loïc wacquant
A F RO P E S S I M I S M ’ S R A D I C A L A B D I C AT I O N Some Sociological Notes
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he term afropessimism was first used in print in 1987 by the French Minister of Cooperation (that is, African affairs), Michel Aurillac, in an editorial published in Le Monde cautioning against the view that economic development and political democratization in sub-Saharan Africa had permanently stalled.1 The word was used and abused in subsequent decades by African economists and Africanist commentators who refused to see colonialism as the root cause of the continent’s predicament and stressed instead postcolonial corruption, ethnic dissension and the patrimonialization of the state as sources of societal stasis. ‘Afropessimism’ was later evoked in discussion of the prospects and pitfalls of foreign investment in Africa.2 The term, but not its original referent, was then appropriated in the 2010s by a new generation of black academics in American departments of ethnic studies and humanities. In the words of Frank Wilderson, who has positioned himself as one of its leading exponents, Afropessimism refers to the notion that ‘Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness’. ‘Blacks’, Wilderson writes in his landmark book Afropessimism (2020), ‘are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.’3 To the narrative of racial progress, Afropessimism counterposes an anti-humanist vision in which the denial of black humanity is everywhere built into the very makeup of civil society: ‘Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks. The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of new left review 144 Nov Dec 2023
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