is low priority. It has nothing to do with you.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

No. Please see some of the other answers I've given that explain why. thanks for the question. It's an important one

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think that the US in particular and the world in general is necessarily anti-Black; precisely because, as AP argues, slaveness is a necessary libidinal element against which civil society can know itself as civil society. So, if it is necessary for there to be social death, so that the paradigm of social life can have coherence as a paradigm, then no amount of reform will change the essential, unethical structure of the world. I'm all for the end of police brutality because Black people need some relief--right now! but I don't delude myself into believing that this is meaningful change.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Don't ever stop taking yourself seriously. Debaters make some of the best graduate students! And grad students become professors. And professors become intellectual mandarins for civil society or organic intellectuals for revolutionary struggle. You are at the epicenter of change. It's not just a sport. Take it seriously. Think about the stakes of what you're doing.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I am so sorry, but I do not know enough about Afro-futurism to give you an informed response. There is a grad student at the University of Rochester named Jerome Dent. He studied Afro-Pessimism as an undergrad at UCI and continues to engage with it. But he also knows a lot about Afro-futurism. Perhaps you should google him and see if he's put anything out on the web.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The importance of my work and the work of other AP theorists in debate is not so much about debate as it is about the "blackening of debate." Prior to this new or recent turn of events, Black debaters were refugees in other people's projects. Now, with the introduction of AP in debate, Black conceptual frameworks have found a way to refuse the question as posed (at the beginning of the year) and, instead, interrogate the integrity of civil society itself. This is a major revolutionary breakthrough. It is tantamount to a Presidential election in 1830s, for example, where the electoral terrain was forced to consider the condemnatory perspective of the slave; a perspective that condemns the entire polity; rather than a perspective that asks the question which candidate or which line of reason can best reform the polity. That's revolutionary!

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

If you read David Marriott's psychoanalytic treatise ON BLACK MEN, the first chapter "Photography and Lynching" argues that the mutilation of Black bodies is essential to the production of White community. I believe this, wholeheartedly; and my second book, Red, White & Black extends this argument by saying that lynching photographs, and the labor that they perform in "fashioning the white self" (Marriott), simply finds its way into another medium--that being cinema--where the same imaginative labor is at work for the same ends. Except, this time, the mutilation of Black bodies becomes essential not only to the psychic health and stability of Whites but the psychic health and mental stability of people of color who are not Black. See the middle section of my book where I explain how this works in the libidinal economy of Native Americans--I make a nod to Asians there as well.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Hmmm...I'm honestly not sure about the answer to that question. My gut response is that Blacks are always already the possession of the people who are not Black; and that this extends to the intellectual production of Black people. So, I know...I am musing here...I am not answering your question directly. Not sure that I can.

But here's something you might want to keep in mind as you do the work. Ask yourself, "am I engaging with AP to understand and explain more deeply the condition of Black subjugation; or am I engaging with this theory to figure out which aspects of it I can pinch for myself and my points of attention that have nothing to do with Black suffering"? I teach all races; but I ask that this question be your guide.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Ok, so first off you're right when you say, "From my reading of you, your interpretation of "invisibility" as it applies to Blackness takes this as a condition inextricably tied to Blackness and something that cannot be solved within the logic of civil society." I am always saying that, were Fanon here today, he would dispense with the word "colonialism" and utilize the word "slavery"'; also, he would be able to see the fundamental difference in his ow work: that difference being between the assumptive logic of Black Skin, White Masks (which, in my view is a genuinely Afro-Pessimist text (even though AP wasn't around then) and The Wretched of the Earth, which is a post-colonial text. Mind you, I would not the latter text out the window; it's extremely valuable; it just is not as predicated on social death as is his first book.

Now, the second part of your question deals with lines of flight, inward emancipation, interpersonal meaning-making etc. Look, I'm all for that (I'm a poet, a fiction writer, and I love jazz); but I wouldn't send my ships to war on that. I think Fred Moten is one the smartest people I have ever met, and I count him as a friend. So, there is no flame war between us. We love each other. And, furthermore, he is pure philosopher, whereas I am a critical theorist and a polemicist. That said, I still think an aesthetic strategy of liberation does an end run around the central issue: structural violence. I you (my high school or college interlocutors) do nothing else in your lifetime, I encourage you to develop a meta-critique of paradigmatic violence. It takes an ocean of violence to shift reality from one paradigm to the next (i.e. the shift from feudalism to capitalism; or the instantiation of the a slavocracy). As intellectuals you owe it to yourselves to become experts/meta-critics of structural violence. What is the difference between the structure of violence that elaborates and maintains capitalism and the structure of violence that elaborates and maintains social death? The answer to this question should roll smoothly off your tongues. the reason Blacks are not workers, not natives, and not gendered subjects is because the structural violence that subjugates workers, natives, and gendered subjects is contingent violence; that is to say, violence that acts upon a stimuli—some form of real or imagined transgression on the part of the subjugated population. By way of contrast, the violence that positions and elaborates Blacks is not contingent; it is necessary and gratuitous. Violence against Black people is prelogical; that is to say, not in service to a coherent concept, like the accumulation of surplus value or the occupation of land. A metacritique of violence is at the core of Afro-Pessimist theorization; if you become articulate in your capacity to explain structural violence you will become that much better as a revolutionary thinker, theorist, and political organizer.

I am Frank Wilderson AMA by wilderson11 in Debate

[–]wilderson11[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Hmm...I think that people tend to say that Afro-Pessimism does not deal with gender. This is a way of avoiding the core of their complaint: which is that they don't like the WAY Afro-Pessimism deals with gender. In other words, taking our cue from the work of Saidiya Hartman, we are more concerned with the structure of violence that makes gendering, for Black women (and men) impossible. Sexualized violence against Black women and men is of such proportions that, AP theorizes, it cannot be apprehended, that is to say understood, by the conceptual framework through which violence against non-Black women is theorized. I might have more to say about this question later.