// on anti-Blackness, social death, and the structure of civil society
Afropessimism is a theoretical framework holding that anti-Blackness is not simply one form of racism among others — it is the structural condition upon which civil society itself is built. Drawing from Orlando Patterson's concept of social death, it argues that Black people exist in a position of permanent structural abjection that reforms and representation cannot resolve.
The central figure of the afropessimist school. Argues that the Black subject is not a worker or colonial subject but a slave — and that anti-Blackness is the structural foundation of civil society itself.
Traces the afterlife of slavery through history, literature, and personal narrative. Her work examines how the structures of slavery persist long after its formal end.
Literary theorist whose landmark 1987 essay laid the groundwork for understanding how slavery destroyed kinship and gendered relations for Black people in ways that persist structurally.
Examines ontology, metaphysics, and the status of Blackness as a form of non-being within Western thought. Interrogates the promise of "humanity" as a political horizon.
Not himself an afropessimist, but his concept of social death — developed through comparative study of slavery — became the foundational framework Wilderson and others built upon.