this introduction is inviting and generous

I like it

Prof. Gloria Wekker up now

Started engaging with afropessimism because was asked by editor if she wanted to write a review of the book.

Wrote a forthcoming review of Frank Wilderson's book.

FORTHCOMING IS ACADEMIC FOR NOT YET AVAILABLE!

Prof. Wekker describes the book as "seductive."

A memoir, auto-theory.
meets
Critical theory.

Main critique is that the book does not engage intersectionality.

Race is the primary grammar of the book.

"Black people are put outside the frame of humanity, and humanity is white people."

"There is no analogy for Wilderson with the suffering of other groups. No solidarity is possible."

Review will appear end month in the European Journal of Women's Studies.

Now.
Prof. Barnor Hesse.

Has encountered Afropessimism in two ways.

While completing a book, in which it is engaged.

Afropessimism is also ubiquitous, particularly among grad students. (That's interesting.)

Notes "theoretical inconsistencies."

(interesting approach)

Problem is the distinction between the human and the nonhuman.

(one problem)

The arbitrary violence against the Black person is a problem for Prof. Hesse.

Who or what can be murdered if the Black person is outside the category of the human?

(I think I got that right.)

(Wouldn't murder require a kind of personhood or humanhood, I think is the critique.)

Now, Kevin Okoth.

Encountered it in academic work and in activist circles.

Especially with older people working on solidarity campaigns.

Read an early version of Wilderson's book.

(I'm fascinated by how Afropessimism is Wilderson's recent book, and not the rich dialogue among Wilderson, Sexton, Moten, and many others, and the work grounded in Fanon and Wynter and Hartman)

A question for Prof. Hesse.

"Why has Afropessimism gotten so much traction right now?"

"Afropessimism emerges at a moment when the idea of radical change is no longer available to the imaginations of most people."

Huh?

(Color me confused. Have we not seen student activism across Africa and in the Europe and North America? And all the Black Life Matters activism.)

(yeah, that was too complicated

something about black suffering being at once ubiquitous and without redress)

"Afropessimism is speaking to what lays unresolved by colonialism"

Huh?

Color me confused.

I. Am. Lost.

I will need one of you clever people to translate this for me.

(I am very uncomfortable when stuff is discussed without specificity.

Where are the page numbers?
What are the references?
What is this general idea of afropessimism that is circulating and being discussed?)

Kevin points out the relation between afropessimism as it lives online and how it circulates in digital spaces, and the different types of rhetorics at work there.

"Afropessimism is overrepresented due to the political economy of the university."

I am honestly very confused.

Sure, I hear a lot about it. BUT THAT IS BECAUSE OF THE PARTICULAR WORK I ENGAGE AND THAT COMES MY WAY.

Zero. Zilch. Nothing of any minoritized scholarship is EVER overrepresented.

EVER.

Prof. Wekker: In the Netherlands, leftist politics erases blackness.

Prof. Wekker returns to the 80s and the women's movement and the involvement of Black and migrant women, and how the term Black circulated as a term of solidarity.

Worries that Afropessimism does not seek communion with other bodies of thought developed elsewhere, and remains bound to the U.S.

Prof. Hesse: "major claim of afropessmism, if we take something like modernity, modernity is structured fundamentally by the antagonism between the human and the black/slave"

(there are many ellipses there)

"there's a primordial antagonism that subtends all other antagonisms, but is repressed from general consideration"

(again, many ellipses)