Affect and Epistemology in Afropessimism

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

In this response to George Weddington’s critique of their recent article, the authors argue that Weddington rightfully critiques them for not paying enough attention to the role of psychoanalysis (exemplified by Frantz Fanon) in Afro-pessimist theory and for not giving primacy to the political ontology of blackness in Afro- pessimist thought. However, his critique is hindered by his mischaracterizing the authors’ argument as saying that black political ontology is merely different, not singular, and his lack of engagement with the authors’ analysis of critical race theory. The authors address these issues and suggest that Weddington’s reading of Afro-pessimist claims as empirically unverifiable is inconsistent with his proposal for incorporating the theory into ethnographic projects and would lead to the abandonment of the sociological project.

Equity & Excellence in Education, 2013

ABSTRACT This article explores the embodiment and affectivity of whiteness, particularly as it implicates educational praxis and social justice in education, focusing on the following questions: In what ways are affect and whiteness constitutive of each other in race dialogue? How does emotion intersect with racial practices and white privilege, and what are the educational implications of this entanglement? In theorizing whiteness as a technology of affect, the authors hope to capture the mental, emotional, and bodily dimensions of whiteness in the context of racial dialogue. In particular, the authors introduce the idea of “white intellectual alibis,” or Whites’ attempt to project a non-racist alibi rather than aligning themselves with anti-racism. Finally, the authors discuss how whiteness as a kind of technology of affect has implications for pedagogical efforts to engage in equitable and anti-racist education. It is suggested that unless educational scholars engage with a theoretical analysis of how whiteness is manifest as affective technology in educational praxis, we will fail to appreciate the important implications of this idea for educational theory and praxis.

Authorship, 2023

Since the emergence of Afro-pessimism in the early 2000s, the focus of much critical conversation in and around the discourse has been on the viability of its ontological claims as to the non-'Human' status of blackness. Departing from these essential debates, this article turns rather to the generic qualities of Afro-pessimism, to suggest that the discourse's formal choices reveal discrepancies in the ontological theses being argued. In comparing two of the discourse's key texts, Frank Wilderson's memoir, Afropessimism (2021) and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's The Undercommons (2013), I illustrate how Wilderson's memoir performs the thesis of ontological anti-blackness through the failures of its first-person singular narration; failures expressive of the impossibility of the black 'object' claiming access to the memoir's generic institutions of authorship and authority. By contrast, reading Harney and Moten's critique of the university through the genre of the manifesto shows their depersonalized first-person plural to adopt an appositional and 'fugitive' relation to the totalizing political authority entailed in the genre. Whereas the failures of Wilderson's text enact, then, a kind of refusal to participate in the institutions of authority enshrined in memoir's first-person singular, Harney and Moten's utopian 'we' 'refuse[s] to refuse.' Their 'undercommons' critique addresses, at once, the Enlightenmentborn institution of the university, and related institutions of genre, representation, and, ultimately, subjectification. Through their appositional orientation to the manifesto, Moten and Harney propose an Afro-pessimist thesis formally and substantively different to Wilderson'sone arguably less predicated on failure.

Historical Materialism, 2018

In the coming months and years, the left faces a historic juncture. On the one hand, racist violence is on the rise across the West, and the political class seems intent on mobilising both overt and subtle racism. On the other hand, strategies of anti-racist organising, which have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, have reached a theoretical impasse. I argue that now, more than ever, a serious project of historical and intellectual retrieval is necessary. This article interrogates the theoretical limitations of ‘anti-blackness’ as an analysis of racialised oppression. Through the thought of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, I argue that theories of ‘anti-blackness’, specifically those rooted in Afro-pessimism, are predicated on a theoretical shift away from relational social theory to identitarian essentialism which obscures, rather than illuminates, the processes of racialisation which undergird racial oppression.

Cr: The New Centennial Review, 2003

Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future-some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry-excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century. Sifting patiently through the rubble, our archaeologists from the United States of Africa, the USAF, would be struck by how much Afrodiasporic subjectivity in the twentieth century constituted itself through the cultural project of recovery. In their Age of Total Recall, memory is never lost. Only the art of forgetting. Imagine them reconstructing the conceptual framework of our cultural moment from those fragments. What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework?

This article outlines the distinct logics that govern embodied, affective forms of anti-Black racism in order to theorize cultural countermeasures that disrupt them. I argue that attempting to dismantle affective forms of racism by creating “positive” representations of Black people is an ineffective strategy in the long term. This approach tends to amplify investments in racial exceptionalism, fetishism, and restrictive conditions of acceptability, ultimately leaving Eurocentric epistemological and ontological frameworks intact. Instead, I consider cultural methodologies and epistemological frames that allow the complexities of Black ontology to thrive and proliferate. I examine Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the ways it uses Black epistemological frames and methods that hold the potential to diminish affective forms of racism.

Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, 2014

To effectively deliver racially just projects, we must theoretically understand from where emotional resistance to them stems, why this resistance is regularly expressed, and what role it plays in stifling antiracism. This theoretical interpretative paper examines how emotional investment in whiteness recycles normative behaviors of white resistance and unveils how it painfully reinforce the supremacy of whiteness. Using a black feminist approach to emotionality and an interdisciplinary approach to critical whiteness studies and critical race theory, this paper begins with positing how the emotions of white resistance are rooted in the shame of revealing a repressed childhood racial abuse. The concern is twofold. First, what happens to the child, now grown, when confronted with moments that reveal this repressed traumatic past? Second, how do these emotional outbursts, regardless of whether they are intentional or malicious, continue to silence, racially microaggress, and ultimately hurt people of color? Methodologically, this paper employs counterstorytelling to illustrate how these emotional behaviors force an interconnected process of pain-one that gets erroneously projected onto people of color rather than therapeutically onto the self. When whites refuse to project their racial shame onto people of color they emotionally invest in a therapy out of whiteness.

1997

JMMLA, 2018

" Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism" situates Jordan Peele's 2017 movie Get Out in dialogue with two prominent forms of African American discourse, Afro-Pessimism and Post-Blackness. Peele's movie narrates how slavery remains a central paradigm for understanding the present, a central tenet of Afro-Pessimism. Although, as this article argues, Peele's movie narrates the deep truth of Afro-Pessimism, the movie also gestures toward ways out of this seemingly historical fixity. The way out, the movie suggests, begins with aesthetics—radical Black aesthetics.

Post-Millennial Cultures of Fear in Literature edited by Mustafa Kirca and Adelheid Rundholz, 2024

Fear is the most basic affect experienced when under threat (Demasio 1999). This was the first of the affects to evolve in life on Earth. Everything from reptiles to birds to mammals experience fear. In this sense, fear has a biological purpose, to signal to the perceiver a danger in the environment (Demasio 1999; Tomkins 2008a; 2008b; Kelly 2009). Today, the experience of fear has accelerated. However, at the same time, fear is not an experience that is always connected to a real danger in the world but instead is used as a device for social control. Here, the rhetoric of reactionary populism uses fear as a means to trigger the populous to act against the other (Massumi 2002; Ahmed 2004; Puar 2007). Hence, fear is both a means to control and an affect which evolved for protection. This formation of fear, in these two directions provides insight into the affect as a means to survival but also as ideological. In order to grasp how fear is distributed, this chapter employs affect theory and autotheory to uncover the ideological bases in which the subject identifies fear as an embodied experience. First, affect theory is a method of social analysis and ideology critique that identifies the social-relational formation of affects and emotions. Authors including Brian Masumi (2002), Sara Ahmed (2004), and Jasbir Puar (2007) have elaborated ways in which affect and emotion are used by social forces to establish ideological positions against the other. However, at the same time, they have elaborated how Western philosophy has privileged abstract thought as the highest form of knowledge, whereas colonized people have privileged embodied experience of emotion as the means to grasp the world. Hence, although affect and emotion are used as a device for ideology and social control, these are likewise an alternative way of knowing and grasping the world. Second, autotheory is the utilization and synthesis of theory from the body as politics. Illuminating the discourses that have presided over the body, authors such as David Marriott (2020), Arianna Zwartjes (2019), and Aisha Sabatini-Sloan (2017), have elaborated the use of personal embodied experience to understand the social forces of oppression. Autotheory is connected to feminist praxis of the personal-political and to what Cherrie Moraga (1980) calls “theory in the flesh,” a form of rebellion through storytelling. Privileging the voices of those living on the margins, it generates theory from embodied lived experience. Connected to the critical race theory tenet that narratives provide knowledge into the experience of racism, autotheoretical accounts form from personal narratives. Employing an affective autotheory, we will analyze how fear moves in two contradictory directions, on the one hand toward ideology and reaction, and on the other toward critical consciousness. The coalescence of pandemic, war, environmental destruction, social strife etc. has become a signifier of end times in the collective imagination. It has become cliché to say we are living through apocalypse. The widespread fear triggered by these events has invaded every aspect of life. And yet for colonized people, the world already was apocalyptic. From the moment of colonization, the world underwent apocalypse, all was destroyed and changed forever. The processes continue generation after generation, destroying anew each world recreated. Between these two positions of the collective imagination and coloniality, fear takes on two roles. In the first instance, fear is imaginary and ideological. It evokes in the perceiver a fear of becoming other, of experiencing the apocalypse of the other. In the later instance, it is the affect left by historical trauma and the cyclical processes of trauma following colonization. It is a fear triggered from a scar. It would be remiss of us to not include embodiment. To this effect, in this chapter, we will be employing affect theory and autotheory as analytic tools for uncovering these contradictory experiences of fear in twenty first century literature, film, and music. First, we explain affect theory and autotheory, both with special attention to fear. Second, we look at the literature of the COVID-19 Pandemic memoire and the zombie film. We argue that these genres both are particular of ideological affects of fear. As a counter to these ideological affects, we investigate how Black music employs both autotheory and affect through challenges to heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Through Black music, the tension between joy and fear develops a critical engagement with ideology. This reading of Black music is extended to the literatures of autotheory through which we analyze the work of Imani Barbarin (2021), David Marriott (2020), and Aisha Sabatini-Sloan (2017). These authors use personal affective experience to develop a critical theory. This mark of affect theory develops a practice of theory wherein the personal is political. Finally, breaking the fourth wall, we use our own experiences and writing in autotheory to develop a direction for social action. It is this final step that provides the reader with the means to take the theory behind this chapter and transform it back into personal experience.

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020

This paper examines the role of African Psychology in healing the trauma caused by the 'lie' of White superiority and Black inferiority, the root cause of the devaluing of Black lives and the underdevelopment of Black communities around the world. It introduces the global grassroots movement for emotional emancipation, led by Community Healing Network, in collaboration with the Association of Black Psychologists, which is mobilizing Africans on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora to heal from, and extinguish, the lie. It describes the movement's leading strategy: the Emotional Emancipation Circle, a self-help support group process, informed by the principles of African psychology, designed to help Africans and people of African ancestry escape the European narrative, driven by the lie of Black inferiority, and create a renewed African narrative, defined by the truth of Black humanity. The paper focuses on the central role of African Psychology in defining and developing the Emotional Emancipation Circle model and argues for African Psychology as the appropriate disciplinary grounding for complete liberation from the lie.

Hypatia, 2021

This paper explores the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with non-dominant experiences. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of epistemological resilience whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counter evidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I develop an account of affective numbness. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally demystified. To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions (Lackey 2018). Second, it can encourage "epistemic appropriation" (Davis 2018), which I demonstrate by examining the appropriation of 'intersectionality' and #MeToo by white culture. Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires affective resistance, or efforts which target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian 'dis-interestedness' as a candidate.

Race Ethnicity and Education

This article draws on the concept of race and racism as “technologies of affect” to think with some of the interventions and arguments of critical affect studies. The author suggests that critical affect theories enable the theorization of race and racism as affective modes of being that recognize the historically specific assemblages which are practiced in schools and the society. It is also argued that rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect, a vision of anti-racist politics and practice in education can be formed in ways that go beyond recognition or resistance, but rather attend to the production of pedagogical spaces and practices that create ways of living differently. The education implications of this idea are discussed in relation to how teachers and teacher educators can begin not only to analyze the affective mobilizations of race and racism, but also to engage in political struggles that harness the affective forces of anti-racist action in everyday life.

Angelaki, 2019