From Afro-Pessimism to Afro-Generativity: Theorizing African Continental and Diasporic Liberation Within Education

• In Event: The Back of Blackness: Critically Examining the Construction of Blackness in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Afro-pessimism is emerging as a prominent perspective informing studies of race and Blackness (Wilderson, 2010, p. 20), including within schooling and education (Dumas, 2016; Dumas & ross, 2016). The objective of this paper is not to dismiss Afro-pessimism, but rather to examine the impact of Afro-pessimism on studies of Blackness and youth racialized as Black. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and the California Bay Area, we suggest that Afro-pessimism has been fruitful and productive in calling out anti-Blackness in schooling. However, we argue that this intellectual project has been less successful in providing ways of understanding how White Supremacy is managing the increasing complexity of Blackness, as well as providing a framework for revitalizing and reimagining the liberatory ways of knowing needed to overturn the White racial capitalist order (Robinson, 1984). Building upon the theorizations of Transnational Black Feminists (Davies, 2014), we argue for what we are tentatively referring to as a Afro-generative framework to address these shortcomings. We intend for this paper to provide a significant contribution to scholars and educational practitioners interested in teaching and organizing for freedom through education.

We theoretically base our loving critique of Afro-pessimism in its dominant orientation toward Americanist, as well as ableist and cisheteropatriarchal ways of knowing and formulating Blackness. While historically and intellectually developed through African and African diasporic epistemologies (Fanon, 1967; Tansi, 1990; Wilderson, 2010), Afro-pessimist thought has come to center and theorize anti-Blackness through the African American experience. This Americanist frame has emphasized “social death” through inadverdent cisheteropatriarchal and ableist renderings of the incredible violence of chattel slavery. This focus on social death through chattel slavery often focuses upon the lives of enslaved African people in the continental U.S., and overlooks the particular experience of enslaved African people in the Caribbean, the broader Americas, and on the continent of Africa. The Americanist framing of chattal slavery by Afro-pessimist scholars frequently misses the distinctive imperialist violence against Indigenous African peoples living on the lands that they were born and raised; as well as African peoples subjected to forced migration across figurative and literal boundaries of nation-states outside of the Translatlantic Slave Trade. The Afro-pessimist perspective also often positions social death as based in the finality of destruction and loss of life, neglecting the memory and mark of living with the intersecting aftermath of gendered violence like rape and sexual violence, and mutilation and injury from the machinery of White Supremacy.

The data for this paper comes from co-occurring studies taking place in the Bronx, New York, and a small working-class city (“Bay Grove”) in the California Bay Area. The critical feminist and ethnographic study in the California Bay Area is based in approximately four years of fieldwork taking place over 1,000 hours of teaching, participant observation, and sociolinguistic data collection. The study in the Bronx, New York is a one-year multi-sited critical ethnographic study that utilizes Postcolonial theory and anti-Blackness to examine the experiences of Black West African students in high school.

Authors

• Mercy Agyepong, New York University

• Casey Philip Wong, University of California - Los Angeles