ON VIOLENCE FRANZ FANON SUMMARY SERIES

His memories are like scraps fished out of the shredder and reassembled into the shape of a monster just to figure out the order of the events relayed in the book is a task.

ON VIOLENCE FRANZ FANON SUMMARY SERIES

Wilderson’s solution is to give us life as a series of cutouts. Wilderson contends that “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic Slave, who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line.” This principle poses a challenge for the book, which is largely a work of memoir. (Patterson, for his part, does not think that African-Americans are currently “in a situation of social death,” and has called his influence on Afropessimism “ironic.”) And civil society as we know it requires this category of nonperson to exist. “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness,” Wilderson writes. For Wilderson, the state of slavery, for Black people, is permanent: every Black person is always a slave and, therefore, a perpetual corpse, buried beneath the world and stinking it up. For Patterson, social death describes the experience of slavery as it has appeared across time and space-a slave is not merely an exploited person but someone robbed of his or her personhood. They are in a state of “social death,” a concept that Wilderson borrows from the sociologist Orlando Patterson. On this map, Black people are integral to human society but at all times and in all places excluded from it.

Rather, Afropessimism sketches a structural map of human experience. Neither the body of thought associated with the term nor Wilderson’s new book espouses an orientation toward the future, or gives much of a damn about social fortunes. Wilderson, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, is one of the founders of a philosophical school called Afropessimism-a slightly misleading bit of nomenclature. In mid-June, the temperamentally soft and sunny conservative Times columnist David Brooks-who, five years ago, lamented that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-seller “Between the World and Me” would “trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future”-suggested that readers who wished to understand the alienation of African-Americans should read “Afropessimism,” quoting the book’s insistence that “the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world.” Since then, Wilderson’s work has received notice in unlikely places. I read his latest, “Afropessimism” (Liveright), twice: once before the world crawled to a halt under the horror of covid-19, and again after anger about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis-Wilderson’s home town-erupted into a righteous spectacle of fire and glass. The best time to read a book by Frank B. Wilderson III, it turns out, is during a hot summer of uneasy isolation, social heartbreak, and racial uprising.

On violence franz fanon summary