Afropessimism

This paper will revisit my thesis to reformulate a new understanding of how essential the collaboration of Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics (2003) (which is not discussed in my thesis) is to a (re)conceptualization of necropolitics, population regulation, and life optimization by the state/sovereignty in order to better understand contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death.  I will utilize biopower as articulated by Foucault, and necropower as mapped out by Mbembe’s description of late modernity state violence (or violence under contemporary sovereignty) as methodological tools to examine,  Why and for what reasons do schools offer poor children free meals, take home laptops, free eye exams and dental check-ups while engaging in symbolic-objective-structural violence and implementing, securitization, militarizing and policing poor black youth bodies in the same spaces?
these important conceptual lenses are essential for us to understand of the totality of all existence, life and/or/both death. By connecting biopower with necropower , I can attempt to unpack some of these questions : What does it mean to have black skin in a world governed by an advanced neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy? “What role do schools and other educational institutions play in an era where black bodies in urban cities are experiencing redundancy, surplus, disposability and dispossessed subjectivities?”
I want to focus on what I think the purpose of schooling is : the mass extermination and life management/optimization of all poor, female, queer, black life/bodies subjectivities.  After I finished my thesis I begin exploring how a black social death is lived through a black social life and a black social life is lived though a black social death (Saxton, 2012). For me, black bodies are engaged and disengaged in a politics that is neither a pure form of life (let live, make life) or death (make death or let die), but a complex management of the two (Bhungalia, 2012). I will analyze this necro-bio dynamic as remains under/un-theorized, and unexamined in current education scholarship, thus, rendering black subjectivities obsolete. This leaves our analysis of contemporary forms of  sovereignty in education. The necro-biopower collaboration has a home in critical/political/Marxist/Feminist/Black geography, Social theory and Black Studies  but in radical/critical education scholarship only one scholar to date, Tyson E. Lewis (2006, 2010)  has theorized concepts of Agamben, Foucault to coin  biopedagogical and necropedagogical/thanatopedagogy (a pedagogy to end all education life).

O novo livro de Osmundo Pinho nos revela um percurso que atravessaa Baía de Todos os Santos (BA) e alcança oThe African and AfricanDiaspora Departament Studies (AADS) na Universidade do Texas, emAustin (EUA). O livro “Cativeiro Antinegritude e Ancestralidade”, lançado pela editora Segundo Selo encontra nas ideias afropessimistas contornos instigantes e originais à “centralidade política e heurística da violência estatal antinegra, do genocídio do povo negro e do lugar político que a morte negra ocupa na estabilização do projeto nacional brasileiro”

OVERVIEW:

Stuart Hall, one of the recognized founders of cultural studies, posed a question that provides an ideal starting point for this course as an introduction to the field:

"Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook."

Hall's idea that integral to cultural studies is a political and ethical mandate to " change anything " squarely places cultural studies within the domain of critical theory, which has for long provided a pillar to the humanities as central to a model of higher education that is now being slowly dismantled by the neoliberal corporate academia. That notion of the humanities has, on the other hand, reflected the assumptive logics of modern humanism as the dominant cognitive framework within which, among other intellectual endeavors, critical theory has emerged. Humanism is, in fact, predicated upon the Human intended both as the subject of critical theory and the beneficiary of its emancipatory aspirations. Trying to answer Hall's question (" what is the point of cultural studies? ") invites therefore reflection on the critical intersections between cultural studies as a form of knowledge and the human(ist) projects sustaining the now beleaguered humanities. The aim of this course is to provide opportunities, theoretical approaches, and conceptual tools for this type of reflection.

The course's topics and readings are therefore loosely organized around few questions: What is the " human " in the humanities? What are the potentialities, effects, constraints, and omissions inherent in the grounding of critical and cultural theory in the " human " ? How do concepts and insights in critical theory invest and define cultural studies? How are such entanglements questioned by writers, voices, and approaches that challenge humanism and its universalist claims by exposing its affinities with coercive and violent processes of colonialism, enslavement, racialized oppression, indigenous displacement, economic exploitation, gendered domination, and environmental devastation? We will, in other words, subject critical theory and cultural studies to the unflinching scrutiny demanded by, in Hall’s words, “people dying in the streets”.

The invitation, in the opening quote, to consider the World’s violence and lethality as questions that unsettle Human cultural agency and capacity will also require you to think on whether what is here at stake are mostly injuries on a generic humanity, or rather the perpetuation of a more structural violence that, at variance with humanist universalism, has torn humanity apart or, more precisely, defined humanity as the (white and male) point of enunciation and organization of global social and cultural hierarchies. It is along these lines that cultural theory has been affected by the work of scholars, especially prominent in Black studies and radical theories of race, pointing out that the World the human/ities made exists in fact, to use Saidiya Hartman’s expression, in the “afterlife of [Black] slavery” and, as Christina Sharpe writes, “in the wake” of its “ongoing disasters”. The course will pay specific attention to these lines of inquiry since they have uniquely confronted cultural studies and critical theory in their very intellectual foundations (even requiring, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, a “rewriting of knowledge” beyond the humanities’ current epistemic framework), making such approaches eminently suitable to an introductory graduate course.

The course is driven by questions and concepts, rather than canonical authors and schools of thoughts. Weekly discussions will invite you to think through a set of key terms in the humanities and cultural theory by addressing authors and readings that, in conversation or opposition with one another, address those terms from various critical and meta-critical standpoints. “Meta-critical” (in the sense of “critique of the critique”, so to speak) broadly refers, for our purposes, to interventions that do not necessarily proceed from the assumed coherence of categories (like race, gender, class, nation, agency, and culture itself) informing critical theory as a human/ist capacity, but rather position those categories along the problematic divide—often ignored by critical theory itself—between the human/ist subject and those whose humanity and subjecthood are removed or curtailed.

The core expectation underlying this course is that you will reflect on the questions and debates raised in class with a view at defining (or revising and refining) your intellectual and scholarly interests, as well as specific empirical questions of your research, by considering these broader theoretical challenges. You should also be able to acquire a complex perspective on the concepts we shall discuss, with a view to their deployment in your own work.

Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative function of time an onto-metaphysical fantasy, one concealing the internecine operations of temporal subjuga-tion? What happens to existence, or life itself, once we abandon time, its unquestioned positivity, and its presumed givenness (as gift, indispensable resource, or a priori condition)? Furthermore, is the activity of imagining even possible without recourse to time, temporality, or its durative schemas? Is the imagination a temporal captive, and does abandoning (or dare I say abolishing) time liberate the imagination to perform different tasks and pursuits? Questioning time is a difficult task, since thinking requires it (to reorient existence beyond Newtonian, post-modern, or neo-liberal time and eschatology). Questioning, as meta-commentary, would require an exceptional position, both within and without time simultaneously, a position capable of investigating the very thing that enables investigation-holding time in abeyance. But the seeming impossibility of this enterprise would require a different noetic apparatus, since thought (as questioning) depends on time as its oxygen. The imagination, then, offers the promise of liberation from temporal tyranny, an enterprise contravening the conditions of reason, knowledge, forms, and, indeed, the possible itself. The potential "trans-gression"-to use a hackneyed term in American Studies-of the imagination is diminished, however, when it is bound to democracy. Democracy tethers the imagination to time, since democracy is an elaborate schematization, instrumentalization, and defense of time. During any moment of political and social crisis, we are importuned to re-imagine democracy, as imagining the future. To consider democracy futureless, or that its time has run out, or that futurity (and progress) is its devastating temporal myth, is to open oneself up to charges of theoretical heresy,

Lynn Nottage’s award-winning play Ruined (2007) dialectically dramatizes how the genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the deadliest genocide since the Holocaust—must be understood within the context of global capitalism. However, as the play critically suggests, the dominant centers of global capitalism disavow their responsibility for this genocide by exclusively focusing upon and fetishizing sexual assault. This article explores how Ruined critiques Western discourses on African genocides, a critique animated by Afropessimism, a theory that challenges normative understandings of genocide. As Afropessimists argue and Ruined dramatizes, Black genocide is not a historically bounded event, but rather, a structure that enables the modern world.

An examination of how Afrosurrealism (in each of its three waves) functions in poetry and narrative: as a dream and a joke, respectively. This paper examines the poetry of Étienne Léro, Henry Dumas, and Will Alexander; the plays of Aimé Césaire and Amiri Baraka; and the films of Jordan Peele, Janicza Bravo, and Boots Riley.

Written in Spring 2021 for a graduate Independent Study at the University of Texas at Austin. It was presented at the University of Texas at Austin Ethnic and Third-World Literature Sequels Conference and The University of Texas at Austin Comparative Literature GRACLS Conference.

Last update 11/16/22

Reading Baldwin alongside the negative gestures of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, Chambers proposes that Baldwin himself can be considered a negative theo-philosopher. Explication of the plays focuses on moments of ‘anti-conversion’, or the recognition of the inability to give oneself over to absolute faith. Like Kierkegaard, Baldwin dramatizes the absurdity of the ‘leap of faith’; his characters struggle to overcome blind spots only to find that such unknowing often grants greater awareness. And like Heidegger, Baldwin is also concerned with the process of recognition itself; how it is that subjects may come to be identified as such, between beings and their ‘Being’? The conclusion engages contemporary Afropessimistic philosophers to suggest that Baldwin’s negative theology troubles the foundations of ontology itself.

Activists and scholars often describe environmental racism as an immoral and illegal dumping of toxic waste into poor, Black, and people of colour communities. Yet, the use of environmental habitats in (and with) which Black people are mutilated, concealed, and contained has gone under-conceptualised as a mode of environmental racism. I propose an expansion of familiar understandings of environmental racism to include the use of environmental habitats to commit and conceal acts of anti-Black violence. This proposition draws from an understanding that environmental racism includes the mutual devaluation of Black bodies and the spaces in which they inhabit. I ground this study in Afro-Pessimist and Black geographies thought, research on environmental racism and cultural analyses of Black literary and performance art. Finally, I draw from the spatial and racial analyses imprinted within James Baldwin's immense catalogue to put forth Blackness as an alternate human ethic imbued with political possibilities, an ontological conceptualisation which may push activists and scholars to seek redress beyond the policy rationales and recommendations commonplace among today's struggles for environmental justice.

Uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome (RS), is a disorder that until recently was thought to affect the children of refugees in Sweden alone. The heuristic of psychopolitics is used to theorize RS as a form of abjection (Bataille, Kristeva) and petrification (Fanon, Marriott), and the movement from petrification to petrification in hallucinosis (Fanon, Bion) is delineated: first these children are petrified by persecutory and culturally specific stereotypes that precede and exceed them symbolically, and then, through a succession of shocks, they enter a post-traumatic stupor in which the faltering symbolization of the stereotype gives way to the (dis)embodiment of abject thinghood. Marriott's distinction between mirror as mask and mask as mirror allows the attribution of RS not only to sociocultural mimesis and the psychosocial impact of stereotypes (mirror as mask) but also to a socially imposed absence that the stereotype simultaneously conceals and reveals (mask as mirror). RS (petrification in hallucinosis) is considered the (dis)embodiment of this socially imposed absence.

Moonlight, as a cinematic mode of thinking, presents a terrifying question: What is a (black) faggot? This destructive question provides a paradigm for thinking blackness without being. In this meditation, I suggest the (black) faggot is the exorbitance of thinking sexuality and humanism, blackness and being, and queerness and anti-blackness. To be a (black) faggot is a mode of non-being redoubled, an existence we struggle to understand with the philosophical resources at our disposal. Through a close reading of the film, I limn the depths of blackness nihilism-the condition of inhabitation without being, sexuality, humanity, justice, and redress. The (black) faggot, then, is much more than onomastic destruction or injurious speech; its purpose is to absorb the terror of onto-metaphysics and, for this reason, it is absolutely indispensable. Abstract Black film theory, as an intervention, would have a more destructive impact if it foregrounded the impossibility of a Black film, the impossibility of a Black film theory, the impossibility of a Black film theorist, and the impossibility of a black person except, and this is key, under "cleansing" conditions of violence. Only when real violence is coupled with representational "monstrosity," can Blacks move from the status of things to the status of…of what, we'll just have to wait and see.-Frank Wilderson, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism Cinema is a mode of thinking-Kara Keeling, The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense I. How do you think the impossible? What protocols of thinking and noetic strategies sufficiently (re)present the impossible? How is thinking possible, at all, within a destructive enterprise? Must destruction obliterate the conditions (or modes) that make thinking itself possible. If cinema is, indeed, a mode of thinking, then black cinema (as black thinking) constitutes a problematic "mode"-a way of encountering the impossible, the unanswerable, the inescapable, and the destructive. As a mode-if we consider the mathematical resonance of this term-black cinema as black thought must confront the repetition within its "thinking-set," that concept or element which appears most often within the cinematic frame of re-presentable things. It is precisely this repetition , this mode of thinking, that often goes undetected within black cinema, until it is exposed and disclosed through black thought. Destruction, then, is the exposure of what is concealed within black cinema and the obliteration of a certain repetition. But such obliteration of the repetition, the most consistent element within the "thinking-set," will inevitably situate the impossible since the set depends on this very repetition for its existence, for its mode of intelligibility, for its narrative clarity. Destroying the repetition, then, is the unbearable, and perhaps impossible, weight of black cinema, one which humanism, as a cinematic pleasure Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren's research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.

Leong, D. (2016). The mattering of Black lives: Octavia Butler's hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialisms. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1-35. Abstract This article argues that the ethical potential of " the nonhuman turn " advanced by the new materialisms is structured by disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh. The most recent new materialist publications draw upon the techno-scientific developments of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by the cumulative effects of species-level human activity, to demonstrate the

What type of life is possible without metaphysical guarantees? How does one practice living, or inhabit existence, without the grounding, foundation, and security metaphysics promises? Can we liberate life from metaphysical captivity, and if so, what "weapons of warfare" accomplish this liberation? These questions, I believe, sketch a putative path for (re)thinking black life, black death, and antiblackness as problems of metaphysical living. Put differently, antiblackness is a crisis of faith-or the grounding of existence, and life itself, in ontotheology (the supreme metaphysical structuration).1 Antiblack and white supremacist religions and practices, then, are deceptively anti-faith. And the consequence of grounding life, existence, and worship in metaphysics is unmitigated cruelty and ritualized violencesince the "God" of metaphysics is pure violence.

The contemporary debate about “abolition” and its relation to wider anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles can be read as reproducing the tired opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual incrementalism and immediate disruptive action. This false dichotomy can be resolved by returning the holistic and historical analysis of “abolition democracy” offered by W.E.B. Du Bois’ in his classic work Black Reconstruction. Du Bois offers an alternative mandate for abolitionist praxis: one which highlights the interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. Understood in these terms, abolition becomes a critically important and neglected component of the revolutionary tradition: abolition is the foil of bourgeois security.

NOTE (not an abstract):

This is the shorter, published version of a paper presented in June 2012 at a conference on precarity at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The paper was my first direct engagement with, and attempted embrace of, Afro-pessimism. As such, it mostly consists of a critique of the concept of precarity, and related social movement projects, reflecting the inquiry into Black positionality in an anti-Black world advanced by Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. Some of the paper's arguments and contentions are being revised as my interest in Afro-pessimism, and Black ontological and paradigmatic critique in general, is deepening, widening, and taking new ethico-political, not only theoretical, directions.

This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical questions about how various conceptualizations of gender violence occlude critical theorizations of how black people die at the hands of the state. Black death is thus taken up as a Black feminist theoretic to challenge the discursive capacity of gender as a singular category to articulate conclusively the suffering of Black gendered subjects. Thus, by examining the narrative maneuvers of the 2017 Women's March to articulate police violence as a gender concern, this essay demonstrates how the specificities of Blackness are crowded out by the drive towards a collective politic.

In Frantz Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Mask,’ Fanon takes two chapters of his first book to analyze the, ‘The Woman of Color and The White Man,’ as well as ‘The Man of Color and The White Woman.’ Fanon does not, however, spend a chapter on the intramural Black (sexual) relation. In this letter-essay, written
to a Black lover, the author seek to address and work-through this intramural absence within the text of Fanon in order to raise the question of whether or not Black love is or is not possible in an anti-Black world. Turning to the insights of Afropessimist theories of Blackness-as-Nothingness, while relying on psychoanalytic and Black feminist critiques of the heteronormative investment of the gender normativity itself, the author argues that Black love is a nihilist love, a relationship of Nothingness-with-Nothingness, that can only be brought into existence through a monstrous intimacy with non-existence.

This essay reexamines the life of the three enslaved Black "women" Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy at the hands of the acclaimed "Father of Modern Gynecology" J. Marion Sims through the lens of Afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. Through a critical Black studies engagement with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of 'primitive accreditation' as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. Through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-Blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of Blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.

The ethical demands of Blackness have weighed on the West for a half millennium. The ontological violence of the Middle Passage continues to fundamentally structure modernity and cohere what it means to be a Human in the world. Following recent interventions at the cutting edge of Black Studies, my project examines Blackness not as group phenotype, social construct, or cultural heritage, but as a structural relationship to violence. This structural violence variously positions some sentient beings as Human subjects and others as non-Human objects, or Slaves. If it is this violence that generates and reproduces the world, then Black revolution (which is to say, revolution) exceeds the paradigms of other revolutionary programs, such as communism or decolonization, which seek to transform and improve the world; instead, Black revolution aims at the destruction of the world and its anti-Black foundations. My thesis finally argues that for a White person to take up this ethical imperative to destroy the world and, crucially, to act on this imperative, will necessarily result in their de-Whitening – they will lose their Human coordinates and become objects, joining the dance of death. I approach this project through three chapters: on Whiteness, on Blackness, and on (Black) revolution.

Neste ensaio, fruto da experiência docente na periferia colonial do capitalismo racializado brasileiro retomo, muito brevemente, a conexão
encontrada na filosofia ocidental entre ontologia e linguagem para dar explicitude aos fundamentos da virada linguística e para apontar a transição para uma virada ontológica, discutida dessa forma em
duas instâncias, que parecem ter estado até então incomunicáveis. O perspectivismo ameríndio, que poderíamos talvez considerar um capítulo da virada ontológica mais ampla na antropologia social contemporânea, e o afropessimismo afroamericano, descendente das tradições do
radicalismo negro norte-americano e da Africa e diáspora.

O objetivo da disciplina é estudar uma parte da extensa bibliografia sobre racismo e antinegritude produzida pelo pensamento crítico negro nas últimas décadas, com ênfase, neste módulo, em autoras e autores anglófonos (lidos em traduções ao português). Terão destaque textos recentes associados ao Afropessimismo e ao Afrofuturismo (livros e ensaios de Frank Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva e Kodwo Eshun) e obras mais antigas (de Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Frantz Fanon e W. E. B. Du Bois) que são referências importantes para as discussões contemporâneas. Em diálogo com os textos teóricos e filosóficos, estudaremos algumas narrativas ficcionais (os romances Kindred: Laços de sangue [Kindred] de Octavia Butler e Amada [Beloved] de Toni Morrison, o conto “O cometa” [“The Comet”] de Du Bois e o filme Nós [Us] de Jordan Peele). Tanto no caso das obras ficcionais quanto no dos textos teóricos, historiográficos e filosóficos, o objetivo será entender melhor como as criações e o pensamento desses autores e autoras responderam às dificuldades narratológicas instauradas pela história da escravidão e pela violência antinegro.

Dans l’histoire africaine-américaine, le pessimisme ne porte pas sur les Noirs, mais sur la capacité de la société blanche à dépasser sa négrophobie. Et si les idées et réformes que nous tenons pour progressistes n’étaient que des métamorphoses du racisme ? À l’ère de Black Lives Matter, la permanence de la déshumanisation et de la mise à mort des Noirs apparaît comme un socle de nos sociétés civiles.
Ce livre s’oppose aux visions simplistes, lisses ou iréniques de la pensée africaine-américaine actuelle. L’intersectionnalité n’est pas la seule manière de penser race, genre et classe d’un point de vue noir. Noirceur présente un ensemble de théories iconoclastes, de débats contemporains et de stratégies politiques pour repenser radicalement l’avenir des vies noires en Amérique et dans le monde.

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.

This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms.
Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency
says about the nature of black positionality and the significance
of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and
the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations
of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black
m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge
production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition
politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence,
and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through
mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.

This essay argues that objections to nonblack suffering in Trump’s America obscure racism’s primary operation as a cut that makes human body from racialized flesh. It returns to Frank B. Wilderson III’s argument in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003) that the civil society that organizes our political and social relationality is necessarily exclusionary to posit a libidinal critique. It adds to Wilderson’s intervention a paradigmatic analysis of social and political constructions of time to call not for inclusivity, which Trump betrays as an antiblack praxis, but to call for the exclusivity of the black feminine.

Despite his incarceration in 1961 on a one-year-to-life sentence, George Jackson was a pro- lific Marxist theorist, with two books published. His autobiographical epistolary text Soledad Brother, published the year before his death in 1971, contains letters to family, friends, and supporters that are at once deeply personal and broadly theoretical. These letters consider and analyze the ways that he finds himself (re)captured and thus caught in the machinery of the US- American carceral apparatus. Jackson’s theory of revolutionary politics, linked to American and global struggles against imperialism, was of particular interest to Gilles Deleuze, whose conceptualization of the Line of Flight is furnished by a crucial quotation of Jackson’s: “I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick” (328). This quotation from Soledad Brother, with minor variations, winds through Deleuze’s collaborative oeuvre, from Anti-Oedipus with Felix Guattari to Dialogues II with Claire Parnet, and forms a key aspect of the notion of the line of flight, which has been further mobilized by recent scholars. Despite the importance of this quotation, it goes uncited throughout all of Deleuze’s work, in all editions, in multiple languages, in both print and digital mediums. There is no included bibliographic information and no editor’s note or translator’s note as to why this is the case. The reference is simply absent, with its most glaring absence in the bibliography of Anti-Oedipus. Using this absence as a point of departure this paper will consider Jackson, and by extension Black/Prisoner beings, as disavowed theoreticians, whose contributions cannot be considered. Further, I argue that this ‘leaving out’ is a critical aspect of both prisoner status and its linkage to Blackness, reflected in the ways that Jackson is bound to both (non)positions. In hope of maintaining the integ- rity of the absence in Anti-Oedipus, this paper will further interrogate the meaning of such an absence, and the parasitic relation of something to nothing and the uncitability of Black prisoner as theorist.

Anti-colonialism is a scam today.
It is the ideological abode of new forms of capital accumulation, symbolised by the Capitalist International of the Postcolonial Immigrant and Silicon Valley.
Anti-colonialism propels the intensification of the 'social death' of black people.

(Informal description) This paper begins to build a bridge between theoretical physics, black studies, and black literature in order to 'map' what I envision the Black Imagination to be. I theorize it as a universe unto itself, with its own physics (distorted, relative to the antiblack world/universe's physics). So in a fundamental way, I'm interested in how this Black imagination and its physics might tell us something interesting about the Black Position (Wilderson). In this essay, I'm interested in building toward a serious question about the Black imagination's temporality, and how that might reveal something instructive and fundamental about Blackness's relation to time. I understand this relation to be gratuitously violent, nonlinear, and unethical, and I call it "untime."

The article analyzes two novels of migration by Nigerian women authors in the context of Afropolitanism: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013) and Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference (2013). It is argued that Afropolitanism obscures the reasons why migration from Africa to the West has been increasing in the decades since independence, rather than decreasing. In comparing the two novels, the article focuses on empathy towards and solidarity between fellow Nigerians, which has been seen by Nigerian philosopher Chielozona Eze as crucial for building African civil society and functional state.

This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought through a meta-commentary on Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil ([2013] 2017) and The Kingdom and the Garden ([2019] 2020). The first study interrogates the history of (mis)reading 2 Thessalonians 2 where the Apostle Paul announces the messianic “mystery of lawlessness” that is being concealed and delayed by the katechōn. This argument anticipates Agamben’s later study, which argues that the legacy of Augustinian original sin as the irremediable alienation of humanity falsely conceals and thus restrains messianic access to the Garden. However, in the wake of racial slavery, annotating Agamben’s thought with Afropessimism reveals that access to the Garden has in fact become foreclosed. And yet, when modernity's anti-Black original sin is understood as the katechōn, Agamben’s reading of the messianic mystery of lawlessness can help us contemplate Afropessimism’s invitation to the dance of social death.