Afro pessimism

"The world looks like this from here": Kopano Ratele's African psychology.

“…Bridging these rigidly opposing views Ratele's African psychology favors a reading of Black interiority that traverses across temporalities and formations of self while attending to historical traumas and formations of subjectivity amidst past and continued trauma. In a similar vein, Gordon et al (2018) urge a reading of the Black existential condition without exclusive recourse to pessimism and fatalism. For Gordon (2020), this distinction between anti-Blackness as a historical fact or social death and anti-Blackness as an ongoing project that may inspire counterworlds and new imaginings of Black freedom is an important This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Mourning work: Death and democracy during a pandemic

“…Black citizens are ,thus, sacrificing to participate in a political project that not only does not protect them, but which is fundamentally not committed to their survival, much less their thriving. As Jasmine Syedullah has observed, one of the key useful insights of Afro-pessimism is that its unrelenting focus on the politics of loss exposes ‘that intimate union of national belonging and domestic violence that is the reward for legal legibility’ for black people, and ‘the limits of political agency, incorporation, representation, and progress’ (Gordon et al ., 2018 , pp. 128-129).…”

Bleak dreams, not nightmares

“…(Patterson, 1982) The idea that the continuous experience of social death renders any form of optimism frivolous plays a central, if contested, role in the current debate around Afropessimism (cf. Gordon, Menzel, Shulman, & Syedullah, 2018;Sexton, 2016;Wilderson, 2010). can build an effective bulwark against such a redemptive reading of emancipation.…”