The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism

Abstract

In what is his finest role, but also his most distressing, the legendary Sidney Poitier plays one Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective in transit from an out-of-state visit to his mother’s residence, in Norman Jewison’s Academy Award-winning 1967 film, In the Heat of the Night. The indomitable Mr. Tibbs has been commandeered by the police chief of Sparta, Mississippi, to solve the murder of Philip Colbert, a Chicago industrialist whose business plan for the development of the local economy has now been jeopardized by his untimely death. Chief Gillespie has justice on his mind, to be sure, but also the rate of unemployment of his rural working-class white constituency. Closing the case to the satisfaction of the industrialist’s widow ensures the job creation essential to the maintenance of law and order on this side of the tracks. Identifying a black perpetrator (I was about to write “suspect” but use of that term would require a presumption of innocence not afforded here) ensures that individualized disorder stays on that side of the tracks. It’s a two-for-one deal that keeps everything on track and, more importantly, keeps in place the tracks themselves: the built environment of segregation and the mythos of Jim Crow.

The data will not save us: Afropessimism and racial antimatter in the COVID-19 pandemic

“…It is beyond the scope of this article to perform a full excavation to fully sketch out both versions and the tensions within them, but two claims require explication because their resolution illuminates the cosmological terrain for my analysis of racial antimatter in the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two substantive points of divergence between Afropessimist thought and the broader body of critical race theory which concerns (1) the essentialist meanings of race that the Black subject is a permanent slave and not a human being (Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2020) and (2) the supposition that racism is principally interpretable through the lens of social death (Mbembe, 2008, 2019; Patterson, 1982).…”

“…Afropessimism 2.0 references both self-described "Afropessimists" (Sexton, 2011;Wilderson, 2020) and a group of interdisciplinary, intersectional humanities and social science scholars whose work grounds these articulations, but who are not "Afropessimists" (Hartman, 1997;Hartman and Wilderson, 2003;McKittrick, 2015McKittrick, , 2021Sharpe, 2016;Spillers, 1987). Sociologist Orlando Patterson's ideas also feature prominently in Afropessimists' accounts of the violence, social dishonor, and natal alienation that enslavement created, a complex ontological situation called "social death" for the slave (Patterson, 1982).…”

Building Black

“…In-sights terestingly, the principal proponents of each tradition -Moten and Harney, heavily reliant on Denise Ferreira da Silva, for Black optimism, and Wilderson and Jared Sexton, following Saidiya Hartman, for Afropessimism -themselves rarely mention any antagonism between the two ways of thinking. Sexton writes about his deep affinity with Moten, 64 and Moten has written a long essay explaining how closely tied his own thinking is with that of Sexton and Wilderson. In the essay, "Chromatic Saturation, " which forms a large part of his 2018 monograph The Universal Machine, Moten recognizes at length the principal difference between his thinking and that of Sexton and Wilderson: I have thought long and hard, in the wake of the remarkable work of Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton, in a kind of echo of Bob Marley's question, about whether blackness could be loved; there seems to be a growing consensus that analytic precision does not allow for such romance but I remain devoted to the impression that analytic precision is, in fact, a function of such romance.…”

Counterclaims: Examining and contesting white entitlement to the space of the university through the labour of anti‐racist student organizers

“…The hope demonstrated by student organizers is not optimistic, rather, hope indicates the possibility of a better way of being by naming its absence. This kind of hope emerges from a necessary pessimism that Ahmed (2010, 178) argues is “about the possibility that a future exists, about the possibility of possibility.” This conceptualization of possibility is informed by the legacy of Afro‐pessimism which Jared Sexton (2011, 37) describes as the “radical negation” of anti‐Blackness for a “radical affirmation” of Black life. For Sexton (2011, 27), refusal of an anti‐Black world or “a pushing back is really a pushing forward.” Research participants did not substantially discuss hope in their interviews, but they did articulate refusal and pessimism, which I argue is an articulation of hope.…”

“…The third section considers how students' anti‐racist labour generates counterclaims to the university motivated by hope. I explore the “spatial arrangement” (Zhao 1998, 1519) of these counterclaims to illustrate their generative capacities by siting anti‐racist student labour in the “underground” (Sexton 2011, 28) or “undercommons” (Harney and Moten 2013, 26) of the university. Finally, the concluding section reflects on the stakes of demystifying and disrupting the racist and distorted fears which emerge from and justify the spatial reproduction of whiteness in the university.…”