The Position of the Unthought

Hartman, Saidiya; Wilderson, Frank B.

doi:10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183

Cited by 448 publications

(49 citation statements)

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“…Sabine Broeck (2017) provided an exquisite point to the criticism, such that it is not only that the distancing of the humanity of slavery was permitted by a dispassionate approach to the accounting of the slaves but that such distancing also erases the legacy of slavery as formative to “European thought, as well as on social, political and cultural practices, including academia’s self-sustaining discourses” (p. 139). Indeed, other thinkers, such as Denise Ferreira da Silva (2011), Hartman and Wilderson (2003), and Alexander Weheliye (2014), have argued that the formulation of key themes and concepts central to European thought have often omitted racial difference or occurred against the backdrop of slavery. Essentially, one of Afro-pessimism’s most relevant criticisms for sociology is the need to historically and critically trace seemingly commonplace sociological concepts in their legacy of slavery.…”

Section: Three Criticisms For Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

Weddington

2018

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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This article is a critical response to a previous article by Victor Ray, Antonia Randolph, Megan Underhill, and David Luke that sought to incorporate lessons from Afro-pessimism for sociological research on race. Specifically, in their article, the authors emphasize conclusions from Afro-pessimism in their assessment of its lessons for theories of racial progress and labor-market research. In reviewing the work of key thinkers in the approach of Afro-pessimism—namely, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, and Jared Sexton—the author argues that Ray and his fellow authors, in focusing on conclusions about race and politics from Afro-pessimism, overlook key foundational assumptions of Afro-pessimist thought. The author clarifies such assumptions, particularly that blackness exists on an ontological register and that slavery persists as a social phenomenon, to argue that the four authors have essentially understated the implications from an Afro-pessimist approach. The author engages criticisms from Hartman, Wilderson, and P. Khalil Saucier, who argue that empiricist sociological approaches are antithetical to Afro-pessimist analysis. The author extends these criticisms to Ray and his fellow authors’ interventions, arguing that their rejection of racial progress narratives is not necessarily Afro-pessimist and that their prescriptions for labor-market research overlook the implications of slavery as a means to understand the racialization of labor. The author concludes by urging sociologists to earnestly engage with such criticisms and challenges from Afro-pessimism in conducting research on black populations.

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Section: Three Criticisms For Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

Weddington

2018

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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“…Human Sciences, Rusert charactizes fugitive science as a "counterscience," (p. 6) one undergirded by a "subterranean politics and furtive insurgency" (p. 17) aimed at appropriating, confronting, mocking, or otherwise destabilizing the logics of the racial science of the antebellum period and its political and ideological echoes in eras beyond. It is a science of the "unthought" (Hartman & Wilderson, 2003) that innovates from the outside margins of history or in between the lines of the archive; it describes a set of "ongoing experiments in freedom, radical empiricisms" (p. 20) that refuse the normative constrictions and often deathly, antiblack consequences of what would typically be recognized as scientific inquiry.…”

Section: Citing Michel Foucault's the Order Of Things: An Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Review: Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, by Britt Rusert

Murillo

2019

Catalyst

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“…Slavery is not a loss that the self experiences -of language, lineage, land, or labor -but rather the loss of any self that could experience such loss. Any politics based in resurgence or recovery is bound to regard the slave as 'the position of the unthought' (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003). 17…”

Section: Decolonizing Anti-racismmentioning

confidence: 99%

TheVelof Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign

Sexton

2014

Critical Sociology

158

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This article addresses the relationship between anti-racism and decolonization in the North American context. It argues that the logic of decolonization movements for indigenous sovereignty and against the settler states of Canada and the USA overlap the discursive field of contemporary post-racialism in ways that circumvent the challenges and possibilities offered by black radicalism in the historic instance. After engaging recent theoretical literature on settler colonialism, it is suggested that the freedom drive that abolishes slavery unsettles both colonial and decolonial forms of sovereign determination.

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The Position of the Unthought

Cited by 448 publications

References 0 publications

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

Review: Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, by Britt Rusert

TheVelof Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign

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