Pessimisms rejection of solidarity/politics recreates colonialism and causes ressentiment

(Greg, GlobalBlackStudies@SU, founder/editor @ProudFlesh, Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism ( 2.0 )? Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 282-317 (Article) )

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). (295)