Beyond Analogues and Analytics: Afrofuturism and the Recovery of Frank Wilderson’s Grammar of Black Suffering

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism as a analytic contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through currents in Afrofuturism. The article argues Wilderson's use of Orlando Patterson's concept of social death results in a performative contradiction as its claims deny the very possibility of their justification. The result is the inability to substantiate that Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness. The article then argues that Wilderson's Afropessimism is better understood as a mythology rather than an analytic. Interpreted as myth, Afropessimism can articulate the grammar of Black suffering through a religious consciousness rather than scientistic or philosophical reason. Afrofuturism serves as a resource in this task by creating images of the past and present simultaneously within consciousness. The claim is evidenced through engaging Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Octavia Butler's Kindred.