Afropessimism Against "Against Afro-Pessimism"

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  • čas přidán 5. 09. 2024

Komentáře • 64

  • @niknikky
    @niknikky Před 2 lety +29

    This is Revolution Pod had an interview with the guy who wrote the Jacobin article. I haven't finished watching, and while I respect those guys, I feel like they used, as Lawrence pointed out, the caricatured version of Afro-Pessism that proliferates on Twitter. I admit, I have not read much AP theory, but for its opponents, it really has become a catch-all term for race-first, so-called grievance politics, which doesn't seem to be a good-faith interpretation.

    • @PiceaSitchensis
      @PiceaSitchensis Před rokem

      It's just a way for some academics to feel relevant and receive accolades.

  • @andywilliam4786
    @andywilliam4786 Před 2 lety +12

    Had to watch this episode again...Really great analysis again gentlemen...

  • @dirty_diver
    @dirty_diver Před 2 lety +8

    The lastest article against AP I saw was Rockhill's paper stating all theory that is influenced by Frankfurt school's Horkheimer is distorting the end goal of Marxism. It also has no detailed argument about the claim. It seems the argument is idealist == if it touches this school and ideas, then it is not materialist enough. AP can seemingly be all about race, but still the end point is materialist revolution. In Wilderson's case, it is directly connected to revolutionary movement and struggles more than most of the bougie Marxist academic scholars that is criticising AP. I would say that most white Marxism is not materialist enough -- that is to say that they cannot understand the material function of race and its totality. They will always resort to tactics short of a complete revolution. I also think the issue in political philosophy is that they really are idealists in the end. Thought produces action. They dont understand that, sometimes, racialised people struggle against capitalism in ways that aren't theoretically coherent. Or just under theorised and misunderstood in academic space. Actions/practice must be evaluated to get the full picture if what it's about.

  • @mansurx26
    @mansurx26 Před 2 lety +11

    Lawrence and Jared both put up 50 this show 🔥🔥🔥 straight ETHER! 🔥🔥

  • @readyrevolutionary1236
    @readyrevolutionary1236 Před 2 lety +7

    Shout-out to the chat for this one. Very engaging and lively discussion of AP and it's pitfalls.

  • @ncrewments
    @ncrewments Před 2 lety +1

    As someone working on recovery from substance abuse, what Lawrence said about what WE have access to concerning “treatment” tends to be spot-on! Mentioning these kind of realities can be “problematic,” to say the least

  • @JoeyAfrika
    @JoeyAfrika Před 2 lety +8

    This was dope

  • @dolphinking1417
    @dolphinking1417 Před 2 lety +17

    Amazing show. Way better analysis than the discussion on This is Revolution.

    • @BlakaveliX
      @BlakaveliX Před 2 lety +2

      I like them folks but they are hella bias

  • @JoeyAfrika
    @JoeyAfrika Před 2 lety +11

    Didn't John Henrick Clark say we ain't have no friends?!

    • @JoeyAfrika
      @JoeyAfrika Před 2 lety +3

      Just motivated me to listen that lecture

    • @jonblaze4244
      @jonblaze4244 Před 2 lety

      @@YouFunkyStank but Umar is an aspiring capitalist which feeds the white supremacist economic structure.

  • @shakkay.3899
    @shakkay.3899 Před 2 lety +5

    Again, having appreciated Richard Wolfe's and others' analysis for decades, I only caught up with a few years ago. He not others if these Socialist, Marxists agree with Reparations or even an unique Black (Afrikan) struggle; only a vanguard. Doug Dowd years ago drove that home years ago when I was in his class. Not only wouldn't he not look in the direction of this Black man wearing Afrikan clothes (me) in his class but not even recognize him as Dowd preceded to dismiss Slavery as economically profitable.

  • @gravydale
    @gravydale Před 2 lety +6

    Just completed that Jacobin article...I'd say that the presence of such a piece in such a space makes sense...the overarching (paternal and gently dismissive, among other things) stance and message is consistent with self proclaimed progressive and liberal white modes of thought.
    When Mr Grandpre mentioned the hegemony of the ( antiblack in practice) concept of "multiculturalism " in California, that and the article echoed my experience with the ethos of Minnesota. Plainly put, a "multicultural " racial heiarchy.....the ordering of the rungs of which are pretty much consistent globally might I add!
    I can't explain why , but this stream of media had me thinking of the Siddi / Sheedi population of Pakistan and India. If you aren't familiar I'd suggest looking them up

  • @andywilliam4786
    @andywilliam4786 Před 2 lety +8

    Self edit...I mischaracterized the brother Sanchez in the live chat...and said he was unfamiliar with fanon...But he said he wasn't a Fanon scholar...I retract lol

    • @Iambigjones
      @Iambigjones Před 2 lety +5

      I watched an interview with him the other day, he didn't even know the title for Black Skin White Masks. You were not wrong in your assessment. He is very unfamiliar with Fanon's work.

  • @DrapetomaniacTilWeAllFree

    I love him!!! Great show

  • @vudoomunkyfut
    @vudoomunkyfut Před 2 lety +8

    I also wish people would stop calling AP race first. That is also disingenuous. It's that BLACKNESS renders identification and the coherence of such possible for everyone BUT Black folk. That queerness, womanhood, manhood, etc are legible in the world in ways that Blackness is not. What's more is that the addition of Black as a qualifier immediately changes the quality of the identifier to one that is inexplicable.
    What's wild is that Black queer folk and women BEEN saying this.

    • @Taylordessalines
      @Taylordessalines Před 2 lety +1

      Mmm… i think it is though. Just differently than Amos or Ani.

    • @vudoomunkyfut
      @vudoomunkyfut Před 2 lety +4

      @@Taylordessalines I see why people say that. I think that, generally, people are responding as though all of these are equal identifiers for Black people; as though we have access to all of them. Afropessimism describes why we even when we strive to identify on the level of gender, sexuality, and even class...we still come up short on support and solidarity. The error was in thinking that any of that applied to us anyway. Moreover, the error is in thinking that we had access when all of those were created in contradistinction to us. So, it's not a choice in the way of put race before gender. It's "racialized Blackness makes gender impossible for Black people". And so AP studies what Blackness "does to" gender, sex, sexuality, humanity, etc. But it also doesn't purport that there is a "community" of dark skinned peoples either. Just that there is this global consensus that has been imposed on us.

  • @BLK-LA
    @BLK-LA Před rokem +2

    I read Afropessimism, and I couldn't get passed the initial critique of it here. The claim that Afropessimism missed using a class analysis is absolutely wrong. There is no surviving that level of incomprehension.

  • @mickeyoshea2035
    @mickeyoshea2035 Před rokem

    This conversation is so needed. Thank you 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 Would love to hear this go on a few more hours and also engage Black anarchist theory and praxis. Ever had Andrewism on the show?

  • @eyesofnihility
    @eyesofnihility Před 2 lety +19

    Sanchez never justified his accusation of AP being ethnonationalist; he has consistently failed to demonstrate both in the twitter debates and his jacobin argument how the charge of ethnonationalism can be reconciled with Wilderson’s claims in the bush mama chapter of RWB. He never demonstrates how Fanon’s tabula rasa or his identification of the rural lumpenproletariat as revolutionary subject is somehow compatible with socialism, here construed as Medicare for All, worker co ops and student debt forgiveness. He never cites the passage in Wretched where Fanon says explicitly that the colonised should be revolutionary socialists; as far as I can tell Fanon thought it was up to the colonised to choose what economic system they wanted. He never reconciles his rainbow coalition picture of Fanon of BSWM, the same book where for Fanon black people internalize anti blackness before they even actually meet any black people. He never explains how his particular conception of socialism is compatible with Marxian socialism, but advocates for “Marxism” over “AP”. He never reconciles how AP’s anarchist theory of the state is compatible with ethnonationalism. If he wanted to argue AP is fundamentally liberal, his argument should be that anarchism is just a brand of radical liberalism hence making AP’s implicit conceptions of the state’s relation to civil society a liberal theory, but Sanchez never even considers such a possibility. The idea that AP may be anarchist is never even put on the table. It’s just liberal because it’s being produced out of academia, which calls into question why we should be reading either AP or Sanchez’s own work considering the latter himself is in academia and is on track for a PhD. Theres a good argument that has been made by black transwomen before about the cissexism laden within AP’s conceptual framework; this aspect of the theory isn’t even on Sanchez’s radar. The work of David Marriott, R Judy, Chandler, Moten, Da Silva, Hartman, Terrefe, Iman Jackson, and Spillers, are all collapsed into each other into an indistinct blob constantly, the differences between their theories are never elaborated and they’re all condemned and discarded by marxists as bourgeois lit studies poetry. If Sanchez sees this, yes I am @ireglint on twitter and I’m still waiting for you to dm me your explanation for how I’m somehow misinterpreting AP’s true aims, how it’s actually compatible with nationalism, how I’m misreading Fanon (don’t cite that fucking passage about economics to be again because I already explained on twitter how it misreads Fanon. Also explain to me how what Fanon means by sociogeny and invention are irrelevant to this convo, or how Fanon’s idea of stereotype-as-fetish doesn’t turn Marx on his head); explain to me why it’s okay to ignore / dismiss the works of all the scholars named above and claim Marxism instead. I haven’t even gotten to how even if AP is an idealist analysis, it has a materialist backing to it. Please explain to me how slaves were workers, and explain to me how literal slave bodies being accumulated / collateralized as financial assets and never being financially compensated doesn’t relegate black people as a whole into a permanent structure of structural debt. I’ll be waiting for your explanations Sanchez.
    These are the works I’d suggest reading for more nuanced interpretations of AP:
    William David Hart’s “Constellations: Capitalism, AntiBlackness, and Black Optimism”
    David Marriott’s “Corpsing: The matter of black life”, “On decadence”, of course his book on Fanon
    Ra Judy’s “liquid blackness”
    Da Silva & Chakravarty’s “Accumulation, Dispossession and Debt”
    Daniel Corlucciello Barber’s “The Creation of Non-Being”
    The most recent publications of Tapji agar a and Sara Maria Sorentino: “Slavery is a metaphor” elaborates AP’s criticism of sovereignty as such, whether as it pertains to the state or individualistic theories of the subject. Also read Garba’s “Blackness before race: race as reoccupation” and Sorentino’s “Expecting blows”, “The Abstract slave”, & “The Sociogeny of Social death”
    David Ponton III’s “An Afropessimist account of history”
    Kwame Holmes “Necrocapitalism, or the value of Black Death”
    Farley’s “Perfecting Slavery”
    Bonnie Martin’s “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property”
    Sora Han’s “Slavery as contract: Betty’s case and the Question of Freedom”
    Sexton’s “On Black negativity, or the affirmation of nothing” & “Ante-anti blackness afterthoughts”.
    I could go on. As has been made obvious by now there’s an extensive but buried literature undergirding AP and there’s plenty of empirical work outside AP that reaffirm the theory’s core ideas. If anyone wants more readings just comment under this post. I’d point you in the direction of historians like Edward Baptist, Martin Reuf, Frédérique Beauvois, Caitlin Rosenthal, Daniel Rood. Even the findings of liberal economists / sociologists like Sandy Darity, Doug Massey, Robert Sampson, among many others should be disillusioning us of the notion that there’s even any black middle class AS an autonomous political force to speak of. But that’s neither here nor there. That’s the end of my spiel

    • @eyesofnihility
      @eyesofnihility Před 2 lety +6

      He also does lazy stuff like collapse Derrida, Foucault and lacan into each other and misattributes their influences to areas where it doesn’t apply, which is characteristic of the Jacobin crowd’s complete and utter resistance to theory. Read Joan copjec’s “read my desire” for the differences between lacan and Foucault, read ray brassier for the epistemic commonalities / dissimilarities between genealogical critique, psychoanalysis and Marxian historical materialism in “dialectics between suspicion and trust”.

    • @eyesofnihility
      @eyesofnihility Před 2 lety +7

      @@tap_water872 I have lots of respect for reed as a scholar (particularly his work on Dubois and black politics in the 80’s) but yeah the class reductionism is a bust. The strange thing is that he’s paraded around as some kind of great Marxist even though when he does provide a positive program for what he considers revolutionary practice, the majority of his demands seem to amount to or at least don’t go beyond what could be provided by social democratic states. I remember on some stream some months ago a commenter asked him what distinguishes him from your bog standard Keynesian and he basically just dodged the question lol. I’m an advocate for unions, worker co ops, organizing in general, etc but we shouldn’t lie to ourselves calling ourselves marxists as if the point of the appendix to Marx’s capital isn’t that such schemes fundamentally do little to actually confront and overcome capital. Jacobin “marxists” always just tend to be neo-ricardians in red wool, and this is especially true of Sanchez. I won’t say AP in its presents a coherent program of “what should be done”, as that’s not the point of the theory; the point of it imo is to just name our conditions with clarity, which hopefully at the grassroots level will provide the conditions for positive actions / programs.

    • @kwameholmes5291
      @kwameholmes5291 Před 2 lety +4

      Honored to be included in your list.

    • @Taylordessalines
      @Taylordessalines Před 2 lety +1

      This is gold. Love ppl like you who do this. Thank you.

    • @eyesofnihility
      @eyesofnihility Před 2 lety

      @@Taylordessalines Thanks a lot. People don’t have to agree with everything I say, but if I can get at least one person to consider stuff like this it makes the whole thing worth the effort to me

  • @TheRealElBo
    @TheRealElBo Před 2 lety +1

    Thanks for this! Shout out to Geechie Yaw!

  • @gravydale
    @gravydale Před 2 lety +6

    In the Jacobin article, when the Americo-Liberian elite chose to align with Firestone as opposed to Garvey, this was said, by the author, to be "in blackness" and because of that, an act afropessimism... but wouldn't teaming with Garvey, as opposed to white rulership structures (of even Libera) then and before, be more "in blackness" and AfroPessimist? That idea doesn't make sense at that point...or any other point within the Liberian example.

    • @Heyu7her3
      @Heyu7her3 Před rokem +1

      At first, I thought it was because Afropessimism seems to be distinctly Black American, and the people generally did not care about Garvey. But I became confused.

    • @user-rk7ws1rh3k
      @user-rk7ws1rh3k Před 6 měsíci

      Marcus Garvey was a pro-capitalist, an antisemite, an anti-communist, and a self-proclaimed fascist(no wonder W.E.B. Dubois (a convinced Marxist, just FYI) hated him). Garvey did a service by raising the esteem of black folk, but screwed up on pretty much everything else.

  • @vudoomunkyfut
    @vudoomunkyfut Před 2 lety +6

    Also to critique Afropessimism requires rather high levels of abstraction. But there are those who do it. Moten, Warren, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson... many of whom find so much generativity in AP. And sometimes... it just needs expansion.

  • @vudoomunkyfut
    @vudoomunkyfut Před 2 lety +8

    How MANY Marxist Panthers turned to anarchism because Marxism was disappointing.

    • @pocketsizedintifada
      @pocketsizedintifada Před 2 lety

      do you know? how many?

    • @Heyu7her3
      @Heyu7her3 Před rokem

      Many Black people are libertarians... just depends on if you're right (conservative/nationalist) or left (anarchist)

    • @royals080
      @royals080 Před 3 měsíci

      Anarchism has and never will be viable.

  • @olgriffin8083
    @olgriffin8083 Před 2 lety +1

    Yaw is a mindreader. give us the elementary version . great answer also'

  • @jetunb
    @jetunb Před 2 lety +11

    Blk 1st...sorry, not sorry

    • @LaLasta
      @LaLasta Před 2 lety +1

      totally, but that was true way before wilderson started calling theory from a black prospective AP

  • @begging4music
    @begging4music Před 2 lety +2

    🕯✌🏾

  • @YoungZulu1
    @YoungZulu1 Před 2 lety +1

    @1:32:10 Go AWWFFF Jared!

  • @sudipbhattacharya2114
    @sudipbhattacharya2114 Před 2 lety +4

    Socialism doesn’t mean more state all the time. There are libertarian socialists etc.

  • @fromafricaicame5909
    @fromafricaicame5909 Před rokem +1

    Host needs to stop cutting ppl off and let them finish their thought

  • @olgriffin8083
    @olgriffin8083 Před 2 lety

    I'll say it for you Dr. Ball > IT is akin to blasphemy

  • @jamesnadell1998
    @jamesnadell1998 Před 2 lety +6

    Sounds more like Afrorealism to me.

  • @fromafricaicame5909
    @fromafricaicame5909 Před rokem

    He could get down with Marimba Ani

  • @LaLasta
    @LaLasta Před 2 lety +5

    I guess I just don’t understand the need for naming a meta theory. It’s putting oneself on the map for having discovered hot water. I have a hard time thinking than anyone is AFRAID of afropessimism (as in the meta theory. Of course they have been afraid of black struggle forever!) There are reasons why people feel suspicious of frank wilderson and LBS’s quasi-dogmatic defense of anything to do with it, without ever granting benefit of doubt is not helping. Afropessimism is an academic self-reference. Of course the article equating it to Zionism is trash-another gimmicky attempt to put oneself on the “theory” map.

    • @vudoomunkyfut
      @vudoomunkyfut Před 2 lety +4

      You don't have to think. It's evident that people are. To the point where people line Joy James and Fred Moten have called out academics by name for terrible, dishonest readings and a refusal to directly engage AP thinkers.

    • @LaLasta
      @LaLasta Před 2 lety

      @@vudoomunkyfut Hi. i am sorry i am not sure i understand. i don't have to think what? and it's evident that people are what?

  • @ttown1007
    @ttown1007 Před 2 lety +2

    ADOS