Kiss and Tell: Afropessimism and Social Death in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life

There is a strain of Black campus novel that is obsessed with “realness.” I can trace its origins to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator leads his college’s white trustee on a darkly comic and ill-fated tour of the Black homes, brothel, and mental hospital full of Black patients that lie just outside his historically Black college’s campus. Ellison does not necessarily posit these grotesqueries as any “realer” than the Black university professor who expels the narrator and undermines his trip to New York; but, rather, the tension rests on the danger of the white trustee assuming that the degradation he saw is Black people’s true nature—untouched by white oppression and unredeemable by education.

This white obsession with “real” Blackness in the academy became a central concern of Black-campus literature in the 1990s and 2000s. I am thinking of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, in which various biracial characters, born to the life and world of academia, ascribe to a Black-male, low-income character an authenticity that they themselves are certain they are lacking. I am thinking also of Thomas Chatterton Williams’s fatally miserable and unintentionally hilarious misread of Black culture at Howard University. There are a few notable exceptions to this obsession. The author and filmmaker Kathleen Collins’s rediscovered 1982 film Losing Ground is an exploration of the intellectual life and romantic sensibilities of a Black academic that is blissfully unconcerned with whether or not the people on screen are “real” Black people. But in the louder drumbeat of popular culture, there was a false belief in midnineties and early 2000s literature that Blackness, once it entered the academy, was no longer “real.” And that Black people, once they entered the academy, either as students or faculty, were suddenly robbed of Blackness, left to float in some unmoored space, as if divested of a superpower—Superman confronted by kryptonite or Dr. Manhattan encased in a lithium cage.

This reading is of course wildly anti-Black. It rests on the assumption that Blackness and studied, intentional intelligence are mutually incompatible. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her own campus novel Americanah, slyly suggests as much when her protagonist, Ifemelu, while drifting in and out of college campuses in Nigeria and the United States, begins to catalog what does and does not constitute Blackness and who—among the white and Black Americans and Black Nigerians—reacts differently to that classification.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is both a break from this tired obsession with “realness” and a meditation on what it might mean in a fuller sense, outside of a reductive understanding. It is less a novel steeped in the subconscious anti-Blackness of highbrow art and realist literature and more one in conversation with questions of personhood and social death. The novel follows the life of Wallace, a Black, gay chemist from Alabama, toiling away in the academy on an overwhelmingly white campus in a small midwestern town. It is perhaps one of the finest Afropessimist pieces of art, if we are allowing pieces of art to be made in this tradition. I may be applying this label too broadly, but if we are to talk about a work that explicitly outlines the themes of Afropessimism, then I would place Real Life as one of the foremost, alongside more established examples such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Writing on Frank Wilderson’s work in the New Yorker earlier this summer, Vinson Cunningham described Afropessimism thusly:

Afropessimism sketches a structural map of human experience. On this map, Black people are integral to human society but at all times and in all places excluded from it. They are in a state of “social death,” a concept that Wilderson borrows from the sociologist Orlando Patterson. For Patterson, social death describes the experience of slavery as it has appeared across time and space—a slave is not merely an exploited person but someone robbed of his or her...