01/20/2020
Racism is a virulent, intractable feature of modern society, argues this vehement memoir-cum-manifesto. Wilderson (Incognegro ), a professor of African-American studies at U.C.-Irvine, recollects his experiences of living while black through the lens of Afropessimism, a radical philosophy that, in his telling, views all relationships between blacks and other races—including Wilderson’s own mixed-race marriage—as forms of master-slave domination, and sees antiblack racism at the mystical core of all social ideologies. (“f Black people were recognized and incorporated as Human Beings,” he writes, “Humanity would cease to exist; because it would lose its conceptual coherence, having lost it baseline other.”) These ideas frame a loose-limbed memoir of racial antagonisms great (battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s), small (growing up amid microaggressions in Minneapolis) and mysterious. (He and a girlfriend fled their apartment believing that a white neighbor deliberately contaminated it with radioactive material.) Wilderson’s academic theorizing can be turgid and overwrought—“he very paradigm of electoral politics is predicated on sexualized violence against Black people”—but when he sticks to his personal experience of racial alienation, his writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical. (“Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs,” he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.) Wilderson’s passionate account of racism’s malevolent influence is engrossing, but not always convincing. (Apr.)
"Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. Anyone unconvinced by the vision may find this a dubious contribution, but enough people have been convinced by the view to make an accessible introduction to it a valuable resource just for understanding contemporary intellectual life. Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity. Afropessimism shares unvarnished glimpses of Wilderson’s childhood, his undergraduate years, his life as a worker and activist between stints in the academy, his graduate studies and their toll on his mental health, his personal relationships, and his experiences as an increasingly well-regarded academic."
"Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism is a brilliant memoir and riveting work of creative non-fiction. He joins the ranks of Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon as one of the boldest and most unflinching theorists of the indispensability—like oxygen to lungs—of anti-Black violence and racism. And nothing since Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas has haunted me with the sheer terror of truth that Humanity and the world itself are defined by and feed on Black suffering and death. The greatest challenge in reading this Afropessimist coming-of-age story is seeing a reflection of yourself and finding the will and the words to prove him wrong."
"What’s most important and so moving about Afropessimism is that Frank B. Wilderson III attends so carefully and devotedly to his own condition of possibility. The persistence of thinking such as Wilderson’s teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge."
"I am awed by this beautiful and compelling book Afropessimism and its ability to combine a growing up (Black) memoir with Frank Wilderson’s own unerring and poetic interpretation of critical race theory to inexorably install in all the ways that only great story telling can the pithy truth that without Anti Blackness there would be no America. Can you handle that. Can I?"
"Frank Wilderson slings piercing stories and scalding analyses with literary fire and intellectual rigor. His tales juke genre and high-step over high-theory mumbo jumbo, and float Franz Fanon some new wings. Like Ralph Ellison’s bluesman, he peers unflinching into the abyss, testifies to its brutal histories and hopeless predicaments, ‘to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not through the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.’ He ghostwrites our brutal pasts into present and still hopeless predicaments, yet divines deep love and blues humor. Even if our own hopes may live elsewhere, we cannot dismiss Afropessimism ’s unnerving and undeniable truths, nor the timeless art of its author."
"There are crucial books that you don’t agree with, but one still comes to understand the importance of the thought experiment. Afropessimism is one of those books."
"Frank B. Wilderson III both thinks and feels, and profoundly knows the difference. I am not sure that I agree with what he thinks, because frankly, how would I know? But I hope that he is wrong, even though I know that no thinking is wishful. Read this book."
"[In Afropessimism ], a trenchant , funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy, Wilderson makes his most comprehensive case to date about the continued relevance of the Afropessimist worldview. . . . This was already shaping up to be one of the most controversial and insightful releases of the year. Now, with the current public health crisis and looming general election, Afropessimism feels very much like a bellwether of things to come."
Literary Hub - Aaron Robertson
★ 2020-01-13
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, "slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power." No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through ("blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon"). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that "has secured a mandate from Black people at their best ; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper."
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
