26/2/25
At the Full and Change of the Moon: Lecture 9 - Dr Sam Durrant
Afropessimism
● Afropessimism: term coined by Frank Wilderson, and associated with Wilderson,
Sadiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten,
Chille Mbembe.
● Arises in the US as the academic wing of BLM, in response to the failure of the Civil
Rights Movement (1950s-1970s): police brutality, institutional racism, incarceration of
black population.
● Orlando Patterson’s analysis of slavery as ‘social death’ and extends this beyond the
historical movement of slavery: ‘blackness’ is ‘social death’ - black subjectivity /
citizenship / personhood is rendered impossible by the structure of racial capitalism.
● ‘Afro-Pessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous
with Slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a
prior meta-moment of plentitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of
social life’.
● ‘Social death bars the slave from access to narrative’.
● ‘A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left cause it emanates
from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress -
no narrative of redemption’.
● The narrative arc of the slave who is Black … is not an arc at all, but a flat kind, what
Hortense Spillers (2003) calls ‘historical stillness’.
● Afropessimism rejects the optimism of the Civil Rights Movement.
Sharpe: ‘In The Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke Up, 2016’:
● Sharpe as an Afropessimist who works on Brand, very closely to her sensibility:
thinks of black literary expression as ‘wake work’.
● ‘Wake work’ - staying with the wake - working from a consciousness of social death,
the negation of black humanity.
● Not about reclamation / redemption of black subjectivity but of imagining ‘new ways
to live in the wake’.
Mourning and Melacholia
● Freud: ‘In some cases the same influences produce melancholia instead of
mourning an we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition … although
mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to
us to regard it as pathological’.
● Mourning as conscious, health, end-directed response to loss, de-cathexis, active
working through: able to move on.
● Melancholia as unconscious, pathological response to loss, no end, passive,
involuntary repetition: trauma, stasis, suicide.
● Wake work: refuses to choose between these two options: staying with the
wake rather than moving on.
At the Full and Change of the Moon: Lecture 9 - Dr Sam Durrant
Afropessimism
● Afropessimism: term coined by Frank Wilderson, and associated with Wilderson,
Sadiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten,
Chille Mbembe.
● Arises in the US as the academic wing of BLM, in response to the failure of the Civil
Rights Movement (1950s-1970s): police brutality, institutional racism, incarceration of
black population.
● Orlando Patterson’s analysis of slavery as ‘social death’ and extends this beyond the
historical movement of slavery: ‘blackness’ is ‘social death’ - black subjectivity /
citizenship / personhood is rendered impossible by the structure of racial capitalism.
● ‘Afro-Pessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous
with Slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a
prior meta-moment of plentitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of
social life’.
● ‘Social death bars the slave from access to narrative’.
● ‘A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left cause it emanates
from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress -
no narrative of redemption’.
● The narrative arc of the slave who is Black … is not an arc at all, but a flat kind, what
Hortense Spillers (2003) calls ‘historical stillness’.
● Afropessimism rejects the optimism of the Civil Rights Movement.
Sharpe: ‘In The Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke Up, 2016’:
● Sharpe as an Afropessimist who works on Brand, very closely to her sensibility:
thinks of black literary expression as ‘wake work’.
● ‘Wake work’ - staying with the wake - working from a consciousness of social death,
the negation of black humanity.
● Not about reclamation / redemption of black subjectivity but of imagining ‘new ways
to live in the wake’.
Mourning and Melacholia
● Freud: ‘In some cases the same influences produce melancholia instead of
mourning an we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition … although
mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to
us to regard it as pathological’.
● Mourning as conscious, health, end-directed response to loss, de-cathexis, active
working through: able to move on.
● Melancholia as unconscious, pathological response to loss, no end, passive,
involuntary repetition: trauma, stasis, suicide.
● Wake work: refuses to choose between these two options: staying with the
wake rather than moving on.
