AN AFROPESSIMIST ACCOUNT OF HISTORY

Abstract

This article addresses four questions: What is Afropessimism? What is history? What can history (not) do in service of black people given the insights of Afropessimism? If history fails to service black people, what should be done with history? It argues that an unavoidable conclusion of Afropessimism is that history, a disciplinary mode of knowledge production, is tethered to the historical construct of the Human and thus is exploitative of the Slave/the Black, which is the negative image of the Human. This article elaborates on the implications of this indictment of history, suggesting that invention of different ways of being becomes at least possible to imagine—to think about—when history is brought into relief, not as the form by which historians account for the past but rather as the evidence of who historians are and what they value in the world as it exists.