I just don't feel they work well for the purpose of introduction. Makes me wonder about form and content: is the writer using tortured prose to express ideas of suffering, born of suffering.? The jargon-heavy pieces were also the excerpted ones-Hartman and Spillers, if I remember right (it's been almost two weeks now). I can swallow a good bit of jargon, but at times while reading those texts I was not having it. Part of the idea is to get you to read more from each author you liked, but excerpting is tricky.Īlso, a couple/few of these texts were heavily laden with jargon and tortured sentences. I wonder about the editor(s)' choices, for example 'The Burdened Individuality of Freedom' (Saidiya Hartman) was a very frustrating read for me, like it was floating without its context I wondered while reading if it was an excerpt and, yes, it turns out it's a chapter from Scenes of Subjection. There are a lot of good ideas in here, and also some pieces I couldn't get into.

And I've been interested for a while (since reading a little interview Frank Wilderson did around the time of Ferguson) in getting more of an idea of Afro-Pessimist ideas, so when I found this in a local bookshop (for like $6 or so) I picked it right up.

It's a kind of popularizing/radicalizing/pirating project, which I can really love. In many cases the original materials are either costly or behind those academia access walls. This book joins the populous set of 'I am excited that something like this exists, and I want it to be a better version of itself.' This is a project where someone(s) took texts out of academic journals and books and made them available for free and cheap, just because they wanted to share ideas they consider useful tools/weapons/etc. The collected articles span three decades of thought and cover, in addition to police violence, topics ranging from the labor of Black women and the slave's transformation following the emancipation to the struggles of the Black Liberation Army and the elements of anti-Blackness in Indigenous struggles for sovereignty.

Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction is a collection of articles compiled for the purpose of offering an overview of this theory. Afro-Pessimism offers an analytical lens to examine this gap and the ways in which society is structured through anti-Black racism. Yet there is a fissure between the prescriptions offered to rectify these issues and the failure to bring that about. In the wake of uprisings and public outrage at the continual murder of Black people by the police, discourse is incrementally acknowledging racialized police violence and discrimination in all areas of society. Afro-Pessimism illuminates, with the intention to abolish, the omnipresence or anti-Black racism in modern society.

Scene of subjection