Between Hopelessness and Despair: Afropessimism and Black Nihilism in Ta-Nehisi Coates's Works

Most of the criticism that Ta-Nehisi Coates received in the aftermath of the publication of his work Between the World and Me orbits around its lack of hopefulness. Indeed, it is several times in the text that Coates tempers his son’s expectations about foreseeing an end to racial conflicts as he tells him that “I do not believe that we can stop [racists], Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves” (Between the World 151). Certainly, the previous contention has drawn critics into reading Coates’s work as an attack against black agency (Chatterton Williams n.p.). It is our contention that, far from being read as a manifestation of cynicism, Coates’s negativity also has a galvanizing dimension. In fact, by emphasizing the futility of hope, which for Coates traps black individuals in an “unending pursuit” of progress (Warren “Black Nihilism” 221), he provides readers with many alternatives to confront the rampant racism that still pervades U.S. society nowadays.

Jade Montserrat’s Fugitive Traces and Earth-Splattered Bodies

This article discusses the Scarborough-born Black British artist Jade Montserrat, interrogating her multimedia work in the light of the history of slavery and Black British presence, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. It looks specifically at the video works Clay and Peat Bog, discussing them in the context of their relation to Black presence in the North and the history of Black agency including new information about runaway slaves. The watercolour Toes and the installation piece No Need for Clothing are discussed in these terms as well, while the latter is used also to describe how charcoal traces from the work illuminate the physical cost of the work on Black bodies. The article uses theoretical work by Edouard Glissant, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Katherine McKitterick, Ian Baucom, and Hannah Arendt, as well as the context of Black British history, to help illuminate the multiple meanings the work engenders.

Revolutionary Suicide

Chapter 6 examines how the absence of hope and the collapse into black pessimism were driven by the exposure of white liberalism’s collaborations with anti-black political rhetoric through the language of “law and order,” through the expansion of the FBI’s harassment and surveillance of Black Power activists, and through the expansion of mass incarceration. Using Huey Newton’s writings, this chapter charts how revolutionary suicide operates both as a Black Power meme as a well as a repository of feelings about black Being in a colonial state where blacks have been denied both thinking and feeling as avenues of expression. With specific focus on the rhetorical form of the eulogy, this chapter describes how Newton’s revolutionary suicide is an attempt to reconcile assassination and repression with possibilities for black agency through what Corrigan calls “necromimesis,” but it demonstrates how little room there was for black activists to politically maneuver by 1971 as the nation consolidated racial feelings around law and order politics and new conservatism.

Free at Lass!

The final chapter examines the Harlem Negro Unit’s immensely popular production of Haiti. Authored by white New York journalist William Dubois, white theatre critics attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of Black primitivism which included Emperor Jones and Orson Welles’ recent Voodoo version of Macbeth. By contrast, the Black performance community worked to transform Dubois’s racist play into a celebration of the Haitian Republic’s Black heroes. The success of Haiti helped the Black performance community push the Federal Theatre to invest in Black dramatists. On the eve of the FTP’s closure two new Black dramas were being prepared for production: Panyared, (1939) explores the origins of African slavery and was the first instalment of a historical trilogy by Hughes Allison; Theodore Browne’s Go Down Moses (1938), is a dramatization of Harriet Tubman’s life which examines Black agency in ending slavery. While neither drama made it to the stage, centering Black theatre manuscripts, and the performance communities who developed them, allows us to see how African Americans imagined radical paths to the future.

Race Leaders, Race Traitors, and the Necropolitics of Black Exceptionalism in Paul Beatty’s Fiction

This essay examines two oppositional figures in Paul Beatty’s debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996), and most recent novel, The Sellout (2015): the exalted race leader and the excoriated race traitor. Positioned at extreme ends of the spectrum of exceptionalism, these figures function to perpetuate a phenomenon that the essay’s author terms the necropolitics of black exceptionalism, the paradox of justifying the violent oppression of the majority of black people by celebrating or censuring a single black figure. In exploring the absurd dimensions of these extreme figures through the lens of satire, both novels denounce black exceptionalism as a necropolitical tool of oppression that entrenches the social death and civic exclusion of black people in a modern US society that purports to be color-blind and postracial. Emerging within the postmodern turn of the African American literary tradition, these novels take on a nihilistic tone to raise questions about how the black community might effectively (if at all) achieve civil progress in the contemporary age. Ultimately, these satirical novels reimagine historically necropolitical spaces, such as the basketball court, the plantation, and the segregated urban neighborhood, as potential, albeit vexed sites of black agency, empowerment, and community building.

The “Grapevine Telegraph”

This chapter examines black agency during the immediate post-Civil War period of 1865-1871, a time in which African American movement and migration transforms the region. In the attempt to achieve a fuller measure of their freedom, black migrants leave Virginia and travel over the Appalachian Mountains into the newly formed state of West Virginia. Though free in the ostensibly anti-slavery state, racism impedes black aspiration. The chapter foregrounds the varied methods blacks utilize to ameliorate these barriers and constraints to build lives anew. It concludes that the primary purpose of black migration into the state and Huntington was not political or social gain but the acquisition of gainful employment affiliated with the establishment of the upstart Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

Brazil's Black Christianity and the Counter-hegemonic Production of Knowledge in World Christianity

Brazil is home for the largest African diaspora. In spite of that, until the end of the twentieth century, Brazil's Africanness tended to be hidden under the Eurocentric construct of a colour-blind national identity and the myth of racial democracy. Since the 1990s, Brazil's negritude or blackness has emerged as an important source of culture, knowledge, identity and public policy. Such a reconfiguration of Brazilian identity and culture to privilege black agency challenges common assumptions in the study of the religions of Brazil, including Christianity. This article examines the impact of Afro-Brazilian spirituality and religions upon Brazilian Christianity, shedding new light on Afro-Brazilian contributions to the formation of Brazil's cultural and religious mosaic. It highlights the often-overlooked agency of Afro-Brazilians as social, religious and cultural actors who have not only resisted colonial and neocolonial efforts to whitewash Brazilian culture, but have also positively contributed to the production of culture, knowledge and identities through a dynamic relation with their African roots. Finally, focusing on Afro-Brazilian spirituality as an important shaper of Brazilian Christianity, this article advances a decolonial perspective that draws attention to the ways Brazil's black Christianity contributes to the production of counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge and knowing.

TOWARDS OTHER NARRATIVES: EDUCATION AND DERACIALIZATION OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN BRAZIL

In this paper, we discuss the historical process involved in the construction of the Brazilian national identity, based on the racialization of the black experience, an element still present in the Brazilian identity formation process. Despite the processes of dehumanization endured by black people, they can and must be portrayed in educational spaces for their resistance and fight in order to escape from the zone of non-being and ontological erasure caused by modernity. The paper is organized in three general topics: a) racism, education and the national question in Brazil; b) the processes of racialization of black subjects; and c) black resistance and black agency as a way to construct new narratives in the field of education.