The term afropessimism was first used in print in 1987 by the French Minister of Cooperation (that is, African affairs), Michel Aurillac, in an editorial published in Le Monde cautioning against the view that economic development and political democratization in sub-Saharan Africa had permanently stalled.footnote¹ The word was used and abused in subsequent decades by African economists and Africanist commentators who refused to see colonialism as the root cause of the continent’s predicament and stressed instead postcolonial corruption, ethnic dissension and the patrimonialization of the state as sources of societal stasis. ‘Afropessimism’ was later evoked in discussion of the prospects and pitfalls of foreign investment in Africa.footnote²

The term, but not its original referent, was then appropriated in the 2010s by a new generation of black academics in American departments of ethnic studies and humanities. In the words of Frank Wilderson, who has positioned himself as one of its leading exponents, Afropessimism refers to the notion that ‘Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness’. ‘Blacks’, Wilderson writes in his landmark book Afropessimism (2020), ‘are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.’footnote³ To the narrative of racial progress, Afropessimism counterposes an anti-humanist vision in which the denial of black humanity is everywhere built into the very makeup of civil society: ‘Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks. The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a health tonic for everyone who is not Black.’footnote⁴ It is, moreover, perpetual and without recourse: workers can oppose and yearn to overthrow capitalism, women patriarchy, lgbt people heterosexism, colonial subjects imperialism. For blacks, however, there is no politics of liberation; they are excluded forever from ‘a narrative of redemption’ because the world finds ‘its nourishment in Black flesh.’ All nonblack people, however progressive their politics, are ‘junior partners’ of whites and objectively complicit in totalized and totalizing antiblackness. The plight of ‘people of colour’—the term Wilderson uses to refer to people who are neither white nor black—cannot be compared to and should not be conflated with the predicament of black people: ‘Analogy mystifies, rather than clarifies, Black suffering. Analogy mystifies Black peoples’ relationship to other people of colour.’footnote⁵

What are we to make of these claims? Opening with a vivid depiction of a mental breakdown, Wilderson’s book is a disconcerting memoir and a provocative travelogue about being black in America from the vantage point of the cultural bourgeoisie of the early 21st century. Educated at Dartmouth, Columbia and Berkeley, Wilderson has had varied life experiences as an activist, a stockbroker and, now, an author and academic at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a professor of drama and African American studies. He is the son of a university dean father and a school administrator mother who also had a private practice as psychologists. He grew up mainly in an upscale district of Minneapolis, and his childhood was stamped by the cultural capital and racial bridging endeavours of his parents on and off campus. Wilderson presents Afropessimism as ‘storytelling when the narrator is a slave’.footnote⁶ Combining passages of genuine lyric power and beauty with heavy didacticism, it is perhaps best read as an exercise in ‘auto-theory’, the ‘commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography’, which Lauren Fournier describes, in her book on the subject, as a ‘critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing activism’.footnote⁷

Afropessimism is difficult to assess and critique because, when it takes leave from the gripping immediacy of its memoirist voice, it situates itself at a ‘meta-theoretical’ level so abstract that no historical reality can be brought to bear on it; and when the time comes for conceptual explication, it retreats back into narration.footnote⁸ The book proceeds by postulation rather than demonstration, by allegory instead of argument. It weaves a tapestry of childhood memories, family anecdotes, professional and romantic experiences, political sorties, academic encounters, allusions to novels, movies and philosophical texts, conceptual disquisitions and historical accounts, all of which it places on a plane of epistemic equality. How to evaluate this intellectual position from the standpoint of an agonistic sociology of ethno-racial domination?footnote⁹ Note that a principled defence might be that Afropessimism is a (or the) poetics of blackness, written by a dramatist; and so its claims should not be taken too literally, nor held up to social scientific standards. But Wilderson insists his approach is a ‘theoretical apparatus’ and an ‘analytic lens’, one that ‘labours as a corrective to Humanist assumptive logics’, and this analytic is being used by sociologists to develop and reorient empirical arguments or to deny their very possibility.footnote¹⁰

Afropessimism is an exclusivist brand of race primordialism. It is primordialist in that it sees race—or, rather, blackness as uniquely institutionalized in the United States and then universalized with a stroke of the pen—as foundational to being, knowledge and power; as permanent, pervasive and impossible to dislodge from its role as structural mooring and existential pivot.footnote¹¹ It is exclusivist in that it reserves this ontological burden for blacks and for blacks alone. As the entry in Oxford Bibliographies, which Wilderson co-authored, explains:

Afropessimism is a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society’s dependence on antiblack violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society, and cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the coloured but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman.footnote¹²

Afropessimism asserts the uniqueness of the black plight, not through methodical genealogy and comparison, but on the authority of the author’s identity, experiences and meta-theoretical virtuosity.