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Frank Wilderson on Afropessimism
April 13, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreePSU’s Black Studies Department invites you to a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III on his recent book Afropessimism.
Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 6-8pm
[Lincoln Hall, Room 75]
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery―in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms―continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilder
Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.
Frank B. Wilderson III is Chancellor’s Professor of African American Studies Department at UC Irvine. During the apartheid era he spent five and a half years in South Africa where he was one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and was a cadre in the underground. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, winner of the American Book Award, The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms; and Afropessimism, which was long listed for the National Book Award. Wilderson was educated at Dartmouth College (A.B/Government and Philosophy), Columbia University (MFA/Fiction Writing), and UC Berkeley (PhD/Rhetoric and Film Studies).
This event is co-sponsored by College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of the Arts, School of Gender, Race and Nations, Communication, English, Philosophy, Speech & Hearing Sciences, School of Film, and World Languages and Literatures.