Frank Wilderson III, "Afropessimism" (Liveright, 2020)
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What is Afropessimism and why does it differ from other anti‑Black theories?
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Welcome back to New Books and Political Science. I'm Susan Liebel at St. Joseph's University, and today I welcome Frank B. Wilderson III, professor and chair of African American Studies, as well as a professor in the Culture and Theory PhD program at the University of California, Irvine. He spent five and a half years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress during apartheid. He's received prestigious awards for both his fiction and nonfiction. Today, we'll be discussing his most recent book, Afropessimism, published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. in 2020. Welcome to the podcast, Frank.
Thank you. Glad to be here, Susan.
So Afropessimism is an ambitious work that combines interrogating critical theory and personal memoir. You describe your earlier assumption that anti-Black racism was analogous to the plight of the Palestinians or Native Americans or the working class. But this book is about reaching a very different conclusion about the suffering of black people as essentially different. And you actually don't foresee a resolution. And before we unpack what it means to be an Afro pessimist, can we start with how you came to write this book? I mean, you are using family memoir and I'm wondering why you chose that narrative style and how it ultimately impacted the substance of the argument.
Yes. Well, I think that I have two professional kind of training degrees. And one is in critical theory from the rhetoric department at UC Berkeley. But long before that, I had a master's in fine arts from Columbia University in fiction writing. So I've been writing vignettes and short stories and incompleted novels. based loosely or greatly on things that I've experienced and family issues, political issues that are dear to my heart for a long time, I began my PhD work in 1997 after I got back from South Africa. And at some point along the way, I had written, as many of your listeners know, two books already. One was called Incognigro, which was a pure kind of... the architecture of the book, a kind of memoir that, uh, oscillated chapters between, uh, my life growing up in the all white neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to my time in South Africa.
And I wrote red, white and black cinema and the structure of us antagonism, which, uh, was a book in which I tried to add a kind of, uh, macro level, explain the stakes and interventions of Afro pessimism and use, uh, film theory and film analysis to do that. What happened with this book is in 2017, the New Press and Verso Press called me separately and asked for something. We were talking it through, whatever they wanted. I was happy to be called. And it turned out to be something like a book of political essays, but it would have to be aimed at a reader who
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Afropessimism and why does it differ from other anti‑Black theories?
0:00–11:21
2
How did Frank Wilderson’s personal memoir shape the arguments in Afropessimism?
11:21–23:49
3
Why does Wilderson argue that Blackness is the opposite of ‘human’ in social theory?
23:49–36:18
4
What are the three elements of social death that define slavery, according to Patterson and Wilderson?
36:18–48:24
5
How does Wilderson explain the limits of intersectionality for Black suffering?
48:24–57:00
6
What is the role of anger and pessimism in Black Lives Matter activism?
57:00–57:29
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)