The Biological Question: Medical Science Puzzles Over Impact of Antiblackness on Health

The health care debate is raising a number of questions around race and health-- and biopower/necropower. Many of the assumptions underwriting formations of health and social entitlement programs are founded in a kind of social scientific antiblackness with which we are all too familiar. The same antiblack affect underwrites the irrational crack-versus-powder cocaine disparity, the opposition to federal means-tested transfer policies (like AFDC), and, if we go back far enough, the initial shaping of the federal New Deal entitlement programs-- especially by powerful southern Congressional leaders-- to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, job classifications in which blacks were concentrated.

Also, over the last few decades, biological and genetic arguments have been on the rise to explain "social problems" like student achievement.

Because of a recent conversation with a friend, I have been thinking a bit lately about the relationship between "the biological" and "the social." What is the appeal of such biological and social scientific explanations to discourses on race? Can the sway of "scientific" explanations be attributed to their power to explain and predict effectively? To the extent to which they tap into a certain set of affective structures widely held in civil and political society? What else might explain the adoption of, say, Prof. John D'Iulio's superpredator theory that continues to underwrite laws concerning the incarceration of juveniles? What crisis is induced, if any, when theories like superpredator theory are proven to be bunk?

Here is another breakdown of the explanatory power of both social sciences and medical sciences. Why would college-educated black American women have higher likelihood of low-birth-weight babies than both white high school dropout women (a control for socioeconomic status explanations so popular in the social sciences) AND African immigrant women (a control for the genetic explanations so popular in the medical sciences)?



Source: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/resources_video.php?res_id=210 (accessed 8/11/09)

I'm curious about what the waxing influence of genetic and biological explanations in scientific and even humanistic discourse bodes for black bodies and blackened spaces.

First, we should remember Fanon's admonition that it is pointless to seek out what Blackness signifies (as the Negritudists had done then, as the Afrocentrists, cultural nationalists, and canon formationists do now). Attempting to do so is an attempt to engage in what Wilderson calls "the ruse of analogy"-- an analogy with whiteness. And that just won't do for blackness.

By way of illustration, in mathematical terms blackness/Africanness wouldn't be a zero or a negative term on a graph in which whiteness/europeanness was a positive term. (If it was such, Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic would work for Blacks because negation would be conceivable.) Instead, Blackness is a null set. We recall from math that even zero has a place on the graph; here we should think of a baseball player who has been at bat once and struck out during that time at bat-- her/his batting average would be 0. A null set (written as a zero with a crossbar over it) is the absence of positionality on the graph altogether-- as though the baseball player had never even been at bat to begin with.

This is the often-overlooked radical meaning of Fanon's statement:

For not only must the black man [sic] be black; he [sic] must be black in relation to the white man [sic]. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [sic] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [sic] (BSWM 110).

In the curious way that social realities reflect back onto math, we should take note that without the concept of the null set, mathematics as we know it would be impossible. The null set in relation to mathematics, like the death-bound subject (to quote janMohamed)-- the black-- in relation to modernity, is a condition of possibility, existing as absence so that Presence may have coherent meaning. "No one knows yet who [the Negro] is," Fanon tells us (BSWM 139). Even the Negro him/herself.

Among those whose psyches are most destabilized by the unknowability of blackness are white folks. In this sense, one could read the scientific tendencies to chart blackness as hegemonic moves to make blackness signify something. The sciences become the final arbiter in chains of signification-- the Name of the Father, what Christianity may once have been.

A Very Touching Story

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4371874

And my reply, posted on the ESPN site:

Enjoyed this immensely. Cried. Thanks for sharing. Let's not let the narrative suture us into the safe sense that "It is enough to have good friends and a resilient spirit" individually and that massive social transformation does not need to take place. These kids were already positioned by an unethical violence that is so essential, it preceded Dartanyon's birth and Leroy's accident. That most people will forgo a structural explanation for the violence that positioned them in hypersegregated Cleveland ghettoes, schools with 40% graduation rates, near industrial train tracks, and in places where preventable birth disorders (unlike Leber's) go unchecked in the first place will cause them to romanticize what these kids have had to overcome instead of changing this society fundamentally so that more kids don't have to overcome an unethical state of nonbeing. "An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring," said MLK, and the same is true of a social edifice that placed these kids in zones of death where, by intelligence and toughness-- but also a lot of LUCK-- they survived where others (of perhaps the same intelligence, toughness, and resilience) did not. Neither stories like this, nor the election of a black president, nor yet another Skip Gates miniseries will absolve America of its reliance on the death of black and blackened bodies in zones like that where millions of other Dartanyons and Leroys "live."

The affective connections to black suffering are deadly. With all the overcoming that blacks must do, you would think that a little Hegelian-type recognition would be in the offing. But previous experience suggests, and the best readings of western culture also suggest, that black suffering is actually a source of affective enjoyment among whites, other nonblacks, and (as my own tears suggest) blacks ourselves! Krin Gabbard illustrates this point to some degree in his book Black Magic, in the chapter on all of the "magical Negro" stories that occurred around the turn of the millennium.

"We Don't Even Have A Country": James Baldwin's documentary Take This Hammer

Thank you, to the source on this!

This is James Baldwin illustrating the concept of the (no)space of the black: that San Francisco is no different from Birmingham for the black.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041

And just think, this was in the relatively "hopeful" days before crack. Look at how clean the streets of Hunter's Point/Bayview are! And these brothas standing around looking all baaad while they smoke,...what,...WEED?

Affect/Politic: Mos Def and Dead Prez

A recent conversation with a friend highlighted our different aesthetic tastes for two so-called "conscious" rappers. My friend favors Mos Def. I have nooooo problems with Mos Def, but lately, I have favored Dead Prez.


Here is a summary of my understanding of my friend's concerns about Dead Prez: They are enunciating so much anger that their artistry is suspect. It doesn't really take as much talent or genius to articulate rage as it does to articulate a coherent political message.


I think I know what this friend means about the difference in the political analysis provided by a Mos Def as opposed to Dead Prez. I guess I hadn't really evaluated my reasons for enjoying Dead Prez, and my friend's comments invite me to do that.

I assume that a political analysis of aesthetics has to take account of both the intellectual content (what they say) and the affective structure of articulation (how they say it).

Given that as a framework for our discussion, there is definitely something to be said for an aesthetic that encourages inquiry in the way that Mos Def's music does. Off the top, I think of "New World Water" and "Mathematics" from Black on Both Sides as an example of this. I suppose that what I appreciate most about Dead Prez is their articulation of the affect of the "death-bound subject."

Not that Mos is not doing this; he is. But Mos performs most of his lyrics with that deadpan lyrical style and has something in the beats/cuts/instrumentation (you can tell that I don't have the conceptual vocab to describe clearly my assessment of Mos' hip-hop music theory) that jibes with a structural analysis in the *content* articulated but not in the articulation itself.

With Dead Prez, "it's real hip-hop, and it don't stop til we get the po-po off the block" in "It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop" comes to mind as an example of how the southern style they use articulates the affect at the level of enunciation. This is not to take anything away from Mos. Since I only have one solo album of his (plus Black Star), I don't know his work well enough to do that. I do suspect that his pairing with Bustah Rhymes on "Do It Now" and Talib Kweli elsewhere suggests that he is aware of his aesthetic limitations. (Bustah and Talib *do* articulate the affect I'm talking about at the level of enunciation and work contrapuntally with Mos' "laid-back" more contemplative style.) I'm going to keep thinking about this.

I know, you probably think I'm saying "Mos is too intellectual"-- which I consider to be the most unfair of the aesthetic critiques of so-called "conscious" rap. I don't think that I'm saying that. I think it has something to do with Mos' voice and this mysterious concept from acoustics called "formants"-- the wavelengths that certain singers are able to access and that have some connection to human affect that no one can really explain. It may not be something Mos can do anything about. And I love his work anyway.

Or maybe it's just that I'm from the South. Seriously. Maybe, being from the South, the affect of enunciation is more attuned to the way I'm accustomed to what I consider "authentic." This will have to be explored later, and I may have to revise all of this once I get the new Mos Def and more of Dead Prez.

Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures"

Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSy7LOwzHQ [UPDATED LINK]

Give it a listen.

Below are my notes about it.

The best thing that I can say about this trickster folk tale is that i received it from somebody black. That makes it resonate with the conditions under which such tales usually have found their way down through the generations in slave quarters and tenements and board rooms, etc).

On the other hand, the framing of the narrative by what sounds like a white announcer disrupts the liberatory potential of this narrative, and by the time the very nonblack seeming audience voices come in, we are back to this being a command performance for the master. The announcer says "overcome"... so, this is packaged as a narrative of "overcoming" "getting over" "making it"-- what does that mean? what ideologies are bundled with that? what do the artists who (re)created it-- the author and the actor-- mean by it? would they agree with the announcer? Okay, let's face it: I'm immediately on guard. Even if it is going to be read by Reuben Santiago-Hudson, it seems to be that this is an extension not of black culture or being but of what Hortense Spillers called "being for the captor."

The Hero (Daniel)
academic bonafides from Ivy League
excuse me, American Studies-- not African American Studies or Education or Sociology or Performing Arts or a sports scholarship recipient or any of the other narratives that have come to be so unsurprising for blacks in a university setting that they no longer instantly catalyze a state of mass (white) psychic crisis. then again, it's still understandable enough so that it's not something like if he majored in astrophysics or something more esoteric that would cause the whole brow to lift. you can see how black people would be in a field like American Studies that is so close to the humanities and social sciences. it is worthy of remark because it is probably the least radical of the relatively recent interdisciplinary (past 60 years) add-ons to the academic buffet. it is information that tells you something about the kind of character this Daniel is and the nature of the empathy he is formulated to induce/enable.

this is the perfect post-civil rights era negro! he exists in what a smarter person than i might call an asignifying oppositional relation to white expectations-- which is to say, he dances with them, ballroom style so that wherever they are, he is not. his blackness makes him asignifying; kinda like the place-name Hunter's Point, which is "black" until whites no longer want it to signify "black." then they move in. blackness is asignifying: it doesn't mean anything except a positionality in relation to whiteness. [Fanon: "not only must the black man (sic) be black, he (sic) must be black IN RELATION TO the white man (sic)" (my emphasis).] by dancing with white expectations, he doesn't seem to undermine, but rather reproduce, those very expectations. And whites can't thank themselves enough for all the things that he is able to do. They have "given" blacks their freedoms, freedoms for which whites themselves represent the standard. what is "black" in an era when there are no more "colored" fountains in south carolina? it is, as ever, whatever "white" is not. this story is about how this Daniel guy seems to be dodging the white expectations by confronting them. so, is that really "freedom"?

wow, and he's a gifted negro with authenticity: the musical performance. (before Dixie, we hear that he plays jazz standards and old slide tunes; after Dixie, he goes right into 'A' Train). this is the perfect negro, who can do all of these "black" things of which whites feel some delight in partaking, AND at the same time he can also serve as an antidote to the stereotypes that left-thinking white folks desperately WANT to jettison from their psyches but for which they keep finding evidence. whites get tired-- physically tired-- of the cognitive dissonance of saying, "I know they're not all like that," even after seeing how many of "them" ARE "like that." Daniel is already the perfect foil to their stereotypes. Maybe this is why he is loved? He is fetishized. They need him. They devour him and his authentic negro self with their eyes (scopophilia, as David Marriott calls it) and their ears. they seem to be saying, "My southern college-educated whiteness needs legitimation in the face of these old-school, OldeStyle-drinking frat boys. Come on, black man. Do something amazing. Say something amazing. I just LOOOOVE to hear you speak."

I am reminded of Stanley Crouch [ugh] quoting somebody else: (to paraphrase) American virtuosity lies in making the exceptional look easy, and this is one of the Negro's best gifts. sliding back and forth between different forms of command performance qualifies in this story as black freedom. This negro virtuosity is also one of the white's favorite fantasies of the black-- that is, until it causes them to lose "their" homerun title or "their" democratic presidential nomination.

His class status and his unproblematic class relationship with other slaves not only enable him to have some protective hedge against many day-to-day experiences of "racism"; they also save the author the trouble of having to bring up a lot of ways in which Daniel is continuously positioned as object and has not been repositioned by the money he inherited. Daniel's money, in fact, gives the author a wider array of tools to play with in suturing the audience members' empathy. Daniel's money makes it so that the author can crowd out ontological and structural continuities with slavery, because Daniel himself is able to crowd out thinking about them by his possession of an amazing house and classic car-- and, of course, the narrative has to mention all of these things.

It's interesting to see what requires a LOT of contextual explanation, and what requires very little.

The money this 23-year-old possesses is INHERITED. the money's not just his. it was amassed in the generations before his by his southern mother and aunt, who surely grew up before "the signs" came down. (he got this money "the old-fashioned way"-- one of many things that are "classic" or "old-fashioned" about him. To be 23, he's an "old" man which makes him asexual, as far as the story goes, even as he is charming and jazzy. just like the symbolic eunuch, louis armstrong, whose famous high-C's could drive white women literally swooning into traffic without his constituting a threat to white men. santiago-hudson is known for these kinds of roles. no hip-hop necessary. pleasing to the white audience. easy on their ears. if this were costumed, Daniel would for sure have a vestmentary code that was in some way suggestive of this "old-fashioned" quality about him.) the fact of this inherited money, of course, plays that aforementioned legitimizing function so that whites can pat themselves on the back for the things blacks did both with and in spite of them. Imagine that: "black entitlement" (oxymoron??)-- and no intervention of the state behind it!

but that is not my point here. my point here is that this information-- the inherited money-- needs to be mentioned and explained. it would not be believed if it were just flashed before us. a nigger with money? a 23-year-old nigger with money? a 23-year-old nigger in the eastern seaboard states (y'know, the ones that track Interstates 85 and 95, those major distribution routes for drugs coming from miami) who drives a fancy car, no less? it would require contextualization in order to be legible in the ways the author intended for purposes of empathy building. The story would not be able to move forward without this explanation.

Here's an example on the flipside. The performer's (Santiago-Hudson's) vocal selections of Dixie try to give us a taste of how Daniel must have sounded, but they don't give us a whole lot of information, they just give us a taste. almost a tease. In the very effective storytelling strategy of "leaving em wantin' more," we are left to simply *imagine* the power of the black voice, and the author and performer/director allow for the taste that we have gotten to be enough. The author doesn't spend too much time/space on this. It is known, it is a common literary trope: Niggers can sing. Unlike the supposition we are asked to make that a young nigger can have honest money and not work, we can accept a singing nigger a priori without much explanation and move on with the story.

Wow. I wonder about how strong the black presence was in the actor's audience as he performed this. hm.

This is a work of black authorial/performative fantasy-- and the fantasies are WHITE! the author frames racism as the preserve of a handful of grotesque frat boys, and poor whites, with maybe a few liberal southern white pecadilloes like the pat on the back sprinkled in for authenticity and liberal awareness that there are still some faux-pas that happen from time to time and that it's best to just ignore or play along with them and move on.

This is also part of the story's suture; it hails the audience's desire to do violence toward "those racists" and to relate to this perfect negro, whom they desire to see do well in the world; he, of course, has to be perfect in his harmless pranksterism. If he were at all angry, I wouldn't be hearing this story right now.

"Daniel didn't too much care for the slaps on the back, but he didn't focus too much energy on that"--

how interesting that the author felt the need to mention this! he would probably frame this as an example of "ignorant behavior"

it's not that this "ignorant behavior" merits no thought or energy; the author didn't say that.

the author does say that Daniel "DIDN'T" devote a lot of attention to "that"

but the author evades any meditation on whether Daniel COULD have focused "energy on that." after all, Daniel is in the Lion's Den. black rage is excised from the story because it would also very likely have found no use and no auditors in the bar that Daniel is in; but also and more essentially (especially to Daniel himself) because the regime of gratuitous violence that civil and political society can make manifest instantly on Daniel's black ass is so tremendous that Daniel is in essence forced to perform a white fantasy of the cool black jazz cat who can take the pats on the back and go back to performing for them.

claiming southern soil-- recognizing land as his-- MY ASS!!! black folk in the south don't even map certain parts of the south onto their geographies.

"gimme back my flag" he says to Pickett in his dream

vocality on Barb, Irmo-- hard rhoticity ("r" sound)-- what is the actor doing here?

"I called about the truck" he answers when travis first answers the door-- something about how his voice "darkens" here, loses some of its resonance, implying that Daniel is at least playing along with, if not completely acknowledging, the power dynamic

"He and Sara walked across the yard, got into the pickup, and waved to Travis and Barb, who were still standing in Daniel's yard as they drove away. Sara was on the verge of hysterics by the time they were out of sight. 'That was beautiful!!' she said. 'No,' Daniel said softly. 'No. That was true.'"

Curious passage. Daniel and the author both seem to be disavowing the regimes of violence that forced him and Sara to perform until "they were out of sight"

Slavery and Social Death says a lot that exposes this story as being, at best, a whimsical fantasy of how to "overcome" slave positionality, and, at worst, an enabling fantasy of civil and political society's regimes of gratuitous violence. It continues a policy narrative that the goal is to create more Daniels-- educated and castrated eunuch slaves-- to do the work of making whites feel good about themselves and helping them administer their empire.

In a sense, you can always destabilize the standard white narratives of blackness by altering its performance. Diahann Caroll and Sidney Poitier, among others, made careers of this.This is not the same thing as repositioning oneself as nonblack/Human.

This is a classic trickster narrative (Anansi, Brer Rabbit, High John the Conqueror) of the black outsmarting the Master/White. And the ubiquity of these narratives has never freed black folk.

He's still performing for the whites even in coercing them through mechanisms of class

The massive act of denial required to sing Dixie and buy a truck with the confederate flag-- i think that this is a recognizable behavior to many middle-class blacks who signify by feigning ignorance as a kind of ploy when the stakes are relatively low.

There is something dishonest about the title. Appropriating culture doesn't seem to quite fit. I mean, it's an ironic story and it's definitely an ironic title, since of course, "black culture" is usually the thing that is appropriated. But it falls kind of falls flat. I'm not sure why.

"When Whiteness Attacks," a Sister Blog from Out of Town, to Crash on Couch

About a year ago (2008), when I was first getting back into the blogging thing, I started a blog called "When Whiteness Attacks," a sort of "reality blog" about the real-life moments in which "white [i.e., nonblack] speech" manifests its primal desires (accumulation and murder) in relation to black bodies and spaces. I only squeezed out a couple of posts before reality crashed in. Maybe it was the recession and not being able to find a job. Anyway, I have since decided to let that blog crash on the couch of this blog until it gets on its feet. So I invite you to go to the bottom of this page, click on "Older Posts," and check out those couple of posts.

One post is a brief note of praise for the movie Manderlay, which we will, I hope, get to talk about. Consider this a preview.

The other post is a close reading of the bodily codes of reporters in a news segment from Charlotte, North Carolina. The news segment is embedded in the blog, thanks to youtube, so you can watch for yourself.

As always, comments/critiques/discussion/recommended readings greatly encouraged!

Enjoy!

"Policing while Black" on Social Etymologies Blog

Here's a link to Lisa Arrastía's article on the shooting of NYPD officer Omar Edwards. It includes some discussion of the 2008 shooting of NYPD officer Christopher Ridley and the entire text of the NY Times article on the shooting.

in the interval, i wait for myself...

Hortense Spillers
1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) …reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; 4) as a category of ‘otherness’, the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping…slides into a more general ‘powerlessness,’ resonating through various centers of human and social meaning

Amy Goodman
And here in New York, an off-duty African American police officer has been killed by a fellow officer who mistook him for a criminal. The slain officer, twenty-five-year-old Omar Edwards, had come across a man breaking into his vehicle. He chased the man with his gun drawn when three police officers came upon him and opened fire. Edwards was recently married and the father of two children.

NYTimes.com
If history is a guide, a grand jury will consider possible charges against Officer Dunton. There will be calls for reform of procedures to better protect minority officers, who have most often paid the price for such cases of mistaken identity.

Orlando Patterson
The condition of slavery did not absolve or erase the prospect of death. Slavery was not a pardon; it was, peculiarly, a conditional commutation. The execution was suspended only as long as the slave acquiesced in his powerlessness. The master was essentially a ransomer. What he bought or acquired was the slave’s life, and restraints on the master’s capacity wantonly to destroy his life did not undermine his claim on that life. Because the slave had no socially recognized existence outside of his master, he became a social nonperson....The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this is true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. Paul Rycaut’s classic description of the Janissaries as men whom their master, the sultan, “can raise without Envy and destroy without Danger” holds true for all slaves in all times.

Does anybody know what the hell this shit is?

oops. I should say, "Please pardon the utter absence of scholarly decor in the posing of that question..." although I actually don't really give a damn if you pardon it or not.

Just write something. Please.

Consider this a kind of CFP (call for postings) on this blog with the prompt being, 'the hell is this shit:

The Red House Furniture Store in High Point, North Carolina





In particular, how are black bodies being used? How are nonblack bodies being used? In what sense is the fact that this store is selling accoutrements of domesticity significant?

What are the bodies being used for? Whose fantasies are being served by this... umm, "???commercial???" Indeed, can it be properly called a commercial at all? Or is it, oh say... a couple of Masters having fun with the Masters-subaltern and the Slaves (even though this is apparently a real store http://redhousefurniture.com/)?

What would Kant/Hegel/Adorno/Foucault/Fanon/etc. say is going on here?

Please add to the list of questions with which we ought to be interrogating shit like this.

Or pose a set of answers to questions already posed.

Some curious things about "afropessimism"...

A continuation of some thoughts
-------------------

What is afropessimism? What does an afropessimist look like?

A cousin of mine laughed when she first heard me refer to some of the authors I’m reading as “afropessimists.” For her it seemed to evoke thoughts of chain-smoking, sad-eyed black women with short 'fros or black men with goaties (like Orlando Patterson and Joy James, seen ABOVE), dressed all in black, sipping coffee in a French café with the same admixture of aplomb and ennui as the image of Jean-Paul Sartre. (Existentialism, of course, is often a profoundly hopeful philosophy.)

First, the name afropessimist is, I think, derived from a critique. In a review of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (NY: Oxford, 1997) in African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (Winter 1999), Anita Patterson said that Hartman's central thesis is "profoundly pessimistic" (683). She was referring to Hartman's move of reading what Patterson would call the "bad use"-- hence, discriminatory practices-- to which African Americans were subjected as signs that blacks have not constituted free subjects in any meaningful sense. (Patterson’s critique, of course, ignores the fact that much of Hartman’s book is not concerned with “bad use” but, rather, with the discourse of civil rights for blacks in the antebellum and postbellum eras. In other words, Hartman is taking on “friends of the negro” as much as those who overtly and violently assailed the notion of black humanity.) Hartman later adopts the term as her own in an interview Frank Wilderson conducts with her, referring to "Achille Mbembe and the other so-called 'Afro-Pessimists'" ("The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III," Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003, p. 197).

This distinction-- between "blacks are human subjects who are sometimes treated badly" versus "blacks' repeated bad treatment shows that they are not human subjects"-- is not quite the crux of an afropessimist argument, but it is an important component of one. The "pessimism" in afropessimism comes back, for me, to something my parents used to tell me-- something pretty much all black parents I know have to tell their children, regardless of age: "No matter where you go, no matter who you're with, always remember where you are and who you are." This is not solely or even essentially a reminder to be proud of one's heritage and carry the strivings of one’s ancestors wherever one goes. Rather, it constitutes a reminder that we are not agents, and that any number of things can and will happen to us at any time without our parents being able to protect us in any way. As Lewis Gordon says in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, with the black, it is a matter of "when," not "whether." It reflects an awareness that blackness is a position formed by the violence essential to Modernity and that that fact does not change no matter how much society may seem to change, no matter how much the company of friends may change, no matter how much my performance changes, no matter my age. Afropessimism is, at its heart, a fundamental critique of performativity and hybridity because it says that no amount of incremental change can create an ethical order so long as black incarceration, fungibility, and death is the precondition for social stability.

Pessimism. Sounds like a horrible, hopeless way to live doesn't it? In a sense, perhaps it should sound that way. As Saidiya Hartman says in the above-cited interview with Frank, it is "obscene" to take "the narrative of defeat" and "still find a way to feel good about ourselves" (185). We should not shrink from it; Hartman says that her pessimistic account of the violence of nineteenth-century black subject formation should be read as "an allegory of the present" (190). Moreover, as she puts it clearly in Scenes of Subjection,

It is impossible to fully redress this pained condition without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions--the abolition of slavery, the destruction of a racist social order, and the actualization of equality (77)

In that possibility of radical change-- what Fanon would call "the end of the world"-- may lie some hope. Let’s be clear. Afropessimism is not a politics. But it does hold political potential. It is probably better to think of it as a precursor to a politics. It is an attempt—however, as yet, incomplete— to frame a rage, a rage that will not find an articulation or a signification within any politics that takes the modern order as its presumption and premise.

This brings me to the second curious thing about afropessimism. The term "afropessimist" is still largely used as a descriptor-- an adjective more than a noun-- for work that evinces certain symptoms of black rage that cannot be spoken. Indeed, it is correct to say that most of the people whose work is described as afropessimist may not identify themselves as afropessimists or may pay a dear price for the extent to which they consciously avow a pessimistic analysis. Again, it has not (yet) coalesced into a school or philosophy. But that is really only to say that it shows up in bits and pieces, in stolen moments, as if whispered through a hole in a wall or as if spoken unconsciously through the ways in which it manifests in fantasies.

So, to point to the fact that Joy James and Saidiya Hartman, for example, have “made it” within the academy as an indication that there is a space for afropessimist thought would be to obscure the actual lived experience of students whose dissertation work, for example, was derailed by advisors who were politically opposed to the prepolitical seeds of afropessimist thought or sentiment that manifested in their work. Or, even before the dissertation work begins—the extent to which the seminar process serves a regulatory function on forms of thought that evince such a critical perspective on hybridity and performativity as afropessimist thought and other politico-ontological perspectives employ. In other words, just because some professors who identify as afropessimists have their photographs online and have won awards for their work does not in any way mean that afropessimist thought has a place within the academy from which it can inform the efforts of up-and-coming scholars to pose a counterhegemonic challenge to the dominant paradigm.

Moreover, the fact that classic authors of the black literary canon like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison-- as well as established scholars like Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, and Orlando Patterson-- may not self-identify as afropessimists does not prove that their thought isn’t shot through with afropessimistic tendencies. Orlando Patterson, for example, is a political moderate, certainly not a revolutionary, who has consulted heads of state and who often moralizes about black male irresponsibility with the most strident of white neoconservatives. Nonetheless, his excellent central argument in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study clearly authorizes a reading that blacks today-- despite the fact that some of them experience (and theoretically all of them could experience) a great deal of politico-/socio-economic success (which prior groups of elite slaves also experienced; see 299-333)-- may still be understood as slaves if their social position is defined by the three constituent elements of slavery: social death, natal alienation, and general dishonor (1-14). When framed by Patterson’s analysis, black political discussions are free to shift to discussions of the extent to which the United States is a society that has depended and continues to depend on slaves for a variety of forms of labor that preserve its existence as a set of relations, rather than dwelling on questions of whether or not the United States ever actually ceased to be a slave society.

There is still more discussion to be had about the question of what constitutes afropessimist thought. One thing to keep in mind is that the goal of this site is not to make us be more afropessimistic, whatever that might mean. The goal is simply to not let certain things that we know to be true atrophy in obscurity and suffocate, for lack of light and air, by not even being raised to the level of discussion. If afropessimistic thoughts flourish as a result of our having a space in which to pose them, that fact will speak to the need for them to be raised and carried further within the academy as well.

For now, this juncture might be a good place for us to start working out a discussion list. Since it is in some ways the source of current afropessimist thinking, maybe we could start out with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

After that, I’d love to move on to work on the following in no particular order:

Ronald A.T. Judy's (Dis)Forming the American Canon
Frank Wilderson's Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight
Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama
Loic Wacquant’s “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”
Hortense Spillers’ Black, White, and In Color
Frank Wilderson’s “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”
The Wire
George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum
Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection
Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes
Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”
Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
Abdul JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound Subject
Assata Shakur’s Assata

These are just things that I’m interested in checking out and discussing. Please feel free to add.

Dissonant Consonance: Afro-pessimism & the Hope of David W. Noble

For a discussion of contributor Myrrh's statement that "there is no space for the afropessimist in the academy," please go to the blog Social Etymologies. SE provides a discussion that links and contrasts afro-pessimist Frank Wilderson's theories on the transformation of time, space, and civil society with that of American studies scholar, David W. Noble.

Are "Afro-pessimists" Really a Rejected Group & Just Another Theory "Movement"?

So, what's an "afro-pessimist" anyway? Another scholar inducted into another theory movement or wave? Could it be just some thinking or must it be an "ist" or "ism"? I hear echoes here of "post-structuralism," "post-modernism," etc. ( [l] Frank Wilderson, UC Irvine; [r] Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University)

This is a response to the post regarding what this blog might offer and discuss. I'm uncomfortable with positioning (or labeling of a "style" of thought) the "afro-pessimist" (or any scholar) as one who is intellectually rejected by the university because of her thinking. Most of the scholars who might be called "afro-pessimists" (I have yet to find a place where any scholars identified by others as "afro-pessimists" call themselves "afro-pessimists" or believers in "afro-pessimism") are doing quite well in the university, publishing, sharing and arguing with colleagues as folks usually do in the academy.

This is not the '60s where there needs to be a revolt because the "thoughts" of afro-pessimism are dis-allowed in the university. There are far more issues around race, sexuality, gender, and capital to go after in the university: the privatization of public space; the neoliberalization of departments. e.g., audits, separate department budgets for pencils, copying, and the rental of classroom space from the university in which departments reside.

Lastly, how can thoughts not be thought (taken from the quotation below in this blog's first post: "thoughts that cannot be thought.")? Which thoughts can't be thought? Whose thoughts can't be thought? I know that when my daughter mumbles under her breath, she is under the illusion that I can't hear her--that she is in her own private Idaho where she may curse me out into the abyss. She has inferred that she may not think her own thoughts about Mamí and Papí, but obviously she knows this not to be true because her mumbles of defiance speak for themselves . . . she mumbles away anyway calling me a "b-ch" in her own 8-year old language. Or, who knows, quite possibly she's doing so in our adult language.

All of this is to say that I hear here a need for some sort of "rights" movement: the right to think thoughts, for example. I hear here a need for positioning, location, a normative "home" within the university. And, this is just what ethnic studies departments didn't problematize when they initially made the "fight"--they succumbed to the fallacy that the university could provide a home--and it did, a home just like the university's--and they became, in many ways, like the university and its disciplines. Because of the times and because of the ways in which power works, perhaps they desired normativity (and the normative space of the university) more than they desired freedom--freedom also being a constructed notion. So what did they want? See Roderick Ferguson's new work on this, which is forthcoming in his new book The Affirmative Actions of Power.

Afro-pessimists have not been shorn off from the university. They are not a desperate group or cause to be argued for. In fact, I think people like Hartman, James, Spillers et al would want to be known as thinking people not people in need of permission to think and speak. Maybe they want to be known as people who are arguing against the terrain that claims theoretical spaces and names them without naming a historical violence. E.g., the way in which the US claimed British cultural studies and created departments and anthologies around it (see Stuart Hall's "Cultural Studies & Its Theoretical Legacies").

Do the so-called afro-pessimists desire to be a theory-group of their own or would they prefer challenging us all to think different kinds of thoughts and to consider seemingly twisted kinds of societal and cultural problematizations. I thought they were (and there's that label of "they" again, as if they were a group) reacting against traditional cultural theory? And PS, is it even for us to decide?

what might a reading group start?

"Alexander and his pregnant 19-year-old wife, Renee, celebrated their wedding a week ago.

'Hey HUBBY,' Renee Alexander wrote in white chalk on the sidewalk just steps from where he was gunned down. 'Its ur wife … jus wanna say I will always love you & miss you!'"

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This blog is not a meditation on police brutality, or crack cocaine, or US involvement in Haiti, or Katrina, or even "racism," although all of those events can be said to be part of it.

It's a place to meditate on the thought suppressed in the following common interaction among black people:

x: How you doing?

y: Aw, you know. Still black.

Somewhere in that simple, mundane interaction is the seed of a discussion that needs to be had among African people everywhere. On one hand, the notion that one is "still" black, implies that there is still a trial period that needs to be endured, perhaps even seeming to hold out the hope that this period will someday end. On the other hand, the answer "still black" comes in response to a question-- "How you doing?" -- so routine that its pertinence to questions of performativity may go overlooked. No matter the performance-- the "doing"-- y is acknowledging that one thing is not going away.

This blog is worthwhile if it allows a space to meditate on the things we cannot contemplate elsewhere-- to work out the thoughts that cannot be thought. It would not be necessary, but for that fact that there is no space for the afropessimist in the academy. While there is no space for us to work out the thought, there will be no space for us to turn black positionality into a set of poseable questions-- capable of being answered. This blog represents a strategic move toward that end.

The afropessimists are intellectuals of various stripes who work through the idea that the violence that creates the modern world is so powerful that it turns a planet full of people into not only the modern subject, of whom so much has been written, but also the modern object, euphemistically called the black person. In other words, they understand that a black person was not "black"-- as a noun, rather than an adjective-- before all things African became equated with slavery. And not just any kind of slavery, but a particularly brutal kind that uses the mechanisms of modern capitalism's drive toward hyperaccumulation. Modernity, the afropessimists posit, created a human who, somehow, is related to in a way that is qualitatively-- and often quantifiably-- different from the way in which other humans are related to, and that this relation is somehow necessary for the modern world/modern subject to be "itself."

A lot of questions present themselves within and about this perspective. What happens within discourse (psychoanalytic, semiotic, political) when certain subjects are not able to signify as themselves, but must (very conditionally) adopt performative characteristics of those to whom they are defined in opposition? How does afropessimism resonate with a wide variety of discourses in black culture and history? How does afropessimism resonate with a wide variety of discourses in nonblack culture and history? In this intellectual context, what does it mean to be an optimist? What about other modalities of oppression-- such as nonblack racial oppression, ethnic chauvinism, gender oppression, class and caste oppression? Et cetera.

How can a blog help?

Well, for one thing, this blog will work as a location for discussion of readings, films, art works, and other materiel that take the afropessimist viewpoint seriously.

This blog will be most effective if we make it a place where people with different amounts of familiarity with plainspeak can posit and discuss points about anything relevant-- including what is raised for discussion.

Let's work out the rest as we go along, can we?