#frank b. wilderson iii

[slayercain]

Aria Dean: Are there terms, programs, or movements that exist that can usefully absorb Afropessimist theory into their functionings? Maybe this can also be asked this way: Can Afropessimism commingle and be combined with other theories and programs such as Marxism, Poststructuralism, Accelerationism, New Materialism, etc. without being itself polluted and totally compromised? Frank B. Wilderson III: I think that commingling is happening and it’s the kiss of death. It’s like the demonstrations in places like Portland and Minneapolis: they start off as insurrectionist projects authorized by Black grammars of suffering and end up being about all kinds of other shit, like White suffering, White exhibitionism, non-Black immigration issues, and how to make the police accountable rather than how to destroy the police. They do to Afropessimist rage what White boys in the suburbs do to hardcore rap, what White folks did to jazz. They use the intensity of Black affect to mobilize the agendas of Human desire. When Professor Patrice Douglass was in one of my seminars, as a graduate student, she asked, “How do we keep Afropessimism Black?” I was so shocked by the question that I had to pause. I said, “We can’t because we possess Afropessimism no more than we possess our flesh. To paraphrase Hortense Spillers, we are always already beings for the captor. And the way of our intellectual labors will, ultimately, go the way of our aesthetic labors, which go the way of our flesh.”

— Frank B. Wilderson III in conversation with Aria Dean

[badatwritingstuff]

... the metanarrative thrust is always towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in crisis, Black people are called upon to affirm it.

“Saidiya Hartman: In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims are more radical. This goes to the second part of the book - that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is always towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in crisis, black people are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it’s about more than the desire for inclusion within the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides. What then does this language - the given language of freedom - enable? And once you realize its limits and begin to see its inexorable investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that language of freedom no longer becomes that which rescues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation.”

— The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III, p. 184-185

[homonationalist]

Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory of more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta-aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true. If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structural inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled by a meta-aporia: a contradition that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action—Black people are the wrench in the works. Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers' agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can't use words like "being" or "person" to describe myself without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling.

Frank B. Wilderson III from "For Halloween I Washed My Face" in Afropessimism (2020)

[cosmicanger]

“white people are not simply “protected” by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.”

— Frank B. Wilderson III

“All White people are the police; and all White “civilians”—-if we can even deploy such irony—will continue to deputized their Whiteness to murder Black bodies at their own discretion and leisure.”

[notasapleasure]

Second time in a day I'm getting fucked up views on Irishness on my dash???

If you're tempted to believe the assertion that the discrimination against the Irish can be equated with the discrimination faced by Black people in the wake of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I recommend this article:

Here's the abstract if you don't like clicking:

Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists of Punch to Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

A quote from within the article that gives a succinct idea of things too:

None of this should obscure the fundamental point, which is that nineteenth-century caricaturists, in both prose and image, turned to racist stereotypes of Black and other nonwhite people in order to mock whites who—for whatever reason��came under critique. After all, the deprecatory rhetorical alignment of the Irish with nonwhite people was frequently rather scattershot: the Irish-born (but London-based) royal physician James Johnson, giving an account of his early 1840s “tour in Ireland,” describes Killarney guides as “an amusing race” who “swarm about the hotels like the Hindoos and Mahomedans on the beach at Madras,” Cashel as “a city of wig-wams inhabited by Titanians,” and the “Hibernian” as “like a Mahomedan Cadi.” He declares that “the murders of this county [Tipperary] would disgrace the most gloomy wilds of the most savage tribes that ever roamed in Asia, Africa, or America.” For all of Johnson's racialized rhetoric, this is not a serious attempt at racial taxonomy but rather the deployment, in the interest of evocative insult, of whatever racist stereotype of nonwhite persons comes to hand. As David Theo Goldberg states more generally, “The charged atypicality of the Irish or Jews in the European context . . . is comprehended and sustained only by identifying each respectively with and in terms of the conjunction of blackness, (European) femininity, and the lumpenproletariat.” That says far more about the largely unquestioned ideologies of anti-Black racism than about prejudice toward, for example, deliberately disparaged subsets of whites.

[realistian]

Pleading the Fifth Element: Disaesthetics and Hip Hop as Black Study

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #21: Andrew Mbaruk

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I’m Andrew Mbaruk, a Black poet living in Vancouver, Canada. I make "literary lo-fi rock rap," drawing from my diverse reading of poetry and classic literature for the "literary" aspect; – it’s "lo-fi" due to the imperfect sound quality, "rock" as the music predominantly features electric guitars, and "rap" because, if I had to use just one genre to categorize it, it’d be rap–I’m obviously rapping in the songs.

On one of my songs I describe my style as “assistant-professorial and janitorial”--it’s a blend of literary, academic, and philosophical elements with a touch of real-life experiences, viewed through my postmodern/modernist collage aesthetic.

Some of my recent albums are Why I Am Not a Painter (a 2023 song anthology), Black Squirrel: A Memoir (an autobiographical album through Extraordinary Rap), and Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album (centered around birds). Collaborations include Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence with Rhys Langston, Papier-Mache Chalet with Th’ Mole, Ultraviolet Flamingo with Vellum Bristol or Jouquin Fox, and Hip-Hop, With a Twist of Lemon with Mantis the Miasma.

Currently, I’m working on a series of lo-fi rock rap albums, each titled Abolish Canada. Abolish Canada [1] and Abolish Canada [2] are already available on my Bandcamp page.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I write whenever I’m awake and in the mood, which is often at home. This could be in the middle of the night or just as frequently in the afternoon. Currently, I find myself in the writing room...surrounded by books... On my desk are three old dictionaries and a book of selected poems by Wallace Stevens, alongside an energy drink can and crumpled papers... Scattered throughout the room are various poetry books, and books on theory and philosophy, from Marx and Hegel to Frank B. Wilderson III and David Marriott... These books are mostly on a couch doubling as a larger desk, and atop an old synthesizer from the 1980s... On the floor stand an electric guitar and amp, alongside pedals and tangled cords at my feet... Two walls are giant windows, one of which is usually open even in winter (I’m often smoking). I’m undisciplined, though I still write almost daily – though there’s the occasional lapse, like these past few days...

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

During 2017-2018, I primarily used pen and paper for my writing. But, since then, I’ve transitioned to typing most of my raps on a computer. Occasionally I’ll compose a verse while walking, relying on my Android. The inconvenience of keeping verses in my head until I can write them down...that’s a problem I face during work shifts – cleaning Vancouver’s streets, e.g....and one song I crafted mentally while washing dishes at a burger bar. Using a recording medium like paper or a word processor is best though – it allows me to carefully consider connections between different parts of a verse, because I have the entire composition visible on a page or on a screen.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I used to have a more disorganized writing style, especially in the first few years of this rapping project... Initially, I didn't even see my work as a part of rap. It was only when I started collaborating with other rappers and producers that I began to structure my writing in bars.

While there are still moments when I write in a more formless manner, I stick to a more regular form these days, lines that last four beats. Typically, I'll create four lines that rhyme (using slant rhymes) entirely parallel to each other:

(e.g., “abnegating dactylic hexameter his vacation, a trip with dead passengers the Latin pages of literate Sapphic verse as the painting's acrylic red flags ablur”),

followed by another set of four, or maybe a couplet or two

(in this case, “as heroin mixed with the China White terror, his literary dynamite exposing the Pindaric champion; explosions, the thin shards of glass in him”),

and then another quatrain or couplet, or sometimes a set of six or eight rhyming lines, or sometimes more...and so on.

I never thought I'd become so formal or strict in my approach. I've always been inclined towards poetry that adheres to (for example) Charles Olson’s "projective verse", but surprisingly, weirdly, this structured approach is working for me now.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

It’s different with every verse and song. Sometimes I’ll finish the entire thing and throw it out/delete it. Usually some part of the aborted material returns in a new form. I work in a "collage" style and see my rhymes as Deleuzian rhizomes, so I can easily connect my rhymes like Lego... It’s totally acceptable within my project to incorporate disparate fragments – unless the lyrics are focused by a constraint, as on my album about birds (Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album) or the one about the Iran-Contra scandal (The Iran-Contra Project).

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve written poetry, fiction, a screenplay... The rapping basically grew out of my experiments with print poetry – I started making poems called "phonotexts," recorded poems, in 2014... I made a spoken word album called Phono=textual: a novel in mono... It took about three years for these "phonotexts" to become rap songs.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I try to edit as I write, then I'll record the thing, sometimes using some instrumental that I'm not actually going to use – just to hear it, so I can edit it some more. Then I record the song immediately. It usually takes a few hours or an evening.

Sometimes I work on a song for a few days.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I begin with the words and a rhythm usually... I write lyrics, then I make the drums, then I record the verse or verses, then finally I'll add guitars and synthesizer and whatnot.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I usually begin with one small idea, just a line or a few words, and I grow a verse or verses from the one idea through free association, playing with meaning and rhyme. I’m often propelled by chance, but just as often propelled by a thematic goal, and this can change midway through writing.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I’ve sneaked sonnets into my raps, and I’ve invented something called “rhyme chiasmus” (a rhyme scheme where two rhyming sounds are repeated in a chiastic pattern for many bars) but I’m usually freer.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

The song "Electrons," track 01 of Abolish Canada [1]...though it goes on a bit too long I think, the bit right at the beginning is very good maybe. That song, and in fact the entirety of Abolish Canada [1]... That’s where I’ve most closely achieved much of what I intend with my words.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

My lines make their meaning through the relation to other lines. So, my favourite passage in my writing – "the human soul stuck in your body / fluent in post-structural ornithology” – is shaped by what surrounds it.

The song is called "Under the Oiseau=text." It’s about reading and about birds. And about reading birds as signs, an ancient practice.

I thought of these words because a bird, a pigeon, rose flapping before me as I walked along Commercial Drive in Vancouver. I decided to make an album about birds in that moment, and began writing "Under the Oiseau=text" as soon as I got home. Here’s the lyric in its context:

sans serif, these words upon my gravestone bearing the withered flower tossed - the Baudelairean inner albatross, the human soul stuck in your body fluent in post-structural ornithology . . .  . . .his words draw you a map of the geographer perched upon a branch in the binoculars, this scholar of math as it pertains to flight, the neurographer mapping the brain with light

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I shorten lines and always try to do verses in a single take.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Afropessimism, John Ashbery’s poetry, nature, the congressional report on the Iran-Contra scandal, and the letter N. Also, I collect and read dictionaries.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Some of my stuff I dig especially, other stuff I’m okay with, most of the stuff I don’t like no one can hear anywhere. Grand Lunatic I’m not crazy about, Andra Mbalimbali I’m not crazy about, Neuro=textual: a novel of ideas is not my favourite of my albums. From late in 2022 and throughout 2023, that stuff I like – though I’m on the fence about some projects like Black Squirrel and The Iran-Contra Project. The earlier stuff evinces potential realized by Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album and Abolish Canada [1]... That’s how I see things.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Rappers who depend less on rhyme and just say really interesting shit, like AKAI SOLO or my friend Jouquin Fox, I can’t do that. I tried using a little less rhyme on The Iran-Contra Project, my concept album about Iran-Contra, and I’m sure I can’t do that. The constraint of rhyme is essential to my style.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

Yes, I am trying to communicate many things to the listener. I am saying nothing specifically, and consequently saying many different things. (Any one of these different things I could write about at length, but it has been recommended to me that I just leave it at “I am saying nothing specifically, and consequently saying many different things” – nice and succinct.)

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: unknown (hit me up)

[deadtothefuture]

“Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a ‘program of complete disorder.’”

– Frank B. Wilderson III, "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal"

[crvvys]

I have maybe 4 books to read before giving an entire fully baked opinion on this but what some AfAm academics have contributed to social activism is tragic. at least in recent years. a lot of different academic conversations seeped online and made shit worse or annoying but this one keeps sticking out to me as of late.

the spreading of afro pessimism in certain circles which of course spreads to the internet and then the rest of the world. I won’t say afro pessimism is wholly responsible for ALL of the shenanigans bc that’s not true but the idea that a philosophy steeped in American exceptionalism and from what I’m coming to understand, misreadings of other black academics, gaining foot on a global scale to define blackness and the world’s relation to blackness…feels very wrong.

it also creates separation when there should be common ground among people with different backgrounds and experiences. and that isn’t always clear cut either bc some people do take and misinterpret and remove cultural context from words or situations which I also don’t like. but I still think there can be understanding and building between groups that suffer oppression. and afro pessimism severs this connection between oppressed people in the global north to help and stand with people in the global south.

I listened to an interview from one of the major proponents of afro pessimism, Frank B Wilderson III and I was so bothered by a lot of it. it felt very America knows best and better about everything including blackness. despite the fact that blackness in the US differs from other countries, African American history differs from other countries with African diasporas so the historical context can’t be applied the same way. and also AfAms tend to feel very insecure in our place in the world which at times has not led to…positive things. the whole fiasco with African Americans arguing with Egyptians about Egyptian history comes to mind. that is its own discussion but the gall you have to have to argue with people about history that’s not even your own? I understand the context of the argument and the African American perspective and I still think it was audacious.

the mindfuck that is being African American gives context to this stuff but it doesn’t excuse it. and I become more bothered by what we’ve put out into the world that ultimately may be black but is also still American and potentially harmful to others.

I just refuse to believe that anti blackness is this necessary social structure to all other societies. i feel like that’s a very narrow view of the world and ignores a lot of ethnic conflicts that are found everywhere and can often be much more intense than racial conflicts. racism against black people is found in many places obviously but I don’t think we are at the immediate lowest social rank in every society. I just don’t buy that.

i think every nation state has its own population of people whether for ethnic/religious reasons, whatever differs them from the accepted main society, that the state wishes to abuse or crush and those are the people worth listening to and seeking solidarity with.

not to mention afro pessimism seems to legitimise race as like biological almost? which I also don’t like? I just don’t believe that black American academics know enough about the world to make these claims that ultimately defines blackness for everyone else or if they do know enough, they’d admit that race is not static and that it has a historical context within the society that it develops. i have many undeveloped thoughts and criticisms on this though.

[professorfaber]

Every society has a murderous hierarchy: someone’s always knocking at the basement door, trying to get free. But life is prismatic—it’s possible to be Black and degraded in America while also profiting from wanton extraction of resources overseas, oppressing millions of non-Black others, and living on land stolen from indigenous people. We are always joined in our sufferings, often by somebody we can’t see through the darkness. We speak of solidarity precisely because the empathetic act of analogy is a way of acknowledging this complexity, and of training our ethical senses, again and again, to widen the circle of our concern. Any system of thought that has refined itself beyond the ability to imagine kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border, or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China, or, again—I can’t get over it—with the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business, is lost in its own fog.

[dykevillanelle]

savannah “dykevillanelle”’s 2022 reading list!

{ books read 2015 x books read 2016 x books read 2017 x books read 2018 x books read 2019 x books read 2020 x books read 2021 }

books read: 93 (goal was 100 but sometimes we have a hard year) pages read: 32,179

top 5 fiction:

(best) the overstory (richard powers)

the stars and the blackness between them (junanda petrus)

no one is talking about this (patricia lockwood)

girl, woman, other (bernardine evaristo)

last night at the telegraph club (malinda lo)

top 5 nonfiction:

(best) afropessimism (frank b. wilderson iii)

recovery from schizophrenia: psychiatry and the political economy (richard warner)

the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (shoshana zuboff)

virology: essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between (joseph osmundson)

crying in h mart (michelle zauner)

bottom 5:

girl made of stars (ashley blake herring)

the four winds (kristen hannah)

aphrodite made me do it (trisha mateer)

come closer (sara gran)

(worst) lovecraft country (matt ruff)

full list and reviews, in order read, under the cut

yolk (mary h.k. choi) [ya, realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

the secret scripture (sebastian barry) [ historical fiction | ★★★]

she drives me crazy (kelly quindlen) [ya, romance | ★★]

last night at the telegraph club (malinda lo) [historical fiction | ★★★★★]

the stars and the blackness between them (junanda petrus) [romance | ★★★★★]

come closer (sara gran) [horror | ★]

racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america (eduardo bonilla-silva) [nonfiction, sociology | ★★★]

something to talk about (meryl wilsner) [romance | ★★] 

real life (brandon taylor) [realistic fiction | ★★★★] 

invisible no more: police violence against black women and women of color (andrea j. ritchie, editor) [nonfiction | ★★★★★] 

queenie (candice carty-williams) [realistic fiction | ★★] 

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo (taylor jenkins reid) [historical fiction, romance | ★★★] 

how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective (keeanga-yamahtta taylor, editor) [nonfiction | ★★★★★]

one last stop (casey mcquiston) [romance | ★★★★] 

patsy (nicole dennis-benn) [realistic fiction | ★★★] 

hani and ishu’s guide to fake dating (adiba jaigirdar) [ya, romance | ★★★] 

my year of rest and relaxation (ottessa moshfegh) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

wilder girls (rory power) [ya, horror | ★★★★] 

not straight, not white: black gay men from the march on washington to the AIDS crisis (kevin j. mumford) [nonfiction | ★★★] 

sex object: a memoir (jessica valenti) [memoir | ★★] 

severed (ling ma) [science fiction | ★★★★] 

blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west (cormac mccarthy) [historical fiction, classics | ★★]

her royal highness (rachel hawkins) [romance | ★★] 

i’m thinking of ending things (iain reid) [horror | ★★★] 

things have gotten worse since we last spoke (eric larocca) [horror | ★★★★★] 

evicted: poverty and profit in the american city (matthew desmond) [nonfiction | ★★★★] 

boy parts (eliza clark) [realistic fiction, horror | ★★★★] 

crying in h mart (michelle zauner) [memoir | ★★★★★] 

leave the world behind (rumaan alam) [science fiction, horror | ★★★★] 

killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty (dorothy roberts) [nonfiction | ★★★★] 

no one is talking about this (patricia lockwood) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★] 

my best friend’s exorcism (grady hendrix) [horror | ★★★★] 

helter skelter: the true story of the manson murders (vincent bugliosi) [true crime | ★★] 

perfume: the story of a murderer (patrick süskind) historical fiction, horror | ★★★]

the tattooist of auschwitz (heather morris) [biography | ★★] 

recovery from schizophrenia: psychiatry and political economy (richard warner) [nonfiction | ★★★★★] 

lovecraft country (matt ruff) [horror | ★] 

pretty girls (karin slaughter) [horror | ★★★] 

therapeutic communication: knowing what to say when (paul l. wachtel) [nonfiction | ★★★] 

maybe you should talk to someone: a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed (lori gottlieb) [memoir | ★★] 

the examined life: how we lose and find ourselves (stephen grosz) [memoir | ★★★]

written in the stars (alexandra bellefleur) [romance | ★] 

klara and the sun (kazuo ishiguro) [klara and the sun | ★★★] 

go tell it on the mountain (james baldwin) [realistic fiction, classics | ★★★★★]

luster (raven leilani) [realistic fiction | ★★★] 

queer and trans artists of color: stories of some of our lives (nia king, editor) [anthology, interviews | ★★★]

annihilation (jeff vandermeer) [science fiction, horror | ★★★★] 

my sister, guard your veil; my brother, guard your eyes: uncensored iranian voices (lila azam zanganeh, editor) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★]

girl made of stars (ashley herring blake) [ya, realistic fiction | ★] 

the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (shoshana zuboff) [nonfiction | ★★★★★] 

folklorn (angela mi young hur) [science fiction, fantasy | ★★★★★] 

girl, woman, other (bernardine evaristo) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★] 

aphrodite made me do it (trista mateer) [poetry | ★] 

we do this ’til we free us: abolitionist organizing and transforming justice (mariame kaba) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★★] 

the chinese lady: afong moy in early america (nancy e. davis) [biography | ★★★] 

the parisian (isabella hammad) [historical fiction | ★★★★★] 

under the udala trees (chinelo okparanta) [historical fiction | ★★★★] 

the overstory (richard powers) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

queen of teeth (hailey piper) [horror | ★★★] 

the southern book club’s guide to slaying vampires (grady hendrix) [horror | ★★★★]

the vegetarian (han kang) [horror | ★★★] 

the priory of the orange tree (samantha shannon) [fantasy | ★★★★] 

harlem shuffle (colson whitehead) [historical fiction | ★★★★] 

the poppy war (r.f. kuang) [fantasy | ★★] 

parable of the sower (octavia butler) [science fiction | ★★★★] 

the idiot (elif batuman) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★] 

tender is the flesh (agustina bazterrica) [horror | ★★★★] 

the four winds (kristin hannah) [historical fiction | ★★] 

manhunt (gretchen felker-martin) [horror, science fiction | ★★★★] 

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (gabrielle zevin) [realistic fiction | ★★★★] 

ace of spades (faridah àbíke íyimídé) [ya, horror | ★★★★★]

nona the ninth (tamsyn muir) [science fiction | ★★★★★] 

blitzed: drugs in the third reich (norman ohler) [nonfiction | ★★★] 

virology: essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between (joseph osmundson) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★★] 

we have always lived in the castle (shirley jackson) [horror | ★★★★] 

the black flamingo (dean atta) [ya, poetry | ★★] 

things we lost to the water (eric nguyen) [realistic fiction | ★★★★] 

ruinsong (julia ember) [ya, fantasy | ★★] 

flung out of space (hannah templar & grace ellis) [graphic novel, biography | ★★★★★] 

everything i never told you (celeste ng) [mystery | ★★★★★] 

here the whole time (vitor martins) [ya, romance | ★★]

why freud was wrong: sin, science, and psychoanalsis (richard webster) [biography | ★★★★] 

sea of tranquility (emily st. john mandel) [science fiction | ★★★★] 

free food for millionaires (min jin lee) [realistic fiction | ★★★★] 

my heart hemmed in (marie ndaiye) [horror | ★★★] 

greywaren (maggie stiefvater) [ya, fantasy | ★★★★] 

bad gays (huw lemmey & ben miller) [biography | ★★★★★] 

cinderella is dead (kalynn bayron) [ya, fantasy | ★★] 

eileen (ottessa moshfegh) [realistic fiction | ★★★] 

artemis (andy weir) [science fiction | ★★★★] 

my heart is a chainsaw (stephen graham jones) [horror | ★★★] 

the orange eats creeps (grace krilanovich) [science fiction, horror | ★★] 

afropessimism (frank b. wilderson iii) [nonfiction, memoir | ★★★★★]

[slayercain]

[I]f Afropessimism can do anything that is not diagnostic [...] it gives people permission to be iconoclastic with their imagination. And I think that’s really important. Because it gives us permission to burn down police stations and treat it like a pagan bonfire. Back in the day when I was a teenager, Weather Underground criticized the Black Liberation Army (BLA) for killing a police officer. Before they fled the scene the BLA danced around his body, and that for me, even more than the assassination of the cop, is the Afropessimist moment: is the moment of the joy of dancing around this cop’s body. And it was precisely that which turned off the White Left. “How gratuitous!” Well, I say, no! Or maybe it was gratuitous, but so what; the dance brought unfettered joy where the White Left would want no more than the realpolitik of dealing with the pigs—a rational undertaking that killed a racist cop while simultaneously catalyzing the death of Black desire.

— Frank B. Wilderson III in conversation with Aria Dean

[the-first-door]

Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.

why is void reblogging this? uninformed take. read Frank B Wilderson III and other Afropessimists.

[homonationalist]

At one point Sameer spoke of being stopped and searched at Israeli checkpoints. He spoke in a manner that seemed not to require my presence. I hadn't seen this level of concentration and detachment in him before. That was fine. He was grieving. "The shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body," he said. Then he added, "But the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew." The earth gave way. The thought that my place in the unconscious of Palestinians fighting for their freedom was the same dishonorable place I occupied in the minds of Whites in America and Israel chilled me. I gathered enough wits about me to tell him that his feelings were odd, seeing how Palestinians were at war with Israelis, and White Israelis at that. How was it that the people who stole his land and slaughtered his relatives were somehow less of a threat in his imagination than Black Jews, often implements of Israeli madness, who sometimes do their dirty work? What, I wondered silently, was it about Black people (about me) that made us so fungible we could be tossed like a salad in the minds of oppressors and the oppressed? I was faced with the realization that in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people. What they share is a largely unconscious consensus that Blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim. At one moment Blackness is a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon; at another moment Blackness is a sentient implement to be joyously deployed for reasons and agendas that have little to do with Black liberation. There I sat, yearning, in solidarity with my Palestinian friend's yearning, for the full restoration of Palestinian sovereignty; mourning, in solidarity with my friend's mourning, over the loss of his insurgent cousin; yearning, that is, for the historical and political redemption of what I thought was a violated commons to which we both belonged—when, all of a sudden, my friend reached down into the unconscious of his people and slapped me upside the head with a wet gym shoe: the startling realization that not only was I barred, ab initio, from the denouement of historical and political redemption, but that the borders of redemption are policed by Whites and non-Whites alike, even as they kill each other. It's worse than that. I, as a Black person (if person, subject, being are appropriate, since Human is not), am both barred from the denouement of social and historical redemption and needed if redemption is to attain any form of coherence.

Frank B. Wilderson III from "For Halloween I Washed My Face" in Afropessimism (2020)

[webionaire]

BLACK STUDIES—as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B. Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture? What becomes of art history as an intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and liberatory horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both the discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address these questions.

[pansexualdemic]

I'm going to uplift voices by blazing my own post and tag spamming instead of mentioning Frank B Wilderson III by name! This totally isn't about more attention for me!

i didn't ask for your validation