Countering Afropessimist Ontological Nihilism

Abstract

Upon my first encounters with Afropessimism, I was, at once, enthralled, and unsettled. I spent a few years unsure about how to hold the simultaneity of these feelings and the root of what was causing the latter. Trained in elements of the white supremacy of the US academy, I struggled through learning to read and regurgitate the canonical DWEMS (Dead White European Males) so that I could learn to justify my decisions to center scholarship by peoples of the Global Majority. By “justify” here, I mean to fulfill the graduate student requirements of my coursework demonstrating enough mastery of the canonical theoretical imperatives of the DWEMS so that I could spend my time moving in a direction more suited to my goals and areas of inquiry. Given these reservations and my struggles, I asked myself if I should then be equally, if notmore generous, with scholarly interlocutors of what we might call the Afropessimist canon?How could I, on the one hand, enjoy the dense theoretical mapping and revel in understanding it, while concomitantly feel tremendous disease at what I call its ontological suicidal ideation and ultimate entrapment in a Euro-colonial white supremacist metaphysical perception of a singular world? In this article, I endeavor to embark on a generous relationshipwith the scholarship of Afropessimism to offer an exit from its ontological nihilism and move instead towards a pluriversal spiritual understandings of the universe from Afro-diasporic cosmology. I write from the positionality of a Black non-binary transman and ordained/initiated Lukumí priest of Obatala practicing in a Yoruba-centric spiritual ile or lineage. I write as a spiritual practitioner whose cosmological understandings come from practice, primarily, and the literature, secondarily. I use Africana Esoteric Studies (AES-more on this shortly) to bring together Afrofuturist thought and Afro-diasporic spiritual/cosmological epistemologies to add to the voices of scholars that give us, as Black people, something beyond Afropessimism’s totalizing claims. The basis of afropessimism’s absolute ontological nihilism signals a major gap in spiritual and cosmological scholarly perception, engaging in a disciplinary decadence. It is this gap that the present article attends to. In making this contention and commitment, I wish to forward a pluriversal perspective. While I do not wish to over-simplify the Afropessimist project, within the limited scope of this article I remain specific by attending to the project’s totalizing and nihilistic ontological position (exemplified in the work of Frank Wilderson III and Calvin Warren) because of how this position ultimately surrenders to the metaphysical location European continental philosophy as if it can name all that is, even while acknowledging the anti-blackness that this Western metaphysical universe relies on. In this instance, I ask how those of us who do not live our lives from a Euro-centered