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This relationship between epistemic insecurity and acceptance of ‘alternative knowledges’ is of great interest to the Russian government. The weakening of scientific dominance in favour of a plurality closely mirrors Russian designs on liberal hegemony at the international level. The same applies to the incursion of conspiracy thinking into the ground previously occupied by rational liberal political debate. Again, to put this in post modern terms, once Russia has ‘exposed’ the dominant discourses of the West for what they are—lies and distortions—the (psychological) ground is clear for the rise of ‘alternative’ discourses, ‘alternative knowledges’, all of which are, at least in principle, equally valid.

One example of this tactic in action is RT’s penchant for anti-mainstream politicians, granting ‘extended coverage to party leaders and their views, as well as portraying key common enemies, such as the US and global capital, in a negative way’ (Grätz 2015: p. 43). Nigel Farage, for instance, the then leader of Britain’s Eurosceptic Ukip party, appeared on RT at least seventeen times between December 2010 and April 2014 (Wintour and Mason 31 March 2014). As Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason at the Guardian note, ‘The Ukip leader has appeared so frequently that he is cited in literature for the TV station Russia Today as one of their special and “endlessly quotable” British guests. “He has been known far longer to the RT audience than most of the British electorate,” Russia Today claims’ (31 March 2014).

Queer arts are uniquely important to queer identities, rainbow youth empowerment, and the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement because unqualified acceptance and intentional inclusion only come through societal acknowledgment and deepening empathy. Acknowledgment and empathy manifest in queer representation in art and media. While we vogue our hands, pat our feet, laugh our stomachs into knots, and wipe tears from our eyes, queer actors, musicians, comedians, painters, and fashionistas are imperceptibly sensitizing us to the complexities of the human sexuality spectrum and structuring our societal conversations about power, love, and the law. Most importantly, queer youth who are most at risk for suicide, homelessness, exposure to illicit drugs, and childhood physical, psychological, and sexual abuse will lose hope when the queer artists they emulate get picked off by major record labels and media conglomerates. Queer kids will never know that “It Gets Better” with time, intentional community, and self-actualization. If rightsholders were to exercise their rights to enjoin drag, ballroom, and queer music performances, we’d lose more than art.

LGBTQ+ arts are now experiencing what rappers endured in the late ‘80s and ‘90s — the dead ends of the copyright system. These artists depend on de facto non-enforcement of our Chapter 17 of the United States Code to survive, and they survive until they thrive. Once arts start thriving, the media conglomerates want their financial cut of outsider arts. As drag, ballroom, and bounce performances move from nighttime shows in dark smokey clubs to Apple Music, Spotify, and prime-time streaming services, queer art grows increasingly susceptible to DCMA takedowns and performance injunctions to stop queer artists from making more money on their copyrights than the conglomerates do.

This essay has presented a reading of the question “what might it mean to queer debate” which isolates a site of irresolvable tension between “queer” and “debate.” Queer’s central characteristic is its ability to be radically open and develop meaning based on its particular instantiations; debate, on the other hand, is constrained by a variety of factors including speech times, the competition format of the activity, and wins and losses. Rather than try to resolve this tension by either limiting queer or unlimiting debate, I have suggested that we might consider reading it as an instance of aporia, an irresolvable impasse which is nevertheless generative insofar as it invites us to reconsider thinking in the face of this incommensurability. For me, this generative understanding of the necessary conflict between “queer” and “debate” focuses on the hyper-specificity and intense contextuality of queer and applies it to an understanding of debate. As a result, my suggestion has been that to queer debate is to approach each individual debate and consider it on its own terms such that our students sidestep arguments about the overall adoption of each model in favor of the particular contingencies associated with each specific debate. Of course, I have provided but one suggestion when considering how we might queer debate. Many may reasonably disagree with me, and I certainly invite others to advance their own positions, theories, and ideas about what it might mean to queer debate. If one of the central lessons of queer’s evolution throughout recent history is the term’s ability to change depending on its contingent deployments, then a queer model of debate must also be able to morph in different ways. And as I have also suggested, debate’s evolution reflects a similar history to queer’s, changing significantly as teams push the boundaries of what should and should not function within debate rounds. Similarly, aporia invites a plurality of responses, albeit those which are inevitably trapped by the impasse that is aporia. Perhaps there are other contextual factors which may invite a queer model of debate that looks different than the model-less model I have proposed here. In addition to proposing a queer model of debate, I hope to have provided two important lessons for those of us interested in both the educational value of debate and the continuation of debates about debate. First, I have suggested that debate is a messy activity. Even as rules and norms governing the activity ensure a certain standard of predictability, the inability to come to definitive conclusions about how all debates should look ensures that the activity has a certain level of disorganization, chaos, and confusion. Many people who judge “clash of civilizations” rounds which pit different models of debate against each other suggest that they do not believe there is a “right” answer to how all debate should be; as someone who often judges these kinds of debates (and votes for both the “policy” and the “kritikal” teams with frequency), I tend to agree with my colleagues. Yet the disorderly chaos preventing the policy debate community from resolving debates about debate makes possible a level of ingenuity and creativity that we should inculcate in our students. My point is not that debate is necessarily unstable or impossible to prepare for; nor is it that debate should not be stable or predictable at all. Rather, my position is that one of the important lessons debate can teach our students is to be artful and slick, figuring out how to adapt to different situations as they evolve and change. In a sense, this lesson extends Gordon Mitchell’s (1998, 57) claim that “with greater room to maneuver for inventing strategies for action, taking risks, making mistakes and affecting change, scholars can begin to envision how to do things with arguments not only in the cozy confines of contest round competition, but in the world beyond as well.” These are skills that are quite beneficial in everyday life, as everyone must learn to adapt to situations as they morph in unpredictable ways; my suggestion has been that debate’s messiness is necessary for inculcating these important skills. Second, I have suggested that all models of debate are imperfect. There will always be concerns about accessibility, dogmatism, exclusion, fairness, and portable skills associated with each proposed model of debate. Rather than either giving up on debates about debate or trying to find the ideal version of debate, my suggestion has been that it is in the very inability to find perfection that we might isolate the educational value of encouraging our students to engage in debates about debate. In other words, much like aporia itself, debates about debate are stuck—but in a productive and generative manner. My position thus diverges from other debate educators who suggest that our goal ought to be to “resolve old disagreements about the paradigms and pedagogies of educational debate” (Hogan and Kurr 2017, 87). Instead, my suggestion is that it is from within the very inability to find resolution for the disagreements between and among debates about debate that we may advance conversations about the intellectual and argumentative value of continuing to engage in these kinds of debates. The college policy debate community is split over what constraints are acceptable and which are not; my suggestion is that we may mine that irresolvable division to find the educational value of debating about debate. And it is particularly important for debaters, educators, and coaches to advance conversations about the benefits of debate now, in the wake of recent conservative attacks on our activity. In a variety of places, Derrida (1992, 41) reminds us that “ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia” (See also Derrida 1993; Derrida 1995; Derrida 2001). Derrida (1992, 41) continues by stating that “when the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program.” If we already know what must be done, then we are not making a decision; we have not really been faced with a choice to make. Instead, making a decision, as one must when considering ethics, politics, and responsibility, necessitates insurmountable indeterminacy, uncertainty, and doubt. Much like ethics, politics, and responsibility, queering debate necessitates an overwhelming and irresolvable level of perplexity and messiness. But approaching that mess from a position of radical openness makes possible a different way of considering the value of debates about debate. While we may not ever be certain what the correct model of debate is, we can turn to aporia for an idea of what to do in the face of that uncertainty. Ethics, politics, and responsibility—every debate, in some way, addresses these three topics. Can we remain open to their irresolvable possibilities?

To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as victims who experienced social death within the abusive regime of transatlantic slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent Brown (2009) however, has criticised Orlando Patterson’s (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for positioning the slave as a subject without agency and maintains that those who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of plantation life ‘were not in fact the living dead’, but ‘the mothers of gasping new societies’ (Brown 2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who managed to band together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule. These ‘runaways’ were in fact ‘ferocious fighters and master strategists’, building towns and military bases which enabled them to fight and successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave ‘hero’ by the very revelation that their leader, ‘Queen Nanny’ was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an ‘old hagg’ or ‘obeah’ woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such ‘the study of her experiences might change the lives of people living under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression’ (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The label of ‘social death’ is rejected here on the grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from the vantage point of a European hegemonic ideology. Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans. However, Fanon’s (1967) assertion that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1967, 110) helps us to understand that this classification can only have meaning relative to the symbolic which represents the alive ness of whiteness against the backdrop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the ‘death’ one suffers relative to the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated her into ‘life’, one now holds the sovereignty of determining the subject’s right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that although the concept of social death has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical experience of those who live antagonistically in relation to the social symbolic, it is nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one dimensional story of terror. In keeping with Gilroy’s (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be constructed from the slaves’ point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity. We might therefore find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which negated them, but also, due to their unique circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communication which would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mutual recognition. In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories of black agency excluded8. Young’s argument that ‘one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white people’s role in abolition is that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression’, appears to echo the behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation ‘immigrants’ believe that voting ‘doesn’t matter’.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might allude to the ‘lived contradiction’ of being black and English which affects one’s confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at its core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a). Without considering the slaves’ capacity for survival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of slavery, we limit the use–value of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire of slavery’s abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived and survived in the time of slavery.

That something of the African backgrounds of black Americans survived is not difficult to argue despite intense efforts to prove that blacks were incapable of cultural retention because of slavery. No displaced people have ever completely lost the forms of their previous culture. The specific artifacts may differ from those employed in a prior time, but the essential elements giving rise to those artifacts are often retained and produce substantive forms in the new context. It is my contention that black Americans retained basic components of the African experience rather than specific artifacts. To seek the distinctive retention of African words in black America as Turner, Herskovits, and Romeo Garrett attempted to do is to search amiss. What they sought to do is an interesting, provocative, and valuable addition to our knowledge, but it is not convincing from the standpoint of cultural survivals. It is cast in too narrow a mold and often depends on the continuity of specific words from several ethnic regions of Africa. Although African lexical items may be found limited supply among African-Americans, they do not make the argument for a more general retention of African linguistic behavior applicable to most black Americans. What my research suggests is that combinations of classes of sounds, units of meaning, and syntax behaviors are to be considered in regard to survival rather than concentrating on any single one of these factors or on simple lexical characteristics. Earlier writers seem to have preferred African lexical discoveries in African-American language; they are, after all, easily identifiable phenomena. But the relationship between African languages and African-American speech behaviors can be more clearly ascertained on a primary level in the “communication style” of the person. While this concept is difficult to define, it means simply the verbal and nonverbal behavior patterns that distinguish one person from another. Even whole groups may be distinguished in such a manner. On a secondary level, there are observable relationships in the substantive social fabric of language behavior—proverbs, riddles, dozens, call-and-response. The combination of communicative styles and “folkloristic modalities” constitutes an approach to the sense of a language. It is this sense of language in African-Americans that is uniquely more African than European, other factors aside. This is not a rejection of linguistic structure, inasmuch as I hope to demonstrate that certain structural matters underscore my basic thesis.

It is more difficult to measure and evaluate the persistence of African culture elsewhere, especially in the United States, outside the core areas of New Orleans and the Sea Islands. In many “pocket areas” in the southern states and in cities and towns through the United States, remnants of African culture abound: in language patterns and vocabulary, in literature, in techniques of storytelling, in folktales such as Breb Rabbit and Tar Baby, in music and dance forms, singing, and rhythm, in foods, and in ways of eating certain foods. The extended-family concept and respect for elders in many rural areas were African transplants. Africanisms are of course most prevalent among black southerners because the South was the heart of the slavery system in the United States. These people took their traditions outside the South once they migrated. The most dominant and intact African survival in the black diaspora has proved to be the religion voodoo. The survival of African religious and magical systems is directly linked to their importance in everyday life. In addition, their ability to accommodate and be associated with various facets of other established religions strengthened their chances of survival. Ancient deities in the African pantheon were often given Catholic saints’ names. The most tenacious African religious retentions in the United States are found where Catholicism has been particularly strong, including New Orleans. By appealing to traditional deities and mystical forces, the slaves were able to keep alive their link with Africa. During the early stages of slavery the link was reinforced by voodoo priests and root doctors who continued to be represented among the newly arrived slaves. The priests in particular led the crusade for the survival of their religious practices by identifying African deities with Catholic saints in Haiti and Brazil. And African concepts of good and evil found counterparts in the Christians’ belief in heaven and hell and Christ and Satan. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the root doctors have been more visible in practicing their craft than the priests. From its beginning, voodoo encompassed certain elements such as divination, manipulation, and herbalism that gave it the appearance of a magical rather than a religious system. In the early days of slavery, magic was often the strongest element because of the suppression of voodoo as a religion by the authorities and slave owners. These antivoodooists managed to limit the number of voodoo meetings among slaves, but they found it impossible to stop the making of voodoo and hoodoo objects in the slaves’ cabins. (Hoodoo is the negative component of voodoo.) Magic helped the slaves to cope with their daily situations, to win the affection of the ones they desired, to cause harm to their enemies, and to feel protected from harm themselves. Its main value was and continues to be psychological. Magic is intimately related to voodoo, as it is to most religions, but is not its essence. Voodoo contains some elements of magic, and magic receives much of its strength from the voodoo deities and rituals. African religious and magical systems also survived because of the organizational role they played in slave revolts throughout the New World but particularly in Haiti and Brazil. Revolutionary protest appears to have been engraved in voodoo upon its arrival in the Americas. Revolts in the early period of slavery were largely the work of African priests and medicine men. In conducting insurrectional meetings disguised as religious ceremonies, voodoo leaders often promised the gods’ support for any rebellion the slaves decided to engage in. The assurance of supernatural support to both leaders and followers and the priests’ promise that the ancestors were aiding the struggle for freedom gave the slaves the necessary inspiration, courage, and determination. Various charms, gris-gris, potions, and small parcels containing bits of paper, bones, or potions hung around the necks of the fighting men provided protection and good luck by warding off bullets. The slave insurrection in New York in 1712 was led by a conjurer who convinced the fighters they were invulnerable. A leader in the 1822 insurrection in North Carolina, “Gullah Jack,” also was a conjurer and root doctor; his charms, chiefly of animal claws, were designed to make the insurrectionists invulnerable. Voodoo priests also helped suicide victims by telling them what to do to ensure their return after death to their homeland in Africa.

As stated earlier, the main premise to Wilderson’s argument for Afro-pessimism derives from the work done by Orlando Patterson between the relationship between slavery and the condition of social death for the Black Body. Thus, because of this condition of social death, Wilderson believes that the Black Body is incapable of accessing the law through legal reform and progress because of the way they are marked ontologically as the Slave. However, historian Vincent Brown has uncovered evidence with regards to the experience of slavery and social death when he writes, “The premise of Orlando Patterson’s major work, that enslaved Africans were natally alienated and culturally isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with “survivals” or “retentions” of African culture and by historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Park’s view of “the Negro” predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave trade and slavery had denuded black people of any ancestral heritage from Africa. The historians Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits argued the opposite. Their research supported the conclusion that while enslaved Africans could not have brought intact social, political, and religious institutions with them to the Americas, they did maintain significant aspects of their cultural backgrounds. For these scholars, the preservation of distinctive cultural forms has served as an index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of resistance to slavery itself. Scholars of slave resistance have never had much use for the concept of social death. How could they have formed the fragile families documented by social historians if they had been “natally alienated” by definition? Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, if slaves had been uniformly subjected to “permanent violent domination,” they could not have revolted as often as they did or shown the “varied manifestations of their resistance.” (Brown, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, pg. 11-13). Patterson’s major theme regarding the social death of slaves is that, since birth, they have been unable to engage in the kind of social relations they desired because their status as fungible objects meant that those relations were always at the discretion of their masters. However, as Brown points out, Patterson, and subsequently Wilderson, have ignored that there were experiences free from the watchful eyes of the master. Furthermore, in the context of Wilderson, the fact that there remains to be evidence that slaves had preserved a distinct culture, than this would indicate that they retained some of their culture from Africa after the Middle Passage, the event that erased Black ontology for Wilderson. To put in bluntly, Africans did not come out of the Middle Passage as Blacks, but came out with some form of their culture still left intact, a culture, that, for Brown, still grew and developed in its own way even during the atrocities of slavery. If Wilderson’s main argument for the ontological death of the Black Body is because of their incapacity to develop their own subjectivity, then the formation of a distinct slave culture would invalidate this argument because the formation of a distinct culture shows that the Black Body still retained some capacity to form their own subjectivity, a sign of life in the ontological realm. Furthermore, if the Black Body were truly ontologically dead in the present, then statistics would indicate otherwise. A study by the Journal of Blacks in Higher education shows that since 1990, the graduation rate for Black men has improved from 28% to 35% in 2005 and subsequently 34% to 46% for Black women during the same period. The study does conceded that the statistics remain low, but that the progress made in the past 15 years has been encouraging and that reform has been a step in the right direction. If the Black Body were truly socially dead, then institutions such as the university would be completely inaccessible to the Black Body, yet the progress made in graduation rates show that the Black Body still has some agency and capacity to shape their own futures.

One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of study, and that is not a fair assessment. The main problem is that Sexton argues from conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around. That is, he begins with the conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves. It is a pretty tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even have opened up a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this is not that book.

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior.

The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.

Stiegler’s theory of libidinal economy rests on the claim that it is the question of the origin that leads to the emergence of desire. Without the desire to ask questions about the origin, there would be no human individuation. This point is made clear in Acting Out: “The question of the origin is what constitutes the whole of human individuation, that is, the whole of desire: the whole of human being insofar as it is essentially desiring” (Stiegler 2009a, 7). Because desire is formed by questions about the origin, it is also constituted by the empirical history that facilitates access to it. This condition of default means that it should be presumed within accounts of desire that “the ‘structural’ is elementarily ‘historical’ and as such ‘accidental,’ and is neither guided nor contained by any ontology that would make it possible to define the constitutive elements of the process” (Stiegler 2011b, 161). Ontology cannot explain desire precisely because it is constituted by the condition of ontological incompleteness represented by the default of origin. This point can be seen clearly in Stiegler’s reading of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Stiegler praises Marcuse for attempting to present a genealogical understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis (Stiegler 2014b, 2). In Marcuse’s account, Freudianism is taken to task for its neglect of how the reality principle—which aligns human instincts with the needs of a particular group, society, or culture—is modified alongside the historical variation of needs (Marcuse 1955, 37). Marcuse demonstrates how Freudian theory “treats as natural a situation that is in fact historical, and therefore contingent” (Stiegler 2014b, 43). The reality principle is not an a-historical component of psychanalysis, but a historical relationship to wider social conditions. Despite his historicism, Marcuse perceived the mid-twentieth century as a potential turning point in the history of desire. While historically desire has been subject to repressive variants of the reality principle that redirect sexual energy toward work and production, Marcuse argued that the productive capacities of capitalism provided an opportunity for the construction of an alternate reality principle based on the fulfilment of pleasure. He claimed that the “historical possibility of a gradual decontrolling of the instinctual development must be taken seriously . . . if civilization is to progress to a higher stage of freedom” (Marcuse 1955, 134). Stiegler claims that this gradual decontrolling of instincts presupposes that the pleasure principle “precedes its domination by the reality principle” (Stiegler 2014b, 45). Marcuse contradicts his own rejection of a-historicism, as he claims that pleasure precedes and is imposed on by the reality principle and can be distinguished from the historical permutations of desire’s constraints. The critique of Freudian ontology resolves into the positing of an equally a-historical foundation for desire. Stiegler’s criticism of Marcuse here rests on his organological method. As a component of the biological dimension of organology, pleasure is formed in tandem with the expectations and constraints placed on it by a particular process of collective individuation. Pleasure and reality principles co-compose one another (Stiegler 2014b, 56). In contrast, Marcuse claims that animal drives are “inhibited” by their transformation into human desire (Marcuse 1955, 11–12). A transductive libidinal economy that rejects ontology cannot conceive of pleasure as “inhibited,” as this claim necessitates an a-historical gesture. By failing to recognize this, Marcuse does not go far enough in rejecting ontology within psychoanalysis, as his understanding of pleasure exists outside the a-transcendental relationship to technics. Two consequences that exist in tension with each other arise from the claim that ontology cannot account for the technical condition of desire. If any conception of desire is historical, for Stiegler it must be situated within a totalizing technical context. However, desire is irreducible to its technical context because it is formed within responses to the question of the default of origin that exceeds any local ontology. Desire follows a quasi-causal logic: it emerges from the reality principle of a particular locality but “exceeds all calculation” insofar as it aims at consistences (Stiegler 2020a, 14). The consistences that desire pursues engender provisional totalization, or a “télos,” which guides psychic and collective individuation (Stiegler 2009c, 35). As Robert Hughes summarizes, these objects of desire transform becoming into a future: “For Stiegler, it is helpful to distinguish the future (l’avenir) from the actual to-come (le devenir). What will actually come to be is, of course, something that one’s fantasies of the future must ‘negotiate’ with, but philosophically one must not confound the fantasized future with this actual to-come” (Hughes 2014, 48). Here the recursive structure of individuation returns within desire. Desire provides answers to the question of the origin, but these answers will never come to pass in reality as we expect. They are perpetually transformed by attempts to realize consistences. As Hughes continues, desire “sustains an openness as a pure future, even while it poses itself in thought as the anticipation of narrative completion” (Hughes 2014, 49). The impossibility of fulfilling these desires means that the “ideal beings of ontology must be replaced by infinite motives” that inform individuation (Stiegler 2013f, 34). Openness and totalization intermingle in this account of desire, as positing either pure totalization or pure openness would fall into the trap of ontology. That is, an a-historical and totalizing account of the psyche represented by Freudianism or an ontological account of liberated pleasure represented by Marcuse. I now turn to Stiegler’s own theory of libidinal economy to explore how it balances both totalization and non-totalization.

The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All the tragedies of the political project of emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals and abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern human-kind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now, this is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always `imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other firrm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded `understand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed radicalism of psycho- analysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere.

As such, the songs also figure as a form of remembering through mourning. In The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization, Alfred Frankowski insists “that mourning cannot help but be a way of resisting the crises of our political lifeworld” (2015: 97). It needs to be politicized and become more than a mere attunement to wrongdoing and loss. Unlike memorialization, mourning does not relegate injustice to the past. Mourning acknowledges the continuities and antiblackness’ pervasive grasp in the present. The novel thus refutes what Frankowski terms “postracial memorialization” which serves the purpose of “social forgetting” and distancing in the present. Political mourning underscores the complicity of the present with the past and future. For Frankowski, a political sense of mourning “requires that our passivity be turned into an activity” (98). It acknowledges how current social relations are intricately linked with historical violence. These links need to be stressed not least in the ways in which past horrors are remembered, memorialized, and mourned. Sing develops such an outlook most visibly through Kayla who unites the important sources of possibility, posture, affection, and song. Thus, she embodies the virtue of hope as action more so than anybody else. In her, the past, present, and future merge. The possibility of a different tomorrow lies in her bond with Jojo and the way in which she engages with suffering. Together, through acts of mourning, they can break the cycle of threatening lovelessness and hopelessness in an antiblack world so accurately diagnosed by Cornel West (2001: 22). By no means is this the end to all problems but it is nonetheless indispensable. bell hooks notes: “Even when we cannot change ongoing exploitation and domination, love gives life meaning, purpose, and direction” (2001: xxiv). Survival and change have only been possible through unconditional commitment to one another. Unconditional commitment is present in the minute gestures of the grandparents and their loving relationship to one another but Kayla also extends it to others beyond her inner circle. Through Kayla, Richie and the other ghosts who are unable to go home fnd relief. Not only is she able to hear their song but she is also able to sing it. This plays a signifcant role in the novel’s solution. Kayla acknowledges their suffering and encourages them to “[g]o home.” Jojo focalizes what happens next: Kayla begins to sing, a song of mismatched, half-garbled words, nothing that I can understand. Only the melody, which is low but as loud as the swish and sway of the trees, that cuts their whispering but twines with it at the same time. And the ghosts open their mouths wider and their faces fold at the edges so they look like they’re crying, but they can’t. And Kayla sings louder. She waves her hand in the air as she sings, and I know it, know the movement, know it’s how Leonie rubbed my back, rubbed Kayla’s back, when we were frightened of the world. Kayla sings, and the multitude of ghosts lean forward, nodding. They smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease. Yes. (Ward 2017: 284) Kayla’s song voices their turmoil and yet also points towards temporary deliverance from it. Through mourning, she can continue to narrate their life stories, but she can also provide comfort. The dead and the atrocities committed against them will not be forgotten, and neither will the countless ways in which their suffering is tied to ongoing harm. The novel thus refutes post-racial memorialization and opts for mourning as a simultaneous call for action. What is striking here, moreover, is the combination of song and movement. Kayla’s hand gestures are the ones that Jojo recognizes as Leonie’s way of comforting them when they were younger. Mam already used it to comfort Leonie when she frst learns that she is pregnant: “[H]er hand rubbed circles on my back” (Ward 2017: 156). If both Jojo and Kayla embody the virtue of hope, then they have also inherited this virtue from their ancestors. This intergenerationally connects Kayla with Mam through Leonie. In this context, it is important to consider the way that Jojo describes Kayla: “Her eyes Michael’s, her nose Leonie’s, the set of her shoulders Pop’s, and the way she looks upward, like she is measuring the tree, all Mam. But something about the way she stands, the way she takes all the pieces of everybody and holds them together, is all her. Kayla” (284). She literally carries in her body those who came before her and has inherited their histories. Yet, because she is her very own person, she at least stands the chance of change. In her bodily posture just as in her ability to empathize with others, past and future merge. An end to the perpetual cycle of violence is possible, even if it has to be forged from serious struggle and effort without any certainty of success: the ghosts smile with something like remembrance and ease—but they do not disappear. The only certainty lies in the fact that any future success will be forever entwined with the losses of the past. Since antiblackness is politically, socially, and affectively entrenched, there is no way of knowing what will become of Jojo and Kayla. The circumstances of their existence might very well catch up with them and send them down an all too familiar path. Yet, against all odds, it might be their very generation that puts a small but meaningful dent into the antiblack project. Recalling Jeffrey Stout, hope “is not the same thing as thinking that what one ardently desires is likely to happen” but the conviction that “we have a chance of making a significant difference for the better” (2010: 283). Ultimately Kayla, cannot send the ghosts away, but walking home with Pop and Jojo, the young girl embodies potential change: “Kayla hums over my shoulder, says ‘Shhh’ like I am the baby and she is the big brother, says ‘Shhh’ like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it. Home, they say. Home” (Ward 2017: 284–285). Social forgetting will not happen on their watch. What lingers in the fnal lines of the novel is a profound awareness of how they can make a difference in each other’s lives by positively affecting each other’s lived bodies. Their actions matter in shaping them and the world around them. In Kayla and Jojo’s efforts, the future already begins to take shape. As Lewis Gordon insists, the political is future-oriented and thus always also about someone other than oneself. It is a commitment “to the life and freedom of others” (2021: 70). Such a commitment must play out in the here and now. That is why Kayla, Jojo, and Pop turn away from the tree of ghosts to face the presence even as they continue to mourn their loss. This is not a lot, but it is also not nothing. The subjunctive undertone in the fnal pages roots them frmly in the present while voicing desire for change. Sing anticipates change—in the absence of certainty. When read alongside the other Black humanist novels studied here, Ward seems to confront readers with the bleakest outlook because hunger, fear, and violence are permanent constants for many who are exposed to structural disadvantages. But the novel’s backward glance also orients itself towards the future: Mam ruminates that “we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it” (Ward 2017: 236). The question then is how humans can impact the present so that it is not the identical reiteration of the past. Even though their actions cannot fully undo or dismantle antiblackness, they can undertake action that does not further it. In an interview, Ward asserts that, though she is fearful for the future, hope remains essential for her: “I don’t think it is an intelligent hope, I think it is a necessary hope” (qtd. in Allardice 2018). With Sing, Ward highlights human accountability for the conditions of life by pointing to both individual and societal responsibility. The two continuously reinforce one another. Ward emphasizes subjectivity as embodied and stresses the lived body as a site of suffering and resistance. It is impossible to make sense of the novel outside of the context of BLM because of its concern with Black Americans living precarious lives at the intersections of white supremacy and poverty. While the novel does not detail a full-fedged ecocriticism but advances a soft anthropocentrism, it at least acknowledges that the relationship to the nonhuman world has meaningful consequences for human life. Ward exposes especially how precarity is historically grown and the result of interlocking systems of oppression. Her backward glance is committed to making these ties legible, but also embraces mourning as a potential way forward. Mourning as a political practice becomes especially important in a post-racial climate that seeks to eliminate the ties between current and past injustices even as premature Black death has become more visible in recent years. In mourning life that is considered ungrievable, writers and activists alike do deep epistemological work. They publicly perform resistance to the ordering ideas and embodied thoughts underlying white supremacy. Both structural and attitudinal work is needed to enable meaningful change. This dual emphasis resides at the very core of Sing as a Black humanist novel.

Both West and Gordon clearly stand in a long prophetic tradition of Black thought which challenges the unjust status by urging a “revolution of value” (Glaude 2016: 233). Throughout American history, Glaude argues, African Americans have resisted their legal statuses to advance a more inclusive vision of democracy: “[T]his is the heart of democracy in black—efforts to imagine a democratic way of life without the burden of the value gap or the illusion that somehow this country is God’s gift to the world” (236). All major social movements have been driven by both the desire for greater justice and the belief that it is not impossible to achieve it. Small acts of individualized resistance have equally been driven by a serious concern for people and their well-being. Both are grounded in a profound love ethic. In Race Matters, West identifes nihilism—“the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness”— as the “major enemy of black survival in America” (2001a: 22–23). Beyond economic and political inequality, the absence of meaning poses a serious threat to Black people. For West, it is consequently important to uncover the structural and cultural workings of racism and simultaneously maintain an attitude that affrms African Americans’ (self-) worth. West emphatically insists: “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affrmation of one’s worth—an affrmation fueled by the concerns of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion” (29). It is precisely this attitude that informs Black humanist thought and guides transformative action in the world.13 Humans produce meaning through actions—both positive and negative. A fragile hope is also an important measure to keep untamed optimism checked. West “hopes against hope if only to hold out the dream of freedom in a never-never land […] in order to survive in the deplorable present” (1984: 10–11). We can then borrow from philosopher Jeffrey Stout: “Hope is not the same thing as thinking that what one ardently desires is likely to happen. It is the virtue one needs when grim facts might tempt one to give up on promoting or protecting important goods. [It is the assumption] that we have a chance of making a signifcant difference for the better” (2010: 283). Aware of the long history of antiblackness, Black humanists know this to be one of many possible worlds, one that is historically grown and not forever and ontologically fxed. Even though Black humanist thought offers an alternative conception of hope to liberal humanism’s investment in optimism, discussions around hope have come under critique as naïve and potentially harmful to Blacks by Afropessimists. Afropessimists reject any sentiment of hope that antiblack racism can potentially be undone. In Afropessimist thought, Black existence equals absolute social death, and nothing can upset the antiblack world order. As one of the most prominent Afropessimists, Frank B.  Wilderson III claims that the position of the Black subject has not structurally changed in contemporary society when compared to the time of slavery because Blackness is not only the backdrop against which whiteness still defnes itself but also the foundation of civil society (2010: 20). Blacks are “the very antithesis to the Human subject,” and the Black and the Human stand in everlasting opposition (9). In fact, he points out that while violence against all non-Blacks is contingent, it is mandatory against Blacks for the world to exist: “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” (2020: 40). Violence is the structuring principle of Black life as “Black people’s saturation by violence is a paradigmatic necessity” for human renewal (245). Antiblackness is ontological in Afropessimist thought. Since the relationship between white and Black is one of structural “antagonism” rather than (reconcilable) “confict,” Wilderson asserts that change is not possible within the confnes of legal society (2010: 75). Wilderson writes: “The Slave needs freedom not from wage relation, nor sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy, nor freedom in the form of land restoration. The Slave needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world” (141). The end of the world is necessary for the Black subject to gain meaningful freedom. Calvin Warren echoes many of Wilderson’s ideas and is particularly critical of hope in the political sphere.14 Antiblackness, for Warren, “will continue without end, as long as the world exists” even as antiblackness might take on different forms (2018: 3). Warren writes further that “humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world” (3). Warren insists that hope is a dangerous discourse that does nothing but manifest the current state of injustice while luring African Americans into believing that they can bring about change. He thus strongly rejects any account of (political) hope. Such hope, for Warren, is cruelly meant to maintain the status quo rather than inspiring people to press for the end of the world. Afropessimism does invaluable work by highlighting the persistence of racism and cautioning about setting too much hope into political processes. Black humanists share many of these insights, but several observations strike as problematic. Gordon has been particularly vocal in his criticism. First, he notes that “‘an antiblack world’ is not identical with ‘the world is antiblack.’ The latter is an antiblack racist project” (2021: 75; emphasis in original). Whereas Afropessimists take the world to be forever so, Gordon emphasizes the contingent nature of antiblackness. Rejecting the closed off state of Afropessimism that ontologizes the structural opposition between Blackness and the human, Gordon advocates exposure of the system that alleges white superiority: “[If] the question of racism is a function of power, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of an assertion of its manifestations as ontological?” (2017: 297). This request includes studying the processes of racialization which render antiblackness visible as a product of human conduct. Finally, Gordon asks: “Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as a social perspective?” (297). Shifting the perspective away from the normative white epistemological framework to Black people who are committed to each other’s fourishing also renders the notion of ontological social death untenable. Moreover, precisely because they are invested in uncovering the larger structures of racism, Afropessimists lose sight of the individual; mourning the individual becomes impossible for them. Afropessimism overlooks the individual’s capacity at agency, stripping any form of resistance—slave revolts, individual and personal small acts, or organized movements—of meaning, let alone effect. The simple fact, however, that the enslaved managed to maintain parts of their original cultures despite slavery’s attempts to destroy them, Vincent Brown notes, indicates resistance (2009: 1241–1242). Afropessimism impairs the potential for agency and self-effciency, both of individual and collective attempts at social and political reform. This is true for Blacks and whites alike and absolves both from taking responsibility for and action against the world as it is. While Afropessimism can be a meaningful analytical tool, it does not translate into practical consequences. Unlike Afropessimism, Black humanism encourages critical and active engagement with the world because the world is organized through intercorporeal exchanges. Consequently, it fnds meaning, hope, and potential in individual and communal struggles to transform the world. However, resistance to world transformation does not simply reside in structural impediments but also in peoples’ embodied ways of being so that Black humanism always considers the affective world. A fragile sense of hope that ‘it could happen otherwise’ has guided everyday resistance to reductive external forces in thought, action, and aesthetic expressions. In the following chapters, I explore how Black humanist literature both develops and employs critical phenomenology in its theorization of Black existence and dismantling of white supremacy in the everyday—all while pointing to the fact that the world could indeed be otherwise.

Turning to embodiment means understanding the resistance to world transformation on an affective and embodied level. The world is not easily changed and antiblackness is pervasive. Yet, as we have seen, transformation remains possible. It is precisely this tension and awareness that guides Black humanism in its approach to a possibly differently lived future. Agency is meaningful in triggering change in the racial set-up of society, and action is never inconsequential for neither oneself nor those around because of the relational nature of human subjectivity. In Black humanist thought, hope is both fragile and persistent. Transformation is not only possible, but there is also an ethical mandate to strive for it. This distinguishes hope from optimism and nihilism as frequently encountered in liberal humanism and Afropessimist thought, respectively. Cornel West’s work epitomizes a Black humanist relationship with hope. It is not framed by naïve optimism regarding the future but advocates the necessity for human dedication to struggle. West clearly distinguishes between optimism and hope: Hope has nothing to do with optimism. I am in no way optimistic about America, nor am I optimistic about the plight of the human species on this globe. There is simply not enough evidence that allows me to infer that things are going to get better. […] We can be prisoners of hope even as we call optimism into question. To be part of the democratic tradition is to be a prisoner of hope. And you cannot be a prisoner of hope without engaging in a form of struggle in the present moment that keeps the best of the past alive. (2001b: 12) While West thoroughly rejects the tradition of optimism found in Western humanism that embraces certainty about a better future and human progress, he embraces hope as motivation to act in the present not because it will necessarily pay off but because it is the ethical thing to do: “To engage in that struggle means that one is always willing to acknowledge that there is no triumph around the corner, but that you persist because you believe that it is right and just and moral” (2001b: 12). From this vantage point, change might not take place and it may at times not even be for the better, but it can occur through human commitment in the world. It is worthwhile struggling for simply because it is not impossible to achieve. Lewis Gordon contends similarly that the “point of some actions is not about their success or failure but whether we deem them worth doing” (2017: 298). But is it irrational for that kind of hope to even exist in a world steeped in antiblackness? Embodiment theory teaches us that even as the future is seemingly closed, it is always also open. Gordon asserts that “whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend” (2021: 77). If this appears optimistic, then he immediately tames his tone because he knows about the persistence of injustice. Nonetheless, precisely because the world is of human making, it can also be undone by humans, even though there is no guaranteed process of how to do it. In this context, Gordon helpfully distinguishes between choices and options, where the “former pertains to individuals [and] the latter to the material conditions and social world” (2017: 300). Even if options—determined, for instance, by law—are limited, human choices are not. Embodied habits and values infuence but do not determine choices. Indeed, taking embodiment seriously, makes it impossible to believe in triumphal breakthroughs but holds open the possibility of change, nonetheless. He thus insists on the importance of “commitment to action without guarantees” (Gordon 2021: 77). Emphasizing commitment also means taking even small gestures of resistance and affection seriously; it means knowing that they matter and can have an impact (even if years later only). The effect of individual agentic acts on the world is often minute, but Gordon invites us to think of agency in a longer perspective. Drawing on Evelyn Simien’s Historic Firsts, Gordon notes that there “could be no Barack Obama without such important predecessors [like Shirley Chisholm or Jesse Jackson] affecting the demographics of voter participation. […] Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘success’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so called ‘failure’” (78–79). Humans are relational beings always in touch with others and the world.

Based on the understanding of the world, Black humanists resist both naïve progress narratives prevalent in liberal humanism and the myth of a post-racial America that the US public so hastily embraced just a few years ago. They are reluctant to celebrate superfcial change and remain deeply critical of the Political process; nonetheless, they believe in political progression, especially through organizing radical and democratic social movements as well as individual actions dedicated to change. Just as small antiblack acts further antiblackness, so do anti-racist actions contribute to dismantling white supremacy on a social and political scale. That is precisely why personal relationships, local spaces of healing, and the challenge to whiteness in everyday encounters are equally relevant as organizing and political activism. All these actions are anti-racist because they confront the unjust racial status quo. I have argued that African American literature is saturated with a Black humanist worldview and driven by a fragile hope that change—though never easily achieved—is possible. Literary classics, alongside lesser-known works, are part of what I have identifed as the Black humanist genre. These texts both incorporate and develop Black humanist thought. One key argument of this book is that Black humanism is a counterdiscourse to liberal humanism. The twenty-frst century has seen the popular rise of posthumanist discourses that similarly pose alternatives to liberal humanism, making it necessary to comment briefy on the relationship between Black humanism and posthumanism. The latter, I maintain, has much to gain from the former. Firstly, posthumanism entails problems for conceptualizations of subjectivity and agency, two central concepts for the historically marginalized and consequently indispensable for Black liberation thought. Secondly, it has a troubled relationship with race: many strands are inherently colorblind and neglect or downplay race as an important factor in people’s lived experiences. Thirdly, it overlooks how ‘other’ humanisms have long provided an alternative to Western humanism. The posthumanist worldview thus reveals blind spots of its own especially because it cannot theorize the lived experiences of Black people. Andy Mousley rightly notes that “the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ are currently being recuperated within literary studies and across the humanities more generally” (2011: 1). This is not least due to the posthumanist discourses. In its broadest sense, posthumanism serves as an umbrella term for various approaches to the human condition of the late twentieth and twenty-frst century and is thus inevitably diverse so that Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner even fnd it “diffcult to identify a coherent posthumanist movement” (2014: 14). Generally, critical posthumanism is deemed the next step after antihumanism in the critique of Western humanism. Many posthumanists turn to matter and, in doing so, stress the commonality of all humans, nonhuman beings, and nonanimated life. Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and new materialists such as Karen Barad are prominent representatives. Since the 1990s, critical posthumanism has been a driving force in theoretical discussions within the humanities and has posed serious challenges for Western humanism. Posthumanists largely build on antihumanist critiques.1 Braidotti explains: “The posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism but goes further in exploring alternatives, without sinking into the rhetoric of the crisis of Man. It works instead towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject” (2013: 37). Whereas Braidotti sees antihumanists hamstrung by their fndings, she attributes posthumanism with the ability to present affrmative alternatives to the human. For Wolfe, the primary goal of posthumanism is not to reject the category of the human as such but to disenchant the humanist subject. For Wolfe, posthumanism “isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (2010: xv, emphasis in original). Posthumanists thus advance a post-dualistic worldview, ultimately removing “the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition” (xii). Being is fuid, multiple, and cannot be fxed. New materialism, an important strand in posthumanist theorizing, seeks to reverse the overemphasis on culture which dominated the humanities in the wake of the linguistic turn. Karen Barad captures new materialist observations: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (2003: 801). By reintroducing matter and the body in its materialized form to theoretical discussions, scholars counter what they sometimes exaggeratedly deem the “exclusive focus on cultural construction at the expense of natural production” (Grosz 2005: 44). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost explain: “Matter is no longer imagined here as a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways” (2010: 10). Instead of being inert, matter is regarded as active, both shaping and being shaped. New materialists view actions as the product of matter activating itself. Such new materialist formulations prove problematic for the Black liberation project. Agency is defamiliarized almost beyond recognition. In relying on theories that help de-center the human, posthumanism has the tendency to de-center subjectivity in a manner that renders meaningful acts of resistance impossible. As I have argued throughout, intelligently guided agency cannot be surrendered, especially by the historically oppressed. Embodiment theory rooted in critical phenomenology allows for this balancing act. Moreover, fully decentering the human is undesirable for most strands within Black thought. Stefan Herbrechter anticipates this argument but quickly declares it irrelevant. For Herbrechter, “the posthumanist critique of the humanist subject and the idea of a universalist ‘humanity’ cannot afford to be delayed” because “the humanist subject position, which from the perspective of the oppressed looks quite attractive, structurally depends on violence against nonhumans, i.e. that it ethically and ecologically may be far less desirable than it seems” (2013: 200). However, as I have argued, Black humanism has never been motivated by the wish to be integrated into the liberal humanist project but by the desire to be an alternative to the exclusionary Eurocentric humanist project. Two further problems relate to posthumanism’s intrinsic whiteness and colorblindness. Race is strikingly absent from its discussions even though antiblackness persists and forms the very basis of liberal humanism’s past and present. Alexander Weheliye rightly asserts in Habeas Viscus that these discourses “largely do not take into account race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity” (2014: 8). Posthumanism’s silence about race is worrisome. In their refusal to think through/with race, posthumanists can only disavow but not escape it, failing to regard race as an important dimension of people’s lived experience. Finally, posthumanism is ignorant of other humanisms and their critiques of Western humanism. Weheliye observes that “many invocations of posthumanism […] reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personifcation of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative versions of humanity” (2014: 9–10). Posthumanism often indirectly reinforces Eurocentrism because it fails to see that many theoretical advancements had already been made in other humanist approaches. Francesca Ferrando, who is a self-identifed posthumanist, stresses the importance of people’s differently lived experiences and histories: “Denying feminism, race studies, postcolonialism and all accounts made by subjects who have been historically located outside of hegemonic discourses, will offer a very limited notion of the human, and will stand as one more repetitive ego trip of the omniscient neutral subject, lacking on providing an accurate representation of humanity as an evolving life form rich in diversity” (2014: 223–224). Scholars need to repeatedly ask: “What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond?” (Jackson 2015: 215). In its attempt to move beyond the subject of liberal humanism, posthumanism tends to reinforce those elements that established just that. It overlooks the alternative humanisms that have long existed and consequently repeats the exclusion of Black and other historically marginalized voices in theorizing what it means to be human. In Chap. 2 of this book, I have laid out a Black humanist view of humanity. I have argued that Black humanism advances a conception of subjectivity as embodied. Since it takes embodiment seriously, it is aware of the pervasive forces of the social world and their impact on the lived body. The fact of embodiment has consequences for understanding resistance: agency is intelligently guided but does not necessarily come in the shape of intentional or conscious action. Often, agency is initiated on a pre-refective level. I have further suggested that the critical study of whiteness is a vital anti-racist tool in all Black humanist texts studied here. Against this background, Black humanism advances a view of the world where change, however unlikely, is possible and needs advocacy. It embraces the possibility of change through committed and caring action. Together, these refections formed the basis for the analyses of Black humanist literature in Chaps. 3–6. I have demonstrated that Black humanism as an anti-racist tradition has strongly infuenced African American culture over the past 70 years. During this time, it has also been in conversation with politics and social movements ranging from the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s to the most recent revival in the Movement for Black Lives. While it has not been my goal to outline a genealogy of Black humanist literature, I have demonstrated how the worldview saturates Black literature, which, in turn, has shaped discourses of social justice, racial equality, and human dignity. Even though the four novels analyzed exemplarily are ordered chronologically, there is no teleological or straightforward development. Rather, they circle around and cycle back to the lived experiences of antiblackness and intersecting systems of oppression that remain strikingly constant across time even though they are not identical. Challenges to the racial status quo take several forms: representing subjectivity and agency as embodied, exposing whiteness as embodied and not in conscious control, and emphasizing the individual’s need but also capacity for community, love, and self-love. All four novelists analyzed in this book are highly attuned to the past’s relevance due to the simple fact that they conceive of subjectivity as embodied. Thus, they continuously insist on the past’s infuence on the present, even when their novels are set in the respective present. Chapter 3 argued that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) emphasizes the necessity of breaking with oppressive ideologies and antiblackness in the struggle for true democracy. The novel decidedly advances self-reliance through committed action while reaching out for community in the very end. In Chap. 4, I traced John A. Williams’ profound analysis of the workings of race and how they impede on interracial relationships in Night Song (1961). At the same time, the novel offers glimpses of how a love ethic can begin to undo white supremacy’s impact. Consequently, it explores both the failure and possibilities of intersubjective ties. Chapter 5 examined Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) which not only narrates the pervasive nature of racism but also challenges the antiblack logic of Enlightenment humanism in its gendered dimensions. Building on slavery as the contextual reference allows Morrison to thoroughly explore subjectivity as continuously torn between structures and (individual) agentic acts. Both are constantly being negotiated because the past continuously encroaches on the present not only socially but also affectively and emotionally in the lived body. However, a vision of futurity remains and is rooted in Black feminist thought. Chapter 6 showed that Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) views humans as existing in extension with the natural world but still remains concerned with the heightened precarity of Black people. It explores the agony of Black motherhood in a racist nation where Black (male) lives are constantly policed and threatened. Even as it highlights the diffculties involved in raising Black sons under such circumstances, the novel insists on people’s ethical responsibility to try to make a difference. It thus assumes that a different tomorrow is neither guaranteed nor impossible. Practices of mourning that recognize the weight of the past and loving relationships frmly place possibility on the horizon. Alongside the attempts to bring to light the modes and operations of white supremacy, the texts display an interest in human healing. In fact, they all more or less explicitly promote self-love and the importance of reaching out towards others to form a community. This is the fipside of anti-racism: anti-racism as a practice of criticizing and fghting to transform the status quo is rooted in the desire to promote human well-being. Closely tied to this is another similarity these narratives share, namely their frm embrace of the tragic. They see it as part of human life; they neither deny its centrality nor allow the tragic to trump all efforts to break it. Glaude writes: “[O]ut of the broken fragments of the life lived those very shards […] provide a foundation, without the security of comforting illusions, to step forward and dare to be, wounds and all. That is revolution” (2018: 54).2 Black humanist literature is committed to exploring and negotiating the relationships between the individual and the various communities the individual is a part of; writers are concerned with “individual fulfllment within the context of concern and responsibility for others” (Pinn 2003: 159). Even an iconic frst-person narrative like Invisible Man aspires to bridge the individual and the collective, relentlessly reaching beyond the self even in the face of disappointments. The four novels insist on the importance of concrete action towards change in the here and now. The characters struggle for fuller modes of being, and the authors use their texts to move readers by challenging, uprooting, and addressing their affective capacities. Literary texts can trigger discomfort and vulnerability and can thus increase readers’ racial literacy (Moya 2016). The scope of Black humanist literature is, of course, not limited to the four novels analyzed in this book. They are but a selection of fctional texts that demonstrates the similarities and differences in the Black humanist genre. From this point of view, Black humanism is best described as a changing same. Thus, I want to exemplarily end on Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2019) which captures the worldview’s central ideas and puts its anti-racist critique on the theatrical stage. The play closes with a refection on the history of racism, the perception of Black people in the Western white supremacist imaginary, and their experiences resulting from this. Charlotte, an African American artist, and Charles, a white philanthropist who considers himself enlightened and non-racist, engage in heated altercation about antiblackness, the (in)visibility of whiteness, and the privilege whiteness always entails. The scene fnds a subdued yet climactic resolution: Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That sounds so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can begin to really see each other. (Rankine 2019: 87) Charlotte confronts Charles’ self-perception as a benevolent American by taking on America as a place that has never viewed Black Americans as fully human. His response to her accusation is predictable and he is appalled by her seeming hopelessness. The hopefulness he calls for, however, is misguided because it does not come from a profound engagement with the nation’s brutal and tragic past and present. Instead, he reiterates the progress myth by calling on her to look forward and not dwell on the continuous history of antiblackness. Not only is his demand harmful, but he also misreads her perspective. Charlotte does not preclude hope. For Charles, there seem to be only two possible positions: naïve optimism or utter pessimism. Neither of the two apply to Charlotte because she knows, to borrow from Linda Martín Alcoff, that “pessimism breeds the fatalism that excuses inaction and complicity” (2015: 92). Her hopefulness is rooted in a painful confrontation with the realities and lived experiences of white supremacy. For her, hopefulness is only justifed when acknowledging the ties of the present moment to the past and recognizing one’s own involvement in it. That is the prerequisite, Rankine asserts just like Ellison, Williams, Morrison, and Ward, for the possibility of a differently lived future. This fragile hope permeates Black humanism. It entails an ethical obligation to struggle for a better world even though success is never guaranteed and often unlikely. Jonathan Lear describes such an outlook as radical because “it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is” (2006: 103). Such hope is not simply a sentiment—it is a call to action. The future that Charlotte envisions is based on recognition of the intersubjective dimensions of subjectivity. Part of genuine mutual recognition is allowing pain and anger to be voiced. This begins to dawn on Charles and so the encounter puts a crack into what Charles Mills terms “white ignorance” which he defnes as “both false belief and the absence of true belief” (2007: 16): Charles: You’re right to keep me a part of it. My whiteness. It needs to be faced. Charlotte: (she faces Charles) At its deepest level, yes. Charles: It’s just skin and yet I know it’s power too. Charlotte: Dehumanizing power. Charles: What is skin? […] I’ve never actually looked at my skin. […] Good lord, all this skin shields me. It protects me from…being you. It’s like the badge of the police. (Rankine 2019: 88) Race is more than skin-deep and Charles (at least temporarily) begins to understand his whiteness. Even though processes of racialization rely on the principle of visibility, both race and racism are embodied. Racial seeing emerges from and affects intersubjective exchanges (Alcoff 2006: 169; Weiss 1999; Yancy 2008). Charles’ whiteness shapes his behavior, action, and (self-) perception, and is intricately linked to power. Any serious attempt to dismantle the workings of white supremacy already signals a level beyond pessimism because it refuses to give in to its logic. However, anti-racism requires continuous individual and collective efforts. This is evident when considering that many political achievements of the past are at risk today. For instance, 19 states passed 34 laws limiting Americans’ access to the vote in 2021 alone (Brennan Center for Justice 2022). Additional restrictive laws have been passed since and many disproportionately affect (and often target) Black communities. Thus, any achievement needs to be reaffrmed and constantly defended. Black humanists have insisted on this fact. Consequently, the humanistic framework also has much to offer for the present. As varied as Black humanisms are, they all delineate the tension of overarching structures and individual agency. Emphasizing human agency does not imply or envision human mastery over the world or systems of inequality. It simply means that humans do not only have the responsibility but also ability to make a meaningful difference. This position combines a realistic outlook with a healthy dose of cautiously utopian thinking. Our present is marked by overwhelming conditions from climate change to global threats to democracy and a pervasive hold of white supremacy. These conditions too often have a paralyzing effect because the systems that sustain them are frequently framed as being without an alternative. Black humanists have insisted that even or especially in times where it all just seems too much, every small act matters. They assert human responsibility while conceding the diffculty of genuine transformation and impossibility of quick fxes. Black humanist literature then might tell us a lot about our current moment and what is needed to brave the manifold crises that await. As Paul Taylor notes, the Black aesthetic tradition is rich in “culture workers who use their talents to reinforce the bonds of solidarity, to insist on the beauty of black life in a world that presumes its brutality and viciousness, and to remind each other that, as the slogan from another resistance movement reminds us, another world is possible” (2017: 229). Indeed, Black humanist authors have continuously exposed and resisted antiblackness in its various manifestations while also affrming the beauty, resilience, and complexity of Black humanity. This dual focus shapes their worldview and epitomizes the best of Black humanist literature.

Acknowledging the fact that liberal humanism has had many deficits, Edward Said argues in Humanism and Democratic Criticism that the humanist project must continue nonetheless because “it is the abuse of humanism that discredits some of humanism’s practitioners without discrediting humanism itself” (2004: 13). He is further convinced that it “is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism” (10–11). For Said, true humanism must serve as critique of the status quo and constantly aim at human betterment. Thus, it is a hasty mistake to overlook alternative humanisms. Viewing the past, present, and future of humanity from the perspective of the marginalized can lay the ground for what Sylvia Wynter envisions as the “re-enchantment of humanism” (qtd. in Scott 2000: 120). Black humanism has much to offer for such a re-enchantment. Not only is it a worldview historically found in African American culture but also an ongoing, yet constantly evolving, discourse on what it means to be human. Norm Allen asserts that “Black humanists can continue to make important contributions to humanist theory by challenging many of the assumptions made by Eurocentric, middle-class humanists” (2001: 159). Residing halfway between conservative and radical Black outlooks, it presents an alternative to several contemporary positions such as post-Blackness and Afropessimism, and it anticipates, corrects, and contributes to (critical) posthumanism in many ways. Precisely because it centers around struggle against racism, Black humanism is a way to remember the past horrors, criticize the present ones, and warn about future dangers while remaining convinced that human efforts and commitment to action matter. This painful certainty is drawn from the (embodied) memories of an oftentimes violent and traumatic past. Especially in times where the trendy discourses of Afropessimism and posthumanism have begun to take center stage in Black studies and the humanities respectively, this book intentionally refocuses the conversation to (re)discover a different angle.

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American history. White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior—owning a home, getting married—and then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society can create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution." If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting it—as we've seen over the last decade—has helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way.

The great anti-colonialist poet of Négritude, Aimé Césaire wrote famously in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party that he wanted Marxism and communism to be placed in the service of Black peoples and not Black peoples in the service of Marxism or communism. He maintained in 1956: “it is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.” 28 As always, he was writing on behalf of Black people who were, proverbially, the only people on the planet who have been excluded from the “human race” by the “modern” history of Western racism and colonialism which obstructs “a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.”29 What is this Négritude if not Blackness, Black anti-colonialism, or anti-colonial Blackness? This tradition is not a tradition in Wilderson who regularly critiques the analogical arrogance of Marxism, feminism, and an academic paradigm of “post-colonialism” with less common reference to “queer” or “gay and lesbian” categories of analysis as well—all in the name of pessimism. For him, none of these political frameworks with their privileged identarian subjects can capture the condition of “Blackness” and “slavery” (or “the Black/Slave”). While that perspective can allow for some insights—ones certainly seen before around the Black world and ones certainly avoided by so much institutional scholarship—it leaves the general categorical grid of established Western political epistemologies intact. The familiar academic terrain of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” frames the critique for “Blackness” of “gender, class, and sexuality” in addition to “post-coloniality” or “post-colonialism.” The most conventional US academic categories of identity and analysis are still rendered in full as discrete, monolithic, and monological categories and referents (e.g., workers, women, etc.), like the respective political ideologies based upon them in the traditional ideological history of the white West (e.g., Marxism, feminism, etc.). There are “workers” and then there are “women,” generically, and then sometimes there are “gays” by whatever name, not to mention “natives” or the colonized in this culturally specific epistemology of a specific culture of colonialism itself. The upshot is quite conservative, even anachronistically so. This critique is an internal if damning critique embodying and encouraging pessimism largely from within the established order of knowledge that it analytically engages and categorically replenishes and preserves. The grid politics of Wilderson’s critique of “the ruse of analogy” leaves all manner of “Blackness” in a wasteland. The routine categorical contrast with “Native Americans” reduces all that and any colonial condition to a startlingly oversimplified matter of “land” (or “land restoration”); and it occludes “Afro-Indian” history as well as “Red-Black” maroonage all across the Americas. The constant generic contrast with “feminism” or “non-Black women” eclipses the more mammoth criticism of “gender” writ large in Diop and Amadiume’s Black-African studies of Europe or “Western Civilization” as a “racial patriarchy” of pessimism and “anti-Black” imperialism. The contrast with Marxism and its “workers” never resurrects any issues of “class” or economics from any other perspective to recognize or to resist, for example, the white invention of Black elites as vital instruments of racism, anti-Blackness, and white-supremacism. There never appears a trace of any critique of Black “social class’ (or political class) elitism in “Afro-pessimism” (2.0), which is a tell-tale sign of petty-bourgeois or “lumpen-bourgeois” articulations. Lastly, Wilderson’s occasional categorical contrast of “Blackness” with Palestinians or al-Nakba (which aligns in Arabic with the Swahili substitution for the term “Middle Passage”—Maafa, the “Catastrophe”) comprehends no Blackness in Palestine or among Palestinians. His Afro-pessimism can envision no Afro-Palestinianism, unlike a great tradition of Pan-African discourses that also do not dislocate Palestine from an anti-colonialist mapping of the African continent or the Afro-Asian landmass of a Pan-Africanist and “Bandung” imagination, one powerfully shared by Malcolm X and Fayez A. Sayegh. For “Black Power” internationally, Kwame Ture would refer to Palestine as the “tip of Africa” and uphold Fatima Bernawi, the iconic Black woman who’s been named the “first Palestinian female political prisoner,” as the paragon of “Black and Palestinian Revolutions.”30 She is likewise canonized by other AfroPalestinian icons themselves, such as Ali Jiddeh and Mahmoud Jiddeh of the African community of the Old City of Jerusalem, for example— or, say, Ahmad and Jumaa Takrouri of Occupied Jericho—who are each among the greatest of all icons across Historic Palestine, a country which has produced multiple Black Panther formations in Hebrew as well as Arabic in the 1970s and the 1980s. Again, Wilderson tacitly “nationalizes” his category of “Blackness” although this is scarcely in the interests of Black people in or outside of the US colonized mainland of Americanism; and so none of the above “Blackness” survives the critical grid of a very Anglo-American (and white racist state-bound) critique of “analogy,” regardless of the “Afro-pessimist” text at hand. Do not the vulgar colonial-nativist politics of Incognegro’s strangely overlooked comment on “West Indians” go full blown then in Red, White & Black and elsewhere?31 There is here a general critical erasure of the massive tradition of Black anti-colonialism—or anti-colonial Black resistance to “anti-Blackness” and anti-Black colonialism, which transcends nationalization. Wilderson’s “Afro-pessimist” rejects the anti-colonialist paradigms of supposedly “other” peoples, and yet in a manner that reinstates US or Western coloniality nonetheless—a white colonialism that oppresses “the Black” inside and outside the United States’s official geopolitical limits. This position can thus make a virtue out of automatic and absolute anti-alliance postures with no further, actual political action then required for Black people, “the Black critic,” or any Black liberation struggle on this view. Such chauvinism without political commitment or engagement beyond critique is logically consistent, for pessimism, where mere resentment or ressentiment can masquerade as resistance or “pro-Black” “radicalism.” After all, Afro-pessimism (2.0) begins with a proud suspicion of Black liberation or Black liberation movement, itself, no less than of its potentially “anti-racist” or “anti-Black” political alliances. This provincial “American” pessimism reveals more affinities with Créolite in the Caribbean than Césaire’s anti-colonialist eruption of Pan-African Négritude, in reality, its narrowly and negatively delimited rhetoric of the “Blackness” of “the Black” (as “Slave,” of course) notwithstanding. As if this too is a virtue, pessimism is not just suspicious of power but possibility—while, upholding dystopia, it is casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm, orientation or sensibility. Analytically, moreover, there is somehow no white colonialism for Blacks to fight in Africa or Black countries of Black people anywhere and no terrible landlessness that afflicts the African diasporas of Blackness captive within white settler and/or imperial state formations, for Wilderson and Afropessimism (2.0).

A glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary intellectual history should be expected from any expression of “Afro-pessimism.” Indeed, could Afro-pessimism 2.0 take hold as another trend in mainstream academia except in the political void produced after the 1960s and ‘70s by local as well as global counter-revolution and counter-insurgency? This absence affects the shape and agenda of the critical analysis of “anti-Black racism” in essential ways. Wilderson’s critique of the “ruse of analogy” in Red, White & Black becomes a refrain that naturalizes academic approaches to politics now institutionalized with the continued reign of Western bourgeois liberalism. For older and enduring Black radical perspectives, the existence of “anti-Black racism” among non-Black peoples, organizations, and movements is neither a new nor shocking phenomenon. For many Black revolutionary movement logics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, for instance, this did not preclude alliance (or the exhaustion of alliances made) or lead to a doctrinaire rejection of “solidarity” work and its international (or “intercommunal”) possibilities.27 “Contradictions” were expected, so to speak, in theory and practice, which might be resolved or not, depending on material interest, circumstance, etc. For them, this work was not about gauging identity, or the perfection of a projected analogy, but mobilization for the political accomplishments of revolution—a revolutionism that could or may not work toward the development of a new humanism not white or racist or anti-Black after all. The reach for potential solidarities was not construed as a gift or an act of good-willed benevolence, wise or unwise given the risks. Even solidarity work with obviously problematic, openly enemy forces could be a strategic or tactical mode of advancing Black collective self-interests that might dispense with any alliance at any given moment in time without seeing the relationship as a statement of some total identity or non-identity of condition and interests. The notion of solidarity has nowadays been superficialized, remaining riveted on mere rhetorical proclamation and aesthetic or representational identification in neo-colonial culture industries here and there. An older, praxical approach to alliance, perhaps “analogy,” and solidarity is not taken up by current analyses of identity conflicts that prevail with the resurgence of a more academic political-intellectualism and a now much less contested liberalism. This is imperial “multiculturalism” and its malcontents. As much as Afro-pessimism (2.0) may object to certain instances of liberalism, or regulation white racist liberalism at least, it assumes these Western epistemic frameworks of white academic liberalism all the same, thereby ensconcing the colonialism and neo-colonialism it constantly and symptomatically denegates in text after text.

Reading what some are today calling “Afro-pessimism” invites no small amount of amnesia, myopia, as well as illiteracy. There is little if any Africa to this discourse at all, its nominal Afro-hyphenation notwithstanding. Armah sits atop the lengthy bibliography on the “AfroPessimism” page at Incognegro.org for alphabetical reasons alone. The selection of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is as symptomatic as this list’s addition of an Achille Mbembe book in due course. There is Frantz Fanon but only his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is included to the exclusion of A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Toward the African Revolution (1964). The rest of the bibliography tends to dovetail with “race” and “critical theory” canons of US-centered academic classrooms, graduate if not undergraduate, across North America—with key duty-free imports from Western Europe. In any case, what is the significance of this term as a term, its rather bizarre adoption by Black academic advocates who have come to promote it today without any apparent sense of the history of its ravaging the African continent and without any reference whatsoever to the history of insistent Black political-intellectual resistance to its application to Africans on the continent and in the diaspora? Crucially, neither pessimism nor optimism is just a word in a dictionary. Fred Moten made a certain call for “optimism” in an earlier, and terribly “friendly,” response to this “Afro-pessimism” which could be deflected by Jared Sexton as if optimism and pessimism were now virtually transposable conceptual terminology or as if pessimism could suddenly be posed as a strange mode of optimism itself—something like a philosophical detour to it, after all, when all is said and done.11 That’s a specious revision to be sure. Yet what goes ignored here is how this lexical couplet makes its meaning in context, politically, in time and space, particularly in European languages and colonial-imperial lexicons, most notably perhaps in English as well as French, just for example. It carries baggage too big to check in current games of academic branding. What’s more, optimism and pessimism do not ever confront each other on equal ground here, any façade of even-handed as opposed to hierarchical dichotomy aside. The pessimist intellectual empire of the West has systematically crowded optimism out of serious contemplation and come to pin pessimist condemnation to all “things” Black-African in the interests of white racist imperialism, for various and sundry periods of this empire. Who would overlook this issue rather than address it frontally—in and beyond books of all kinds? A history or genealogy of optimism and pessimism as “ideologies” is hardly unavailable to us. The old Black radicalism of Cheikh Anta Diop wrote famously and at length about this subject. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1959) concluded in the late 1950s, no less: “the Meridional Cradle, confined to the African continent in particular, is characterized by the matriarchal family, the creation of the territorial state, in contrast to the Aryan city-state, the emancipation of woman in domestic life, xenophilia, cosmopolitanism, a sort of social collectivism having as a corollary a tranquility going as far as unconcern for tomorrow, a material solidarity of right for each individual….” “In the moral domain,” he continues, “it shows an ideal of peace, of justice, of goodness and an optimism which eliminates all notion of guilt or original sin in religious and metaphysical institutions.”12 Looking at literature in a long world history, Diop analyzed novels, tales, fables, and comedies to advance this core proposition, along with the material and economic structures of human social development. His Pan-African critique of European imperialism indicted not only its culture of “war, violence, crime, and conquests,” but also its signature “metaphysical systems” of pessimism.13 One could thus combat “anti-Black” racism, “anti-Black” colonialism, and “anti-Black” imperialism, so to speak, by confronting or challenging the pessimism of Occidentalism—or one could reproduce this “anti-Black” empire of slavery and colonialism by adopting, reifying, and endorsing it. The final words of The Cultural Unity of Black Africa would proclaim in the spirit of revolutionary decolonization and bona fide independence: “The universe of tomorrow will in all probability be imbued with African optimism.”14 How then does a current trend in academia proceed to dub itself “Afro-pessimism,” simultaneously deeming itself a school of Black radical thinking, with no awareness of a critique of this stature; no engagement with it at all; and no critical explanation of how “Afropessimism” could not as a consequence signify an elemental contradiction in terms? The late Diop remains the most monumental historian of the Black world. His intellectual biography is as a legendary as his academic and extra-academic scholarship. It is almost cliché now to recall that he was named the most influential thinker of the 20th century—with W.E.B. DuBois—at the First World Festival of Black Arts convened in Dakar of the 1960s. Even if Anglophone political and intellectual circles show little awareness of his radical political practice and related political imprisonment as opposition under Leopold Senghor in neo-colonial Senegal—thinking too exclusively of his counter to Egyptology or his anti-Hellenomania—Diop was and is no less a giant for the historic Black Studies movement of the African diaspora across the Americas.15 Ifi Amadiume would revisit these aspects of Diop’s thought with dazzling ingenuity in her introduction to the Karnak House publication of L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noir: domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’antiquité classique in English translation. She endorses without pause his “vision” of an African optimism and identifies him as a Black-African precursor of the white ecology movement, the “Greens.”16 Her own groundbreaking work as in Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (1997) makes a massive critique of European sexual and gender imperialism, systemically exposing assorted feminisms as Occidentalism as a rule, politically and epistemologically. Both world historiography and global political theory remain sites of intervention for her too. Overall, she highlights a critique of what could be dubbed a racial patriarchy conceived by Diop’s corpus that is comparable to Cedric J. Robinson’s critique of “racial capitalism” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). In opposition to imperialism, it could also oppose the romance language of “feminism” as the exclusive and compulsory language for any systemic “anti-sexism” or opposition to “patriarchy” or male dominance. At any rate, Amadiume’s Black radicalism does not “forget” the anti-pessimism or age-old Afro-optimism embedded in Cheikh Anta Diop’s classic anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism of the Black world. The total ignorance of these traditions manifested by the new incarnation of “Afro-pessimism” might be alarming enough, but what may be more so is its studied ignorance of the racist discourse of “Afro-pessimism” that preceded it and which gives it a name, a sensibility and an orientation. The original Afro-pessimism functioned like a sociological “culture of poverty” or “culture of pathology” discourse not for Black ghettos in the diaspora but for the entire African continent (and, by extension, the diaspora) with a tacit historical and environmental determinism as opposed to the ecological and politically militant African optimism of Diop, Amadiume, and others. This is the Afro-pessimism that has been so diffuse in popular media and all the Western academic disciplines which ever fix upon Africa that it may be impossible to write an exact or exhaustive history of it. What Trinh T. Minh-ha once said about the anthropological version of the “human sciences” can easily be said about this recently recycled Afropessimism; it functions as “the foundation of every single discourse pronounced above the native’s head,” whenever that “native” is an African in Western discourse on Africa and Africans anywhere.17 So, in 2010, Gloria Emeagwali of the History Department at Central Connecticut University offered an online broadside against “Afro-pessimism” grounded in history, realism, and critical hilarity. She cut straight to the point: “There are about six types of Afropessimists.” They might be schematized as follows: Category A: the Nihilists Category B: the Haters and Abominable Racists Category C: the Scholars of Hopelessness Category D: the Self-Loathers Category E: the Opportunist Career-Seekers Category F: the Poverty Pornographers.18 Of the first category, she writes: “Their negative and nihilistic views still permeate a lot of texts on history, geography, sociology, etc. Just pay a visit to the textbooks and read between and above the lines.” The second category’s vocabulary “is limited to words like barbarism, savage, tribesmen, uncivilized and so on. Let us say that you can spot them from a mile away. They are less sophisticated than Group A…. The cult of whiteness permeates their thought process, theological icons and symbols.” The third category of scholars may be “genuinely disappointed with the pace of change in post-colonial Africa,” and can conduct some otherwise correct analysis, but “their discourse is largely counter-inspirational, when unmatched with real political activity and engagement on the ground.” More pointedly, and tragically, they lack all confidence to have hope in anything. The fourth category of Afro-pessimist hates “the skin they’re in” as “victims of white supremacist propaganda, assimilated from the neo-colonial mass media, textbooks, religious texts, Hollywood movies and literature[,] etc.” They are bemoaned as “self-destructive parodies of themselves.” The fifth category doesn’t even believe what they say while they pander for fame and fortune in the white public spheres of the West: “The more they pathologize Africa, the more likely their promotion to the next level in the context of institutionalized racism. They thrive on pity and are beneficiaries of the ‘mercy-industrial complex’ in one way or the other.” The sixth category seems to delight in tales and images of Black misery and suffering. This type especially embodies a blatant “First Worldism” by default: “Celebrities in search of attention, and politicians with little to offer their constituency at home, may fall into this category. Some are humanitarian opportunists—although there are a few well-meaning exceptions, with less questionable motives.” Then, Emeagwali observes, “there are the flip floppers … occasionally trapped between the old paradigm and a newly emerging one.”19 No doubt, other critics might tweak the details of this profile in one way or another. But it’d be inaccurate to dub Emeagwali’s electronic broadside a “parody,” or a “caricature,” since it was so decisively on the mark for so many: “Afro-pessimists” of diverse stripes had been asking for this kind of treatment for how long? Their colonial cultural pathology had been doing its racist colonial work for so long that Diop’s scholarship was a clear response to it and had been hard pressed to dismantle it since the middle of the last millennium.