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Brooke Clark
Graduate Student, Department of English
Fondren Library Research Award
Is there “something to save”?: Death and Hope in Afro-Pessimism, Queer Negativity, and the
late Baldwin
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the connections and dissensions between two fields of thought, which
scholars rarely discuss alongside each other: Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity. Through
interweaving Baldwin’s late nonfiction and interviews with these two fields, I ask theorists of
Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity questions concerning their understandings of death,
subjectivity, temporality, and hope. In doing so, I do not seek to compare these methodologies
against one another to fashion a hierarchy; rather I place these theories in conversation with one
another in the hopes to find how Afro-Pessimism’s logic can challenge Queer Negativity and
how Queer Negativity’s logic can further Afro-Pessimism. While these two theoretical fields are
immersed in death, negativity, irredeemability, and hopelessness, I use the insights of late
Baldwin to unfold Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity and then tie them together. Ultimately,
I argue that these modes of thought are anything but hopeless and assert that hope is located in
the intense, provocative, and generative power of their works themselves.
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Brooke Clark
Graduate Student, Department of English
Fondren Library Research Award
Is there “something to save”?: Death and Hope in Afro-Pessimism, Queer Negativity, and the
late Baldwin
There's a stench in the air, which, from this
distance underground, might be the smell either of
death or of spring—I hope of spring. But don't let me
trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and
in the smell of thee as in the smell of me.
1
— Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
In his June 16, 1984, interview with James Baldwin for The Village Voice, Robert
Goldstein asks midway through their discussion, “Are you as apocalyptic about the prospects for
2
sexual reconciliation as you are about racial reconciliation?” Baldwin replies, “Well, they join.
The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans
3
can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.” While this
quote is highly popular throughout Baldwin and race/sexuality scholarship, few critics cite
Goldstein’s question which elicits Baldwin’s response. This statement of Baldwin’s is quoted
excessively for its clarity and powerful assertion: race and sexuality are inseparable. However
accurate, I want to go beyond this point and consider the implications of Baldwin’s claim and
Goldstein’s question through the theoretical lens of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity.
Here, race and sexuality are not just solely any race or any sexuality. Race and sexuality,
in general, are certainly connected. Yet, Goldstein’s question points to a particular sexuality and
a particular race—those that need to be reconciled. In effect, Goldstein’s use of “reconciliation”
1
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 580.
2
James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014),
64.
3
Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 64.
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glosses over the real subjects, as “sexual reconciliation” is sexual queerness and “racial
reconciliation” is blackness. Even if we exchange “reconciliation” for queerness and blackness, a
hierarchy of oppressions still persists in the question, measuring sexuality against race. In the
interest of connection rather than comparison, I want to ask questions, similar in topic to
Goldstein’s but with different aims: What does it mean to be apocalyptic about queerness and
4
blackness? Do blackness and queerness have similar or different apocalypses? What is the
particular process of apocalypse for queerness? For blackness? What comes after the apocalypse
for both? Is there an aftermath at all to these apocalypses? As these apocalypses exist across
everyday incidents and the longue durée, where can hope be found? Can hope be possible in the
apocalypses of blackness and queerness? If so, what can we do with this potential for hope in the
face of these seemingly inevitable apocalypses? And yet, what happens if hope is no longer
possible?
At the beginning of the interview, Baldwin notes, “The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me
5
the wrong way. I never understood exactly what is meant by it.” I aim to invest this “rub”: the
frictions and harmonies among blackness’s and queerness’s apocalypses and hopes. I ask
theorists of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity these questions through particular moments in
6
Baldwin’s late nonfiction and interviews. More specifically, I think through Afro-Pessimism’s
and Queer Negativity’s conceptions of death, subjectivity, temporality, and hope along with the
connections and dissensions between these theoretical lens. I use late Baldwin’s logic to unfold
4
I use apocalypse in the plural to note both black apocalypse and queer apocalypse, so that the apocalypse of
queerness does not conflate to the apocalypse of blackness and vice versa.
5
Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 59.
6
Queer Negativity is somewhat a rephrasing of the antisocial thesis in queer theory. While the phrasing antisocial
thesis is more widely known, I use Queer Negativity, as this is the more contemporary label and emphasizes the
negativity with the theory.
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these theories to then tangle them together, in the hopes to see how their critical investments
challenge and further one another. In tracing Afro-Pessimism’s and Queer Negativity’s theories
of death, I hope to locate where the potentiality lies, where we can find hope. I do not use the
term “hope” in the context of Western liberal progressivity or utopic ends. I use hope, as a
signifier of the critical, physical, emotional, psychological, individual, communal, national, and
global work which Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity look toward with the unavoidable
imminence of death and with the seemingly unattainability of hope. In the vein of Baldwin’s
entwinement of race and sexuality, I entwine these theoretical modes with Baldwin’s
understandings not to compare but to engage the two. Like Fred Moten’s ensemble, Alexander
G. Weheliye’s assemblage, and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s theory-through-dialogue, this
project is about a collaborative conversation across fields and ways of being to see what this
7
“rub” is and where this “rub” will lead us.
Intersections and Dissents: Black Studies and Queer Theory
Before discussing the particularities of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity, definitions
of queerness and blackness, along with their general fields, are needed to place the overall
relationship between the two. Of course, queer theory arose as predominantly white in its subject
matter and considerations. Writers and theorists, such as Roderick A. Ferguson, Barbara
Christian, Evelynn Hammonds, E. Patrick Johnson, José Esteban Muñoz, Jasbir K. Puar, Kathryn
Bond Stockton, and Jack Halberstam, have attended to the field’s treatment of race “as an
8
addendum.” However, more work needs to be done in this regard, for the whiteness of queer
7
See Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas
Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, and Lauren Berlant and
Lee Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable.
8
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
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studies still persists. We see this most explicitly in the ways in which queer theory and queer of
color or black queer theory appear as separate entities in disciplinary categories and even indexes
of books. Even if one considers queer of color theory as a subfield of queer studies, the blackness
in the theory must be stated; otherwise, queer theory assumes whiteness.
A similar dynamic applies to black studies, for unless queer is stated in the title of black
studies or in one of its projects, heterosexuality prevails as the assumption. Homophobia in the
black community is certainty a partner in this, which has been thoroughly critiqued by Audre
Lorde, Barbara Smith, and other black feminist theorists. Similarly, systematic racism speaks to
queer theory’s white default. This is not to say that the black community is more homophobic
than others or that racism and homophobia are comparable injustices. The point is that social and
political discriminations penetrate these theoretical modes. The fields’ focuses certainly
contribute to this issue, as queer theory attends to sexuality and black studies to race. The issue is
not the areas’ concentrations but is the assumptions which underlie their projects and manifest in
their scholarship. In other words, queer theory and black studies have enacted the norm of the
other: queer as white and black as heterosexual.
These theories and communities at large still enact these norms, perhaps, on more subtle
levels or, perhaps, not so subtle registers. We witness this in one recent controversy concerning
the rainbow flag. In the summer of 2017, the city of Philadelphia redesigned Gilbert Baker’s
original rainbow layout by adding two stripes to its rainbow—one black and one brown placed
above the rainbow. Philadelphia’s flag was a part of the city’s More Color More Pride campaign,
aiming to illustrate gay liberation’s need for and enactment of inclusivity. Despite the flag’s
intentions, its new design drew harsh criticism within the white gay community, as the critique
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followed that the rainbow flag already represents everyone, and, thus, there is no need to modify
9
it.
Again, we see this “rub” or, as Stockton notes, the “uniquely asymmetrical” quality
10
between and within black and queer. Even considering all the brilliant work by those named
above and many others, the entwinement of queerness and blackness remains volatile territory.
In terms of my project, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity are subfields within the realms of
black studies and queer theory. While they certainly possesses their own specific methodologies,
archives, and aims, these disciplinary subsets emerge from and operate within their broader
fields’ pasts. In fact, these two practices came to be through critiquing assumptions within their
own disciplines, and entwining their critical work together offers us new ways to explore
blackness’s and queerness’s overlaps, divergences, and complications.
Definitions and Positionalities: Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity
With blackness and queerness, I do not use the terms interchangeably or suggest that one
always already references to the other. On the surface, blackness may appear solely to signify the
color of flesh, and queerness seems to only indicate a sex act of the flesh. While the body and,
thus, ontology are central to both, blackness goes far beyond just color, and queerness extends
that of just sex. Fred Moten’s study of black audio avant-garde and history, In the Break: The
Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, opens by defining blackness: “Blackness—the
extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a
9
See Nancy Coleman, “Redesigned Pride Flag Recognizes LGBT People of Color,” CNN.com, last modified June
13, 2017 and accessed December 1, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/13/health/new-pride-flag
-colors-trnd/index.html.
10
Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 27.
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11
strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity.”
Blackness continuously eradicates stability and coherency between human and subject. However,
blackness’s target for rupture is “specific” to Western ideology, which serves as the master voice
of and for subjects and, thus, regulates who is and is not a subject or human. For Moten,
blackness is not outside history or Western ideology but operates on a subaltern frequency within
these worlds, acting as a sonic modality to give an alternative, more encompassing and profound
account of beingness.
Afro-Pessimists take Moten’s definition and critique of Western hegemony a step further.
They position blackness or, more specifically, antiblackness as constitutive of Western thought,
politics, and society. Quoting Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton outlines Afro-Pessimism’s practice
and object of study:
This “afterlife of slavery,” as Saidiya Hartman terms it, challenges practitioners in the
field to question the prevailing understanding of a post-emancipation society and to
revisit the most basic questions about the structural conditions of antiblackness in the
modern world. To ask, in other words, what it means to speak of “the tragic continuity
between slavery and freedom” or “the incomplete nature of emancipation,” indeed to
12
speak of about a type of living on that survives after a type of death.
For Afro-Pessimism, slavery not only continues to live; it literally and figuratively fleshes out
the West. For instance, freedom is not just liberation or independence. Freedom is a Western
concept which comes to exist through its enforcement of antiblackness. This “revist[ing] of the
most basic questions” concerning ontology, slavery, freedom, life, death, and survival is where
Afro-Pessimism lays and does its groundwork. In effect, asking “What is freedom?” is not a
11
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 1.
12
Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions Journal 5
(Fall/Winter 2011): 23. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Macmillan, 2007), 6.
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question solely about definition, but a question about on what “grammar of suffering”—“the
13
grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering”—was this definition established.
Additionally, Afro-Pessimism returns to terms, which are usually taken as universally
understood, for universal understanding is Western understanding. More simply, the universal is
the West, and the West forms through antiblackness. Frank B. Wilderson III discusses the ways
in which universality speaks to Western violence against blackness. In Red, White, and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Wilderson’s finds that “Black positionality” is
the locus of Afro-Pessimism’s analytics and, thus, catalyzes these interrogations of “the most
14
basic questions.” In doing so, Wilderson asserts that Afro-Pessimism “shits on the inspiration
15
of the personal pronoun we.” This “we” signifies Western ideas of universal inclusivity, but as
Afro-Pessimism argues, antiblackness functions as the basis for Western ideology and
community, this “we” is predicated not on the exclusion of black bodies but on the psychological
and physical trauma and suffering of them.
From the first question of his interview with Goldstein, Baldwin takes on this “we” of the
West and, more particularly, of America. To begin the interview, Goldstein asks Baldwin, “Do
16
you feel like a stranger in gay America?” This initial inquiry signals his desired topic of
discussion: Baldwin’s personal take on sexuality. Baldwin’s reply begins, “Well, first of all I feel
like a stranger in America from almost every conceivable angle except, oddly enough, as a black
person. The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never understood exactly what is
13
Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 6 and 5.
14
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 58.
15
Ibid., 143.
16
Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 59.
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17
meant by it.” Before commenting on the word “gay,” Baldwin calls himself “a black person,”
which is not one of the reasons that he feels “like a stranger in America.” On the surface, his
remark seems contradictory, considering America’s racism undoubtedly exists before, in, and
after the time of this interview. Is Baldwin’s comment that a black person is a stranger in
America contrary to America’s racism? In other words, is racism or, more specifically,
antiblackness a stranger in America? For Baldwin and Afro-Pessimists, the answer is a
resounding, ongoing, reverberating “No.” Baldwin’s reply points to how antiblackness is no
stranger, outsider, or alien to America but structures the nation. Baldwin’s articulation of racism
as non-stranger in America follows Afro-Pessimism’s evisceration of “the personal pronoun we.”
The West, America, and “we” exist and maintain themselves through antiblackness. What are we
do with Baldwin’s rub with “gay” and “gay America”?
The term “gay” rubs Baldwin “the wrong way” partially due to its investment in Western
identitarianism. Thus, antiblackness structures “gay” and especially “gay America,” as they are
referential of the West and, in effect, antiblackness. Queer Negativity also has a problem with the
way “gay” and “gay America” rubs it. Why is “gay” used in conjunction with America, when
antiblackness is already suggested by naming the nation? Firstly, “gay America” places gay as
inconsistent with America, locating gay outside the nation and, in turn, marking gay as
exceptional to America. At the same time, the phrase implies a relationship between gay and
America. Gay becomes a sexuality of and for the nation. Queer theorists, especially those on the
side of negativity, would push against Goldstein’s phrasing and, like Afro-Pessimism, locate and
17
Ibid.
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explore the “most basic” presumptions underlying “gay America” and the community this phrase
fosters.
Firstly, scholars use the term “queer” rather than “gay” to reference sexualities that
extend beyond that of (white) male-to-male desire. Additionally, even suggesting the possibility
of “gay America” implies that queer sex can be normalized and sanctioned by the country. While
some scholars of queer studies strive for “gay America” to become reality, theorists of Queer
Negativity contest this desire. Queer Negativity resists normalization and institutionalization, as
18
they define queerness by the radical nature of its queer sex. Thus, normalizing or institutional
ventures, such as the right to marry and to participate in the military, follow LGBTQ+ activism
rather than Queer Negativity’s aims. In other words, Queer Negativists find that queer, emptied
of its revolutionary political and sexual charge, would be “gay America.” In effect, “gay
America” may be possible, but “queer America” is the antithesis of queerness itself.
Queer Negativity began as and is most often termed the antisocial turn in queer theory. In
2006, PMLA published a roundtable discussion entitled “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer
Theory,” which collected views from senior scholars, such as Robert L. Caserio, Lee Edelman,
Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, on queerness’s antisociality. While
diverse in its archives, methodologies, and objectives, the debate among these theorists
frequently condense to questions concerning either queer’s “political negativity” or “queer
19
utopianism.” Similar to Hartman’s, Sexton’s, and Wilderson’s critique of Moten’s use of
18
In contemporary queer scholarship, the definition of queerness has surpassed that of just sex and sexuality.
Theorists now use queer in discussions on aesthetics, ecology, psychology, age, animal, objects and many other
objects of study. For my project, I use queer in relation to sex and sexuality. Additionally, while the field of queer
studies may be considered institutionalized, as it is a visible and recognized discipline, I am referring to the notion of
queer, signifying its resistance toward institutional forms.
19
Robert L. Caserio, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Thesis in
Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, No. 3 (May 2006): 821.
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blackness, Edelman denounces queer utopianism because it fails to recognize “that organization
depends on internal antagonism, on the self-constituting tension of negativity that forms of
20
liberal utopianism.” Altogether, negativity is not outside or alternative to the social but is
structurally essential to it, and queer negativity reads this construction through sexuality and sex
acts.
At the same time, sexuality does not solely act as a lens for theorists of Queer Negativity,
21
but it is the location for the most potent “undoing” of one’s self. Queer Negativists follow Leo
Bersani’s view of sexuality in his landmark essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In his piece, Bersani
forgoes queer sex’s or even sex’s redeemability or optimist possibility by psychoanalytically
22
mapping sexuality’s powerful “self-shattering” effects on the already-divided subject. Robyn
Wiegman’s recent review of the queer theory’s turn to negativity notes how Bersani’s thesis
stripped sexuality of repressive understandings, for he “conceiv[ed] of sexuality as resistant to
23
the imperative to socialize our conception of it.” From this, Queer Negativity arose and found
one of its primary voices in Edelman’s polemic, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.
Employing Lacan, Edelman theorizes his concept of “reproductive futurism” which is
heteronormativity’s ideology based around the family’s and, more importantly, the Child’s
24
futurity and locates “the possibility of queer resistance” “outside the political domain.”
Queerness is “outside” the (heteronormative) social because queer bodies are non-reproductive
20
Ibid.
21
Robyn Wiegman, “Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You,” Cultural Critique 95 (Winter 2017):
220.
22
Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” (Winter 1987):
217.
23
Wiegman, 220.
24
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
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and, thus, cannot participate in heteronormative relations and futures established by sexual
reproduction.
Yet, the social works to position the queer as “outside” its realm, which is structurally
similar to Afro-Pessimism’s account of the West’s formation through and by antiblackness. In
Sex, or the Unbearable, Edelman along with Lauren Berlant further this point by recognizing
how queerness, negativity, and queer negativity are not merely “outside” the social but
25
“intrinsic” to it. As heteronormativity rules the social, they make the point that queer bodies are
politically, socially, and ontologically negative beings. Subsequently, the idea of “gay
America”—a nation-building type of queerness—requires the queer to be not only normalized
but productive in the heteronormative sexual, social, and political senses. In other words, the
possibility of “gay America” requires a future which is not only unreachable to queer bodies but
also, as Edelman argues, is illusory to all. For Edelman and other Queer Negativists, the future is
an ever-deferred temporality, a “fantasy” which sustains the fantasy of heteronormativity’s
26
“stability,” “coherence,” and “order.” In effect, “gay America” is an unattainable and
undesirable ideal for Queer Negativity, as it not only enacts a future but enacts a future based on
institutional integration and nationalist profits.
Death: Afro-Pessimism’s Ontological Battle and Queer Negativity’s Driving Force
Discussing Afro-Pessimism’s and Queer Negativity’s conceptions of death seems to echo
27
the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “The end was in the beginning.” While Ellison’s
narrator refers to the narrative construction of his telling, his statement certainly translates to
Queer Negativity and Afro-Pessimism, as the end or death serves as a beginning for these
25
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), xiii.
26
Edelman, No Future, 7.
27
Ellison, 571.
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thinkers too. These theorists turn to death is not purely an end or beginning; rather this turn
speaks to endings, beginnings, and, ultimately, an ongoing ontological state for black and/or
queer bodies. Death marks the starting point of these conversations, since coherent subjectivity,
humanity, and even life are not guarantees for blackness and queerness. Seeing that the
ontologies of blackness and queerness do not and cannot afford to take life as inherent to all
beings, scholars of Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity must interrogate Western ideologies to
show the constructed nature of innateness and inheritance. Without political, social, economic, or
any recognized form of subjectivity, living is no longer a promise. Thus, death is who, where,
and what thinkers of Queer Negativity and Afro-Pessimism must lead their explorations and
questions, for death’s before (humanity, subjecthood) and after (inheritance, continuance) are not
constituents for being queer and/or black. While their interests overlap, these theories tackle
subjectivity and the future in differing ways. Their divergences push against theories of the other,
subsequently furthering the considerations and possibilities of each.
Toward the end of his essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,”
Baldwin reads humanity through death, as a way to motivate readers to think about death but not
become paralyzed by it:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the
beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices,
steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which
is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of
death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the
28
conundrum of life.
For Baldwin, death is a centralizing nucleus for the living, but through psychological and
religious powers, the living attempt to evade not only death itself but “the fact” of it. We should
28
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 91-92.
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“rejoice” in this fact, Baldwin says, because evacuating death from life empties life of its
“beauty.” Here, one should also “earn one’s death” by intensely encountering and interrogating
“the conundrum of life.” While Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity do not advocate for
“rejoic[ing]” for or in death, Baldwin’s attention to “the fact of death” speaks to issue of
ontology and subjecthood in black and/or queer death.
On Wilderson’s site Incognergo.org, he has a page devoted to outlining
Afro-Pessimism’s definition and aim, and the first line of his piece reads: “Rather than celebrate
Blackness as a cultural identity, Afro-Pessimism theorizes it as a position of accumulation and
29
fungibility (Saidiya Hartman); that is a condition—or relation—of ontological death.”
Blackness within itself is death. Like “the personal pronoun we,” death is Westernized concept as
well as ontology. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and philosopher whose work catalyzed
Afro-Pessimism, writes, “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the
30
wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.” The West
overdetermines blackness’s affinity with death by inventing blackness along with major
philosophical modes to determine blackness as “ontological death.” No matter how the coin is
flipped—to blackness or death—the sides no longer matter, as they are the same under the
Western regime. And yet, blackness still signifies the real or, more precisely, the physical deaths
of blackness, those of countless unnamed slaves and those of black bodies throughout history
which have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of the West.
Returning to Sexton’s statement quoting Hartman, Afro-Pessimism engages with the
“afterlife of slavery,” signifying major, irredeemable deaths by slavery preceding this
29
Frank Wilderson III, “Afro-Pessimism” last modified 2008. incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html.
30
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 110.
Clark 15
31
“afterlife”—”a type of living on that survives after a type of death.” This survival is not one of
redemption, as Afro-Pessimism renounces the idealism of reparative readings. However, Sexton
complicates blackness’s “ontological death” by furthering Baldwin’s point concerning life and
death’s relation and relationality: “Rather than approaching (the theorization of) social death and
(the theorization of) social life as an ‘either/or’ proposition, then, why not attempt to think them
32
as a matter of ‘both/and’?” Instead of life and death being based on difference, life and death
can co-exist and do so, as black bodies continue to life within the social despite and alongside
their ongoing social death. Hartman’s “afterlife of slavery” does not signify slavery’s passing;
rather it attends to the black lives lived within a world forever marked by and maintained through
slavery. Hartman’s afterlife of slavery, Sexton’s social death, and Wilderson’s ontological death,
however different in their conceptions of death, all find that blackness carries on the traumatic
past of slavery. As Sexton notes, “[B]lack life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in
33
social death.” Thus, black bodies are living within an ongoing death of and in the past that has
yet to conclude.
Through Bersani and Edelman, Queer Negativity takes on “the fact of death” by means of
the death drive. Bersani’s employs Freud’s use of the concept, while Edelman holds to Lacan.
For Freud and Lacan, the death drive marks one’s drive, psychologically and behaviorally,
toward death, in contrast to the drive toward sex, reproduction, and survival. Opposing the death
drive’s traditional psychoanalytic connotations, Bersani and Edelman connect the death drive to
sex, and in particular, queer sex. Edelman asserts, “[A]s the inarticulable surplus that dismantles
the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called
31
Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” 23.
32
Ibid., 22.
33
Ibid., 29.
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34
forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.” The queer finds itself
against all sociality and immersed in negativity, a specific negativity that tends toward death and
sex rather than toward death but not sex. The connection between death and sex emerges from
queer bodies’ inability to sexually reproduce and, thus, inability to productively engage in the
social. Death for Queer Negativity is not grounded in ontological questions like Afro-Pessimism.
Rather Queer Negativity finds death most potent in questions of temporality: the concept of not
having a future. The queer bodies literally and figuratively embody the unattainability and, in
turn, fantasy of futurity. Edelman also notes, “[A] death drive movement, a back and forth that
35
betrays the insistence of something we can never resolve, get beyond, or make peace with.”
Queerness’s enactment of no future—death—is certainly that something we are not able to
“make peace with” because the idea of resolution or reparation is dependent on a future that
queerness cannot and directly refuses to fix, whether for the better or worse unreachable future.
Subjectivity: Afro-Pessimism’s Problem and Queer Negativity’s Failure to See It
While it may be obvious in their titles, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity both
abstain from optimism, as it stems from prejudicial exclusion and fantasy. Each interrogate the
work of reparative readings or “reconciliation,” not to forgo hope or life but to generate more
productive and pragmatic understandings of black and queer processes of survival. Both question
subjectivity as a way to interrogate optimism’s promotion of the subject as inherently good. In
the vein of asking “the most basic questions,” Afro-Pessimism refuses to assume that blackness
possesses subjectivity, personhood, and even humanness. In fact, their work actively shows that
34
Edelman, No Future, 9.
35
Berlant and Edelman, 28.
Clark 17
blackness can never be a subject or human under Western thought. Instead, as Hortense J.
Spillers’s pathbreaking essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
asserts, blackness is flesh: “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape
36
concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” Flesh marks a
being’s ontology before ideologies or discourses encounter it.
Again, as the West’s constitution depends on antiblackness, the subject—a Western
creation—excludes blackness. In a 1969 interview titled, “Disturber of the Peace: James
Baldwin—An Interview,” Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynchy ask Baldwin about the Negro,
and Baldwin’s reply redirects the conversation to the issue of terminology:
Interviewers: Can a Negro ever talk about anything but being a Negro?
Baldwin: I get so tired of black and white, you know, so tired of talking about it,
especially when you can’t get anything across. What you have to do, I suppose, is invest
the vocabulary with something it doesn’t contain yet. Don’t you see what I’m trying to
do? I’m trying to find another word besides Negro to say what I mean, and I can’t use
37
tragedy.
Baldwin addresses the difficulty of talking about one’s experience and positionality, when the
language available is structured around the exclusion of that experience. In other words, Negro is
the Western term used to describe Baldwin and his experience, but the constructed identity of the
Negro fails to “get anything across” that he desire to communicate. Afro-Pessimism’s critique of
Western thought and language becomes apparent in Baldwin’s trouble with articulating himself
through “vocabulary with something it doesn’t contain yet.” Here, blackness operates similarly
to Negro; language cannot encapsulate these states of being, especially considering the
vocabulary’s source.
36
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, No. 2, “Culture
and Countermemory: The "American" Connection” (Summer 1987): 67.
37
Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 81(emphasis added).
Clark 18
Why does Baldwin refuse to use “tragedy” as a substitute term for Negro? Firstly,
nothing can substitute the term Negro or blackness, as they are overdetermined by their
ontological, historical, temporal, sexual, linguist, social, and political significances. Fanon notes
the excessiveness tied to blackness: “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I
was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects,
38
slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin.’” Fanon’s discovery of blackness is
really his discovery of the West’s view of him. Western language—blackness, Negro, and
tragedy—rely upon antiblackness or, more precisely, is contingent upon “batter[ing] down”
blackness with exorbitant symbolic meaning, so that it is emptied of personhood through its
overflow of referents. However, this referential spillage does not arise from blackness itself.
Quoting Ronald A.T. Judy, Wilderson asserts, “[T]he Negro is a symbol that cannot ‘enable the
39
representation of meaning [because] it has no referent.’” The Western hegemony generates this
referential overproduction with blackness. In doing so, the West uses antiblackness to define
subjectivity and, ultimately, life, so that the West appears coherent and stable and blackness
seems irrational and violently erratic. Within this space of blackness’s no-referential state,
Afro-Pessimism challenges Western referential lineages regarding the connections among body,
human, consciousness, and subjectivity because these links not only do not apply to blackness
40
but also are predicated on undeterminable “grammar of suffering” experienced by black bodies.
Ultimately, Baldwin’s and Afro-Pessimism’s challenge of language leads to the challenge
of subjectivity. How does Queer Negativity handle the problematic implications of the West’s
38
Fanon, 112.
39
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 39. Ronald A.T. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic
Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 107.
40
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 6.
Clark 19
language and sense of self? Put simply, it is not their question, for these theorists use Western
language and philosophy to articulate and support their projects. The role of the West in their
archives and terminology goes largely unnoticed. This lack of questioning is partially due to their
interest in Western formations of the social, but again, the Western qualities of these formations
remain unstated. Additionally, Queer Negativity presumes the subjectivity and human status of
bodies. By returning to Bersani’s point of sexuality’s “self-shattering” effects, we find that the
self, in some manner, exists before this sexuality-induced shattering occurs. While Queer
Negativity regards the self as undone, it fails to ask: do queer bodies have selves or subjectivities
from the start?; what determines one’s having of subjecthood?; and what is the connections
among flesh, body, human, personhood, and subject?
For Queer Negativity and Afro-Pessimism, universal inclusivity is a fictitious liberal
ideal striving for reparative understandings. Both fields note the pitfalls of desiring racial and
sexual reconciliation. Like Afro-Pessimism, Queer Negativity refuses the fantasy of universality.
And yet, Queer Negativity recognizes this universality as a symptom of neoliberalism rather than
Western thought. If Queer Negativity refuses inclusivity, then the notion that all beings have
subjectivity would fall short. At the same time, subjecthood and its ontological entanglements
with body, human, and self remain knotted together for Queer Negativists. Queer Negativity and
queer theory overall find a challenge in asking “the most basic questions” like Afro-Pessimism.
Yet, this does not mean this task is impossible. By interrogating the very existence of
subjectivity, Queer Negativity may find a clearer image of their aims. Edelman urges us to treat
futurity as the fantasy and radically reside in the present and just that. Dismantling institutions to
just erect new ones requires a future to work and look toward. Thus, Edelman argues, “[T]he aim
Clark 20
of queer negativity is rather to hammer [institutions and other normalizing entities] into the dust”
41
and leave them as that. If subjectivity, self, and humanness are the cornerstones of Western
thought, refusing to take them as givens would certainty destabilize the powers that be. In effect,
Queer Negativity’s recognition of subjectivity as a privileged promise rather than a guarantee
would already do the work it pursues—to leave neoliberal Western ideologies in “the dust.”
Temporality: Afro-Pessimism’s Boundless Past and Queer Negativity’s No Future
Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity locate negativity in different temporal registers.
Afro-Pessimism discusses the ways in which slavery’s past is unending, as slavery marks all
time and all blackness that follows it. Queer Negativity lays its interest in the future or, more
specifically, the fantasy of it. Queerness aims to embody a constant state of radical presentism, in
order to avoid falling into the illusion of the future. These temporal focuses appear to be the
antithesis of the other—blackness with ongoing past, queerness with a nonexistent future—yet
queerness’s treatment of time may benefit blackness’s temporal understandings.
Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being directly tackles black bodies’
inheritance of slavery’s trauma. Sharpe’s uses the term “wake” to temporally and spatially
indicate the time of slavery’s beginning to the contemporary moment, as slavery’s presence is
still felt and subjected on black bodies. With this, she notes, “In the wake, the past that is not past
reappears, always, to rupture the present,” and refers to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the
42
past as “a position,” and “[t]hus, in no way can we identify the past as past.” Under
Afro-Pessimism, both blackness and “pastness” are positions rather than bounded categories or
Edelman, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” 822.
41
42
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 9. Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 15.
Clark 21
43
limited systems of knowledge. Further into her monograph, Sharpe summarizes the state of
“Black positionality” in terms of slavery’s “singularity”:
In the United States, slavery is imagined as a singular event even as it changed over time
and even as its duration expands into supposed emancipation and beyond. But slavery
was not singular; it was, rather, a singularity—a weather event or phenomenon likely to
occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances. Emancipation did not
make free Black life free; it continues to hold us in that singularity. The brutality was not
44
singular; it was the singularity of antiblackness.
Singularity, for Sharpe, does not imply a singular entity, for she uses the physics definition of the
term, which connotes “a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are
infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling
45
into a black hole.” There is more than an afterlife to slavery; there is also an infinite state of
“brutality” and death fleshed out in anti/blackness. Black bodies inherit the trauma of slavery, an
infinitely transforming and existing death, which simultaneously extends and collapses time and
space to find itself in “the singularity of antiblackness.”
What if we were to apply Queer Negativity’s forgoing of the future to Afro-Pessimism?
Baldwin has words to help situate this question. In her 1979 interview with Baldwin titled,
“James Baldwin: No Gain for Race Relations,” Hollie I. West writes, “Baldwin is nearly as
articulate in his speech as in his celebrated writing. And on this day his words have painted a
paradox. All during the interview he has said he’s an optimist. So why is he voicing such
46
pessimism?” To that, Baldwin responses: “It’s a contradiction… When I say I’m not a
pessimist, I mean that I don’t consider that everything is lost even though I don’t see how we’re
43
Referring back to Wilderson’s observation that Afro-Pessimism concentrates on “Black positionality.”
44
Sharpe, 106.
45
Sharpe, 106, quoting Merriam-Webster Online.
46
James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, eds. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1989), 172.
Clark 22
47
going to have a future or even present.” While Baldwin says he is not a pessimist because he
does not believe “that everything is lost,” he remains unsure about what the current moment and
the time to come. Baldwin’s statement does necessarily suggest that he entirely aligns with
Queer Negativity’s disavowal of the future. At the same time, his apprehension toward futurity
speaks to Queer Negativity, as Baldwin questions the possibility of a future and worth of striving
toward it.
With Afro-Pessimism’s focus on the past of slavery rupturing all that comes after it, what
would happen to the inheritance of slavery if the future was treated as fantasy? This is definitely
easier asked than theorized. This is not to say that Afro-Pessimism is invested in maintaining the
inheritance of slavery because their thinkers currently do not view the future as an ever-deferred
temporality. By its logic, Afro-Pessimism partially supports Queer Negativity’s concept of the
future as illusion maintain the continuance of the social because asserting no future undermines
Western ideologies. My aim is not to critique Afro-Pessimism’s understanding of the past as a
position and slavery as an non-concluded, traumatic event. I think playing with the notion of the
future as fantasy, which is integral to Queer Negativity, may afford Afro-Pessimism another
articulation of the “afterlife of slavery” and may allow slavery to be stripped of its inherited
status.
How would Afro-Pessimism’s theorizations of slavery’s “singularity” change if the future
is seen as fantasy? On the surface, Afro-Pessimism does not engage with the future, yet for
slavery’s “singularity” to have its infinite, boundless impact in and on time, it needs a future for
this to transpire. Taking the future as nonexistent would alter the continuance of slavery’s
47
Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, 172-3.
Clark 23
afterlives. However, saying that the future is a fantasy does not preclude time from progressing;
consequently, naming the future as fantasy would not automatically rid slavery’s marker from
time. Queer Negativity’s call for no future functions as a complete dismantlement of the social,
West, and anything that needs a future to be recognizable and coherent. Claiming a similar
polemic against futurity may be a way for Afro-Pessimism to tackle and work toward undoing
slavery’s “singularity,” not to forget slavery’s cruelty but to halt its continuance of violence on
black bodies for the West.
Hope: The Work of Afro-Pessimism’s and Queer Negativity’s “Rub”
While in dialogue with Edelman, Berlant takes note of their practice’s limitations: “As
with sex and politics, theory is that to which we look both to disturb things and to repair them.
48
But Lee and I begin with problems that are not reparable by theory or, perhaps, by anything.”
These irresolvable “problems” of death, subjectivity, temporality, and hope are just a few
irredeemable and undeterminable issues within Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity. While a
problem’s irreparability would usually suggest hopelessness, Afro-Pessimism and Queer
Negativity locate the most productive hope in these hopeless endeavors. We see this near the end
of Black Skin, White Masks, as Fanon states, “In a savage struggle I am willing to accept
49
convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the impossible.” Despite
their monikers of pessimism and negativity, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity interrogate
“the impossible” to see “the possibility” within it. Thus, hope is not traceable to one of their
focuses or methods; it is instilled in the practices themselves.
48
Berlant and Edelman, 71.
49
Fanon, 218.
Clark 24
In his manifesto-like piece, Sexton’s “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear World” ends with:
“If Afro-Pessimism strikes a nerve, confusing the bounds of the intramural and the extramural in
the process, then it is not unrelated to a certain conjuring of spirit, or attitude, of those still
50
willing to fight for what is right and necessary rather than simply in the immediate interest.” In
Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant concludes her theory-through-dialogue practice with Edelman
by noting, “Structural consistency is a fantasy; the noise of relation’s impact, inducing
incompletion where it emerges, is the overwhelming condition that enables the change that,
51
within collaborative action, can shift lived worlds.” Sharpe’s In the Wake opens with questions
concerning how “to tend to” Black people and their dead, and her answer is, “It means work. It is
work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the
52
needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living.”
Here are the ultimate “rubs”: these contacts, connections, and collaborations across
Afro-Pessimist and Queer Negativist thought. Sexton’s call for “those still willing to fight,”
Edelman’s and Berlant’s call for world-shifting “collaborative action,” and Sharpe’s call for
“hard emotion, physical, and intellectual work” all see hope in these attitudes and actions. By
putting these fields in direct conversation with one another, we see how Afro-Pessimism’s and
Queer Negativity’s conceptions of death, subjectivity, and temporality all relate and complicate
one other, fashioning larger conversations, projects, and work to be done.
Near the beginning of Red, White, and Black, Wilderson points to Baldwin’s essay “The
Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” to emphasize how the structure between whiteness and
blackness precludes blackness from empathy. He quotes this line from Baldwin: “There is a
50
Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes, 19 (2016): paragraph 35.
51
Berlant and Edelman, 125.
52
Sharpe, 10.
Clark 25
difference between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to
53
save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.” While Wilderson’s reads this as a “barring”
of blackness from empathy, I think Baldwin’s statement forces us to ask generally: Is there
54
“something to save”? and Is there “anything to lose”? Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity
extensively chronicle the physical, emotional, psychological, sexual, political, and social losses
tied to blackness and queerness. Through their engagements with loss, death, irredeemability,
pessimism, negativity, and hopelessness, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity both find
“something to save” in the act of saving. In other words, these fields work to save current
understandings of saving, redemption, and reparability through their refusal to save the social
and West from themselves. Instead, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity work through the
hopeless to find hope in the very act of their work. Whether dead or living, being or subject, an
ongoing past or nonexistent future, Afro-Pessimism and Queer Negativity “rub” against,
alongside, and across one another, hoping through their work to make impossibility possible and
possibility impossible.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage International, 1961),
53
172.
54
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 12.
Clark 26
Bibliography
Baldwin, James. Conversations with James Baldwin. Eds. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
———. James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Brooklyn: Melville
House, 2014.
———. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Vintage
International, 1961.
———. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993.
Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press,
2014.
Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural
Activism” (Winter 1987): 197-222.
Caserio, Robert L. and Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean.
“The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121, No. 3 (May 2006): 819-28.
Coleman, Nancy. “Redesigned Pride Flag Recognizes LGBT People of Color.” CNN.com. Last
modified June 13, 2017. Accessed December 1, 2017,
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/13/health/new-pride-flag -colors-trnd/index.html.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press,
2004.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove
Press, 1967.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York:
Macmillan, 2007.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Clark 27
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes, 19 (2016).
———. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions
Journal 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1-47.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics
17, No. 2, “Culture and Countermemory: The "American" Connection” (Summer 1987):
64-81.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.”
Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1997.
Wiegman, Robyn. “Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You.” Cultural Critique
95 (Winter 2017): 219-43.
Wilderson III, Frank B. “Afro-Pessimism” last modified 2008.
incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html.
———. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010.
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