Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)?

This article examines Wilderson and Sexton's trending reiteration of an old Euro-imperial pessimism—a perverse "Afro-pessimism (2.0)" in which Africa disappears altogether along with most of the Black diaspora. Its fatalist representation of "slavery" is interrogated for its "Americanism" and Occidentalism besides its canonical erasure of Black resistance and Pan-African revolt for white settler state historiographies. Although their academic critique disguises itself as a "Black radical discourse," it is here interrogated vis-á-vis actual traditions of Black radical praxis which it typically disregards (e.g., C.A. Diop; Césaire; Sylvia Wynter) or distorts (e.g., Fanon; Assata; the "BLA"). The article closes with an analysis of Wilderson's simply shocking distortion of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, a novel of the liveliest maroonage.