F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Afropessimism and the Black Atlantic

Over the course of this semester, reading the likes of Sadiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson III, I have dove headfirst into the conversation around Afropessimism. Recently, I was reading this conversation between Hartman and Wilderson that took place in 2003. At the heart of their discussion is the topic of subjectivity and humanity; yet, where they depart from other humanist theorists, they believe that the category of Blackness is mutually exclusive from the categories of humanity. At first, this caught me by surprise, given that I have been educated in a liberal humanist tradition that would view racial progress through the theoretical expansion of categorization to include black people. However, the more I have dabbled in posthumanist theory, the quicker I began to understand the core of what Wilderson and Hartman are trying to say. In both of their works, they discuss how humanist discourse (as do many posthumanist theorists) relies upon practices of speciesism, liberal exclusion of humans based on difference, and the infliction of pain and trauma. In other words, Western theorizations about what constitutes human identity has been genealogically linked to and is inextricable from the white supremacist construction of race and blackness. Relying on Orlando Patterson's notion of "social death," Wilderson III explains that the fundamental existence of black people in the West is relegated to non-human or slave. Taking this point even further, Wilderson III explains that the only dynamic that governs relationships across the color line is the master-slave dynamic. (He wasn't kidding when he said this was pessimistic). It also throws an obvious wrench in white people's efforts towards allyship as well. Heaven knows those well meaning liberals would never think they are participating in a dynamic that replicates the master-slave dynamic, but as Hartman and Wilderson III point out, we participate in it everyday. While Wilderson III, is concerned with personal relationships, Hartman is primarily concerned about history and its tendency to numb and desensitize people to the expression of black pain and grief. Both mention how these traumas are both unfathomable but undeniably real. This would mean that the historical voids contain unseeable and invisible amounts of pain and fear, that are theoretically unknowable and still historically replicated by the archive and its gaps. 

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