Afropessimism [Hardcover]

Wildersons ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. Anyone unconvinced by the vision may find this a dubious contribution, but enough people have been convinced by the view to make an accessible introduction to it a valuable resource just for understanding contemporary intellectual life. Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity. [In A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes thatby designmatters will never improve for African Americans.... Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old.... An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come. Frank Wildersons [Wildersons] writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical (Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs, he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.)... [his] passionate account of racisms malevolent influence is engrossing. There are crucial books that you dont agree with, but one still comes to understand the importance of the thought experiment. I am awed by this beautiful and compelling book Frank B. Wilderson III both thinks and feels, and profoundly knows the difference. I am not sure that I agree with what he thinks, because frankly, how would I know? But I hope that he is wrong, even though I know that no thinking is wishful. Read this book. Whats most important and so moving about Frank Wilderson slings piercing stories and scalding analyses with literary fire and intellectual rigor. HlS~