Afropessimism’s Radical Abdication

2023/11/30 by Loic Wacquant
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction #Anarchism and Radical Politics

paper · doi:10.64590/iex

Abstract

In radical counter-position to the ameliorative civil-rights tradition, the Afropessimist perspective blends memoir and theory, lyricism and abstraction, into a nihilistic vision of ‘slaveness’ as founding condition of black American life. Loïc Wacquant probes the political logic of this ‘excluvisist brand of race primordialism’.

Related

• Afro-American Identity: Reflections on the Pre-Civil War Era
• The Pitfalls of (Anti)Essentialism: Pan-Africanism, Afropolitanism, and Global Blackness
• Black Ideologies, Black Utopias: Afrocentricity in Historical Perspective
• The Afropessimist Never Drinks the Kool-Aid of Black Enlightened Progress: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III
• Paul Laurence Dunbar and Turn-into-the-20th-Century African American Dualism