Afropessimism
by Frank B. Wilderson III

Reviewed by John Murillo III

In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman writes about the impossibility of writing Black life in the afterlife of slavery. She articulates this best in a question: “And how does one tell an impossible story?” She asks this in recognition of the material and corporeal ways Black folk suffer. She also asks in regards to the abstract consequences of antiblackness we know and feel, but do not necessarily see: the ways antiblackness violently disfigures Blackness metaphysically, psychically, and aesthetically (i.e. with regard to creative praxis and possibility). When Hartman asks about how we tell impossible stories, she is asking what kind of storytelling Black folk can do given the antiblack world’s violent imposition of impossibility upon Black life at every level.

Wilderson’s Afropessimism is both a methodological articulation of and creatively theoretical response to Hartman’s question. Structurally, Wilderson weaves narrative threads into familiar, sometimes humorous, but always harrowing stories of Black life, stitching them together with the kind of political acuity and intense reflection characteristic of the communiqués of our most hallowed revolutionaries. These storied reflections repeatedly lull the reader into an empathetic, fantastical trancelike state. Once the reader crosses the event horizon into the narrated space-times of Black life—lived on the run, in the hostile academic space, in the passive aggressive white middle-class enclave, as wait-staff in a racist South African restaurant, or while conjuring the fraught kind of love we know so well—once Wilderson enthralls the reader with his darkly deep and deeply honest prose, he rips the tapestry asunder and exposes theoretically its frayed innards. These rips in the spacetime of the story, these spatiotemporal rends, offer neither escape nor solace; we have already been caught in the inescapable gravity of the writing.

These black holes in the story open up opportunities for Wilderson to introduce and expound upon core principles and concepts of Afropessimism, the theoretical framework or “metatheory” that has rocked all of Black studies, challenged the Black folk who engage it, and radically animated political movements in the United States, South Africa, and around the world. In these interruptive moments, Wilderson unpacks important concepts like “social death,” an initially context-specific concept Wilderson plundered from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, and then generatively, necessarily warped into a paradigmatic problem for thought. Social death is a triptych, unfolding into three essential elements of what it means to be a slave. First is gratuitous violence, meaning the slave is subject to violence that is not contingent—or, perhaps, the only contingency is that one be a slave at all; as an example, consider the executions of Ahmaud Arbery, Breona Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd. Second is natal alienation, meaning the slave is devoid of recognized relational ties—to kin, blood or not, to land or geography, to society and its legal protections, and so on; consider the Reels Brothers and their arrest for not leaving land they inherited from their family, which they purchased only one generation removed from slavery. And third is generalized dishonor, a direct consequence of the first two, meaning that the slave is always already disgraced in/by the world as general principle; here, consider what animates both, The New York Times’s publication and defense of the sentence “Michael Brown…was no angel” in an article the day before his funeral. For Wilderson, “the slave” in question is not merely the slave of the historical moment of chattel slavery, but instead the term describing the position Black folk continue to occupy in the antiblack world. To be Black in an antiblack world is to be, in a very real sense, a slave.

For Wilderson, Black folk remain socially dead, unfree, enslaved by the dominant symbolic and political order of this world. This formulation animates Afropessimism’s paradigm and laces this memoir’s stories; it is the black hole’s singularity. 

Devastating and contentious as this formulation might appear, its applicability only widens in scope under the current state of a world stricken by a pandemic disproportionally killing Black folk, governed by both liberal and conservative regimes that seem to consider Black health, wellbeing, and socioeconomic survivability fodder for the capitalistic machine, and afflicted by a passivity about climate catastrophe that, no doubt, will most profoundly devastate Black lives around the globe. These are only a few examples of what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” and what Christina Sharpe describes as “the wake.” And, along with the recent and ongoing executions of Black folk by the police, these are just a few of the problems animating the global protests moving to radically transform this world inextricably bound up with slavery and its aftermath. 

Throughout Afropessimism, Wilderson interrupts his recollected stories with theoretical insights that devastate as much and insofar as they illuminate: from elaborating social death and its continued framing of Black existence, to unpacking the ways “Black death functions as national therapy,” to exposing the almost automatic solidarity between non-Black people and white people around antiblackness. 

Perhaps most devastating are the implications of Afropessimism for Black folks’ capacity to articulate, let alone own, let alone live coherent narratives of Black life. Wilderson’s theoretical elaborations intercede into the reflective, compelling stories he aims to tell, not only to expose the conceptual threads necessary to understand the real-world resonances and larger theoretical questions that interest him (and should interest us), but also to perform methodologically the failure of coherent Black storytelling. His writing spaghettifies both the reading and the telling of the story as a way of allegorically staging the total degradation, or atomization, of Black being in the afterlife of slavery. The fractured narrative elements of Afropessimism violently ebb and flow, caught up in the tidal forces of theoretical insight after theoretical insight, black hole after black hole, such that these pessimistic facts of Blackness warp these narrative elements, these stories, into examples of the impossibility of Black life lived and narrated in the antiblack world. 

In this way, the stories that make up the larger story of Afropessimism are, impossibly, told and untold at once. In order for the fullness of the told tales to register — tales of fugitivity from the FBI, violence in Germany at an academic symposium, or sorrow at his dying mother’s bedside — they must also be untold, interruptively unraveled by the theoretical violence of analysis he offers in between. They can only attain the maximum level of meaning because they cannot and are not allowed to cohere. The theoretical moments of elaboration disallow the neat conventions of normative narration because, as Wilderson puts it, the “Black story is jinxed” in the crisis it presents to the rules of narrative such that “no narrative arc…can accrue to us.” The only way to tell the story he aims to tell is, paradoxically, repeatedly, and deliberately, to violate the sanctity and coherence of the telling itself. Afropessimism is an impossible story that contributes remarkably to the radical work of Black thinking, creating, and living in, and against, the antiblack world. Drawing from M. NourbeSe Philip’s writing at the end of Zong!, Wilderson’s story, like each and every Black story, is a story that “cannot be told yet must be told, but only through its un-telling.”