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Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
Red, White & Black is a provocative critique of socially engaged films and related critical discourse. Offering an unflinching account of race and representation, Frank B. Wilderson III asks whether such films accurately represent the structure of U.S. racial antagonisms. That structure, he argues, is based on three essential subject that of the White (the “settler,” “master,” and “human”), the Red (the “savage” and “half-human”), and the Black (the “slave” and “non-human”). Wilderson contends that for Blacks, slavery is ontological, an inseparable element of their being. From the beginning of the European slave trade until now, Blacks have had symbolic value as fungible flesh, as the non-human (or anti-human) against which Whites have defined themselves as human. Just as slavery is the existential basis of the Black subject position, genocide is essential to the ontology of the Indian. Both positions are foundational to the existence of (White) humanity. Wilderson provides detailed readings of two films by Black directors, Antwone Fisher (Denzel Washington) and Bush Mama (Haile Gerima); one by an Indian director, Skins (Chris Eyre); and one by a White director, Monster’s Ball (Marc Foster). These films present Red and Black people beleaguered by problems such as homelessness and the repercussions of incarceration. They portray social turmoil in terms of conflict, as problems that can be solved (at least theoretically, if not in the given narratives). Wilderson maintains that at the narrative level, they fail to recognize that the turmoil is based not in conflict, but in fundamentally irreconcilable racial antagonisms. Yet, as he explains, those antagonisms are unintentionally disclosed in the films’ non-narrative strategies, in decisions regarding matters such as lighting, camera angles, and sound.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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About the author
Frank B. Wilderson III
12 books165 followersFrank B Wilderson III is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of drama and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
November 11, 2013
Blew my doors off. Very challenging text, and one I will need to re-visit to fully understand, but well worth the effort. Can't look at film or criticism the same way again.
December 9, 2023
“Where there are slaves it is unethical to be free” - not a statement about the past, but an indictment of the present. Such are the stakes of Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black, for which the slave is not a figure long-gone, but one who remains as a loadstone upon which all existing society rests upon. The slave, that is, the Black. For the Black has never stopped being a slave, or at least has never stopped occupying the position of the slave, their formal freedom under the law being at best a cover for a reality which remains subservient and property-like, through and through. Resisting any self-congratulatory peans to progress and integration, for Wilderson, society is so rotten, so soaked in the humid dew of racism, that nothing less than bringing an ‘end to the world’ is the condition for Black freedom, and, if the rest of us are lucky, the condition under which we might, at long last, be graced with an ethical existence.
But among the lessons here is that there is, in fact, no ‘we’. Or, if there is a ‘we’, it is only a ‘we’ set against the void of Blackness, from which, vampire-like, we draw a subsistence. It is to theorise and bring to light this antagonism - where antagonism means irreconcilable conflict, or conflict resolved only by means of the vanquishing of one party against the other - it is this antagonism that Wilderson sets out to chart, and chart in its specificity. Which is to say, without it being ‘subsumed’ into the mere ‘conflicts’ which otherwise define the (reconcilable) struggles of our time: conflicts over class, gender, and colonialism say, which are, for Wilderson, struggles to which only Humans are party to, and over which Blacks - who do not qualify for humanity - are excluded from. Neither Marxism, nor feminism, nor indigenous struggle, can have anything to say about the Black predicament, which exceeds the very terms in which Humans get to pose their problems.
This is a book then, which gives full meaning to the the phrase ‘to grasp the nettle’. Are Blacks not human? Very well, so be it: so much the worse for humanity, whose existence, top-to-bottom, is impeached, rendered unethical. This is not a book looking for ‘allies’, but a book looking for foes, and one is all the more a foe precisely to the degree one considers oneself an ally. You can see then, where all the common epithets which gather around this book draw their force: ‘confronting’, ‘unflinching’, ‘provocative’. For, in triangulating Black struggle outside and even against the intra-Human contests that vie for collaboration, Wilderson rearranges the topography of worldly struggle, parochializing what we might otherwise take for ultimate ends. Even if we were to abolish the exploitation and alienation of the class relation, even if the patriarchy were dismantled, there would remain, nonetheless, the slave upon whom the Masters will continue to cannibalise.
It isn’t that Wilderson is insensitive to range of other struggles whose bloodiness still marks the world. To take the first term in the book’s title - Red - Wilderson’s discussion of American Indian dispossession and genocide is as harrowing and brutal as the history which it befits. Indeed, the Red ‘Savage’ occupies a kind of half-way position between the socially dead (i.e., the Black) and the fully alive (the White), insofar as, of the two modalities that mark the ‘Savage’ position - dispossession and genocide - at least one of these, dispossession, lends itself to restitution: lands can be returned. Not so for genocide, which brooks no commensurable recompense. But for Blacks, it’s incommensurability all the way down: nothing ‘tangible’ marks their position as slaves: there is no land to be returned, no rights to be granted, no alienation to be freed of: having passed through the Middle Passage, in which ‘Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks’, the Black has been dispossessed not of this or that capacity ‘in’ life, but capacity as such, life per se.
It’s a vision of the world as uncompromising as it is stringent, and it’s hard not to admire the sheer undauntedness with which Wilderson pursues his project. As for my own takeaway, it seems pretty inarguable that the position of the ‘slave’ ought to be taken far more seriously than it has been so far in emancipatory projects: the ‘gratuitous violence’ visited upon the slave - for no ‘contingent’ reason other than their being one - is ever more in evidence for populations across the planet. Similarly, the renunciation of conciliation, the indictment of the world as such, and the need - the necessity - for its coming to an end, with all the dangerous ambiguity that phrase carries, seems practically imperative to me. That it is an imperative addressed to Blacks alone, is, on the other hand - I guess - something hard to stomach. But of course it would be for me, who sits, if not on the side of the Masters, then at least their junior partners. I am left simply with the gratuitous hope that Wilderson is wrong.
But among the lessons here is that there is, in fact, no ‘we’. Or, if there is a ‘we’, it is only a ‘we’ set against the void of Blackness, from which, vampire-like, we draw a subsistence. It is to theorise and bring to light this antagonism - where antagonism means irreconcilable conflict, or conflict resolved only by means of the vanquishing of one party against the other - it is this antagonism that Wilderson sets out to chart, and chart in its specificity. Which is to say, without it being ‘subsumed’ into the mere ‘conflicts’ which otherwise define the (reconcilable) struggles of our time: conflicts over class, gender, and colonialism say, which are, for Wilderson, struggles to which only Humans are party to, and over which Blacks - who do not qualify for humanity - are excluded from. Neither Marxism, nor feminism, nor indigenous struggle, can have anything to say about the Black predicament, which exceeds the very terms in which Humans get to pose their problems.
This is a book then, which gives full meaning to the the phrase ‘to grasp the nettle’. Are Blacks not human? Very well, so be it: so much the worse for humanity, whose existence, top-to-bottom, is impeached, rendered unethical. This is not a book looking for ‘allies’, but a book looking for foes, and one is all the more a foe precisely to the degree one considers oneself an ally. You can see then, where all the common epithets which gather around this book draw their force: ‘confronting’, ‘unflinching’, ‘provocative’. For, in triangulating Black struggle outside and even against the intra-Human contests that vie for collaboration, Wilderson rearranges the topography of worldly struggle, parochializing what we might otherwise take for ultimate ends. Even if we were to abolish the exploitation and alienation of the class relation, even if the patriarchy were dismantled, there would remain, nonetheless, the slave upon whom the Masters will continue to cannibalise.
It isn’t that Wilderson is insensitive to range of other struggles whose bloodiness still marks the world. To take the first term in the book’s title - Red - Wilderson’s discussion of American Indian dispossession and genocide is as harrowing and brutal as the history which it befits. Indeed, the Red ‘Savage’ occupies a kind of half-way position between the socially dead (i.e., the Black) and the fully alive (the White), insofar as, of the two modalities that mark the ‘Savage’ position - dispossession and genocide - at least one of these, dispossession, lends itself to restitution: lands can be returned. Not so for genocide, which brooks no commensurable recompense. But for Blacks, it’s incommensurability all the way down: nothing ‘tangible’ marks their position as slaves: there is no land to be returned, no rights to be granted, no alienation to be freed of: having passed through the Middle Passage, in which ‘Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks’, the Black has been dispossessed not of this or that capacity ‘in’ life, but capacity as such, life per se.
It’s a vision of the world as uncompromising as it is stringent, and it’s hard not to admire the sheer undauntedness with which Wilderson pursues his project. As for my own takeaway, it seems pretty inarguable that the position of the ‘slave’ ought to be taken far more seriously than it has been so far in emancipatory projects: the ‘gratuitous violence’ visited upon the slave - for no ‘contingent’ reason other than their being one - is ever more in evidence for populations across the planet. Similarly, the renunciation of conciliation, the indictment of the world as such, and the need - the necessity - for its coming to an end, with all the dangerous ambiguity that phrase carries, seems practically imperative to me. That it is an imperative addressed to Blacks alone, is, on the other hand - I guess - something hard to stomach. But of course it would be for me, who sits, if not on the side of the Masters, then at least their junior partners. I am left simply with the gratuitous hope that Wilderson is wrong.
March 28, 2014
As Wilderson compels me to recognize, any opinion of mine on this work is basically illegitimate. In his tightly described worldview, I, a White, have agency, and he does not. Simple as that. Actually, more than that: I have spatial and temporal capacity, and he has none. I can only approach this dialectic as a Master, a full Human, a conqueror. He is a Slave, a void, deprived of all capacity. In his analysis, I am antagonistically set against relating with anything experienced by a Black.
What prohibits me from doing so is the social grammar he diagnoses as structurally opposed to interrelation. Far surpassing mere racism, this structure is dear to the basest conceptions of Western society, such that it could not be changed without the overthrow of Western capitalism, white supremacy (obviously) and even the United States.
He defines an "antagonism" as an adversarial relationship which cannot change without the total destruction of the context. He offers the example of two opposing chess pieces; effort to reconcile the white queen with the black queen is futile. To do so would destroy the entire game.
So it is, sadly, with the racial triangulation that he offers here between white, red, and black, in descending order of human value. The white is the Master, the Native American is the Savage, and the black is the Slave. We are human, half-human, and nonhuman. This status, robbed status, and utter deprivation of status, respectively, forms what Wilderson calls the "grammar" of our society. A note to anyone who has braved the Mariana-Trench density of this book for an appreciable time: once you're in a groove with his writing style and his radical ideas, go back and read the introduction. It rewards multiple readings. For example, he lays out what he means by his confusing and ubiquitous term "grammar" pretty clearly: "Grammar goes unspoken. Grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible." The grammar of political ethics, then, is rooted in the aforementioned caste system.
It's a powerful statement, one which founds Wilderson's label of "Afropessimism." He rejects and "humiliates" the PC notion of "we" as a race-blurring pronoun. Blackness is antithetical to whiteness as is presently constructed, and being in a white society as we are, blacks have no place.
The argument of the film studies aspect of the book, as far as I can tell, is that films often fail to expose this total alienation in narrative structure, but because they are unaware of it, they succumb to reinforcing it in their non-narrative devices. He specifies acoustic, lighting, editing, and directorial techniques which he identifies as evincing this non-humanity of blackness.
But I'm not a film studies major, and I came to this book to get an airing of Wilderson's philosophy, not necessarily his take on a bunch of movies which I've never seen. There's plenty of that, more of it than formal film criticism.
At first I was struck by the extremity of Wilderson's argument. I could get my mind around the idea of black bodies being the site of plunder, of white supremacy being our dominant social modality, all that. What came across a little too strong, for me, was the binary melodrama of his rendering of the plight of black people. So formless and fungible and worthless are they to our society, he says, they literally cannot be represented on film. "For the Black female (or male, or child) body to be exploited there would have had to be a Black female (or male, or child) body on screen. There was not. There has never been." (p. 320.)
Then I started thinking about myself, a white guy, and I realized that I did indeed fit a lot of the descriptors he attributes to the Settler/Master. It's a dramatic way of framing white privilege, maybe, but maybe a more truthful one than the typical laundry list of enumerated benefits I enjoy that a black man cannot. He doesn't delve into our mindset extensively - it would be far outside his book's scope and a direct rebuke to his claim of radical non-relatability - but I did it for him. Suddenly my dissatisfaction with my station in life and genuine expectation to improve it became tainted with the sting of having been recognized and taxonomized, Mendeleev-like, by Wilderson. I was a Master/Settler/Conquerer, thinking conqueror thoughts. ("Why hasn't American capitalism crowned me yet?") My desire to be fulfilled creatively was suddenly, shudderingly the provenance of the Human, unavailable to the non-humans that are black people. I've always been comfortable with the proposition that being a different race in America would be an ontologically different experience of life - starkly different in practice, fundamentally different in impression. But this was even a step further than that. I could never understand.
Well, the sheen of this little breakthrough wore off quickly. Over the course of the unavailing drudgery of reading this book, Wilderson's pronouncements became cartoonish. His dialectic rests fully in this conceptual arena - he's almost determined to surpass the most esoteric Continental philosophy (like his beloved materialism/Marxism) in the vein of Useless High Critical Theory - and I have no idea how it's supposed to be applied to actually living in life. It's a film studies book; fine. I look at movies with a new attention to the lighting of black characters now, and I look at real black people with Wilderson's commentary on the "vestmentary" semiotics of their clothes in the back of my mind. I also had never read real film theory before, so perhaps I'm giving him too much credit for this. In terms of understanding what life is like as a black person, beating this conceptual drum isn't helping.
I mean, I get that this is critical theory, but how can he say there has never been a black body on film? How seriously does he intend to lean on the idea that because the black body is a site of plunder, that it is devoid of humanity in our social grammar? This is too pessimistic for me. Where do black artists fit into this model? Surely they expressed elements of humanity that civil society embraced; is it simply that there has never been a White person who read and appreciated Baldwin? Sure, you could say that I couldn't begin to grasp the profundity of Ellison or N.W.A., but wouldn't that be true of any art generated from outside my milieu? Wouldn't I be equally unable to appreciate the profundity of Dubliners? It rings hollow that White civil society stole the product of black humanism without attributing the source of it to black people. If Jim Crow ended 500 years ago, maybe. But it didn't; if we're racist, it's because we're still racist, not forever destined to be racist. And we in white civil society are certainly conflicted about our role as consumers of black bodies and art. Not nearly as much as we should be according to a Marxist framework, but that's hardly the lone disagreement Marxism has with mainstream white society's consumption of labor.
And to me, this isn't even how white people, even virulent racists, view black or "red" people. Maybe once they were thought of as savages, but I think that in fact the most powerful hatred comes from a consummately human-to-human recognition. It's a rivalry and a resentment, essentially, that couldn't exist between a man and a dog or a man and a computer. We don't vest these things with human agency and motives. We do vest fellow humans with that, and it founds racism. I think racism is not nearly as dramatic, and certainly not as permanent, as he makes it out to be. (Which is not to say that racism isn't dramatic or pronounced, only that this inexorable, up vs. down relationship between races is superlative.) Now, in the year 2014, mainstream racism is a form of tribalism more than a ontological divide between man and animal/property. At the very least, our laws no longer read that way (to say nothing of their enforcement).
To be clear about (what I understand is) his thesis, I recognize that the portrayal of blacks is still problematic. But I reject the idea that this is borne of an introspection that we are totally incapable of. To the contrary, I think it is being exercised already, and this type of portrayal will become rarer and rarer. Just look at portrayals of blacks in movies from 30, 40, 50 years ago in white movies; there is a marked difference. The idea that this caste system's reflection in cinema somehow makes it a permanent fixture of white culture is mistaken and overly cynical.
Here are two competing dialectics, one his and one mine. 1) Being that Africa has, since the 7th century, been robbed by foreigners, there will never emerge the possibility of true structural equality between the races of the thief and the victim. It is structurally impossible and would represent, at a minimum, the destruction of White civil society. 2) Western elites stopped selling African people amongst each other a mere 150 years ago - a fraction of the historical duration of our doing so - and our attitudes, though changing, still reflect the lineage of this ancient prejudice...but will not always. To me, the first of these sounds mendacious and unapproachably academic, self-serving in the mode of resentful quasi-sociology.
But Wilderson's credibility on the inexorability of racial antagonism is most crippled by how poorly he analyzes the plight of Native Americans, his "red" subject. Make no mistake, Indians, you who have suffered an indignity of at least the depth of Africans sold as slaves: this book is about black people and how you join us whites in hating them. The Chris Rock line about who really got it worst ("when was the last time you ever saw two Indians walking down the street!") comes much closer to recognizing the extreme profundity of what Europeans did to Native Americans than Wilderson. In what way does White civil society, whether now or under Andrew Jackson, put more stock in the humanity of Indians than of black people? Last I checked, Native Americans were the victims of a systemic genocide for the purpose of taking their land, leaving their population decimated and impoverished. How is that materially better than the fate of black people vis-à-vis the White settler's reluctant embrace of each race's humanity? Native Americans can't even get a loud enough voice to speak up and definitively assert that "Redskins" is racist, yet somehow, black Americans, with their heavy political presence, are even less regarded than that?
A note on the actual writing style. I haven't made up my mind about Wilderson's prose, and I don't think I will for a while. It is insanely dense and difficult to pick up. Yet, amazingly, it never seems egregious. I think that his message exists in the rarefied realm of high theory so exclusively that he couldn't substitute in simpler language. It wouldn't work. It's never beautiful - this is workmanlike academic argot - but it does convey his message precisely. I can only hope I picked up enough of it to be left with relevant thoughts here.
One last note: for all the intellectual integrity this radical theory predicates upon, I thought it was funny that it holds a dissection of the infamous sex scene from Monster's Ball as a carrot. A still from the scene is on the book's cover, and after only a few pages in, every single reader says to themselves, I can't wait to see what he's going to say about that scene. It arrives, vibrantly and satisfyingly, at the very end. Nice marketing!
A challenging read both intellectually and physically. At the end of it, though, I can't see it as more than as a signpost on the far end of racial pessimism.
What prohibits me from doing so is the social grammar he diagnoses as structurally opposed to interrelation. Far surpassing mere racism, this structure is dear to the basest conceptions of Western society, such that it could not be changed without the overthrow of Western capitalism, white supremacy (obviously) and even the United States.
He defines an "antagonism" as an adversarial relationship which cannot change without the total destruction of the context. He offers the example of two opposing chess pieces; effort to reconcile the white queen with the black queen is futile. To do so would destroy the entire game.
So it is, sadly, with the racial triangulation that he offers here between white, red, and black, in descending order of human value. The white is the Master, the Native American is the Savage, and the black is the Slave. We are human, half-human, and nonhuman. This status, robbed status, and utter deprivation of status, respectively, forms what Wilderson calls the "grammar" of our society. A note to anyone who has braved the Mariana-Trench density of this book for an appreciable time: once you're in a groove with his writing style and his radical ideas, go back and read the introduction. It rewards multiple readings. For example, he lays out what he means by his confusing and ubiquitous term "grammar" pretty clearly: "Grammar goes unspoken. Grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible." The grammar of political ethics, then, is rooted in the aforementioned caste system.
It's a powerful statement, one which founds Wilderson's label of "Afropessimism." He rejects and "humiliates" the PC notion of "we" as a race-blurring pronoun. Blackness is antithetical to whiteness as is presently constructed, and being in a white society as we are, blacks have no place.
The argument of the film studies aspect of the book, as far as I can tell, is that films often fail to expose this total alienation in narrative structure, but because they are unaware of it, they succumb to reinforcing it in their non-narrative devices. He specifies acoustic, lighting, editing, and directorial techniques which he identifies as evincing this non-humanity of blackness.
But I'm not a film studies major, and I came to this book to get an airing of Wilderson's philosophy, not necessarily his take on a bunch of movies which I've never seen. There's plenty of that, more of it than formal film criticism.
At first I was struck by the extremity of Wilderson's argument. I could get my mind around the idea of black bodies being the site of plunder, of white supremacy being our dominant social modality, all that. What came across a little too strong, for me, was the binary melodrama of his rendering of the plight of black people. So formless and fungible and worthless are they to our society, he says, they literally cannot be represented on film. "For the Black female (or male, or child) body to be exploited there would have had to be a Black female (or male, or child) body on screen. There was not. There has never been." (p. 320.)
Then I started thinking about myself, a white guy, and I realized that I did indeed fit a lot of the descriptors he attributes to the Settler/Master. It's a dramatic way of framing white privilege, maybe, but maybe a more truthful one than the typical laundry list of enumerated benefits I enjoy that a black man cannot. He doesn't delve into our mindset extensively - it would be far outside his book's scope and a direct rebuke to his claim of radical non-relatability - but I did it for him. Suddenly my dissatisfaction with my station in life and genuine expectation to improve it became tainted with the sting of having been recognized and taxonomized, Mendeleev-like, by Wilderson. I was a Master/Settler/Conquerer, thinking conqueror thoughts. ("Why hasn't American capitalism crowned me yet?") My desire to be fulfilled creatively was suddenly, shudderingly the provenance of the Human, unavailable to the non-humans that are black people. I've always been comfortable with the proposition that being a different race in America would be an ontologically different experience of life - starkly different in practice, fundamentally different in impression. But this was even a step further than that. I could never understand.
Well, the sheen of this little breakthrough wore off quickly. Over the course of the unavailing drudgery of reading this book, Wilderson's pronouncements became cartoonish. His dialectic rests fully in this conceptual arena - he's almost determined to surpass the most esoteric Continental philosophy (like his beloved materialism/Marxism) in the vein of Useless High Critical Theory - and I have no idea how it's supposed to be applied to actually living in life. It's a film studies book; fine. I look at movies with a new attention to the lighting of black characters now, and I look at real black people with Wilderson's commentary on the "vestmentary" semiotics of their clothes in the back of my mind. I also had never read real film theory before, so perhaps I'm giving him too much credit for this. In terms of understanding what life is like as a black person, beating this conceptual drum isn't helping.
I mean, I get that this is critical theory, but how can he say there has never been a black body on film? How seriously does he intend to lean on the idea that because the black body is a site of plunder, that it is devoid of humanity in our social grammar? This is too pessimistic for me. Where do black artists fit into this model? Surely they expressed elements of humanity that civil society embraced; is it simply that there has never been a White person who read and appreciated Baldwin? Sure, you could say that I couldn't begin to grasp the profundity of Ellison or N.W.A., but wouldn't that be true of any art generated from outside my milieu? Wouldn't I be equally unable to appreciate the profundity of Dubliners? It rings hollow that White civil society stole the product of black humanism without attributing the source of it to black people. If Jim Crow ended 500 years ago, maybe. But it didn't; if we're racist, it's because we're still racist, not forever destined to be racist. And we in white civil society are certainly conflicted about our role as consumers of black bodies and art. Not nearly as much as we should be according to a Marxist framework, but that's hardly the lone disagreement Marxism has with mainstream white society's consumption of labor.
And to me, this isn't even how white people, even virulent racists, view black or "red" people. Maybe once they were thought of as savages, but I think that in fact the most powerful hatred comes from a consummately human-to-human recognition. It's a rivalry and a resentment, essentially, that couldn't exist between a man and a dog or a man and a computer. We don't vest these things with human agency and motives. We do vest fellow humans with that, and it founds racism. I think racism is not nearly as dramatic, and certainly not as permanent, as he makes it out to be. (Which is not to say that racism isn't dramatic or pronounced, only that this inexorable, up vs. down relationship between races is superlative.) Now, in the year 2014, mainstream racism is a form of tribalism more than a ontological divide between man and animal/property. At the very least, our laws no longer read that way (to say nothing of their enforcement).
To be clear about (what I understand is) his thesis, I recognize that the portrayal of blacks is still problematic. But I reject the idea that this is borne of an introspection that we are totally incapable of. To the contrary, I think it is being exercised already, and this type of portrayal will become rarer and rarer. Just look at portrayals of blacks in movies from 30, 40, 50 years ago in white movies; there is a marked difference. The idea that this caste system's reflection in cinema somehow makes it a permanent fixture of white culture is mistaken and overly cynical.
Here are two competing dialectics, one his and one mine. 1) Being that Africa has, since the 7th century, been robbed by foreigners, there will never emerge the possibility of true structural equality between the races of the thief and the victim. It is structurally impossible and would represent, at a minimum, the destruction of White civil society. 2) Western elites stopped selling African people amongst each other a mere 150 years ago - a fraction of the historical duration of our doing so - and our attitudes, though changing, still reflect the lineage of this ancient prejudice...but will not always. To me, the first of these sounds mendacious and unapproachably academic, self-serving in the mode of resentful quasi-sociology.
But Wilderson's credibility on the inexorability of racial antagonism is most crippled by how poorly he analyzes the plight of Native Americans, his "red" subject. Make no mistake, Indians, you who have suffered an indignity of at least the depth of Africans sold as slaves: this book is about black people and how you join us whites in hating them. The Chris Rock line about who really got it worst ("when was the last time you ever saw two Indians walking down the street!") comes much closer to recognizing the extreme profundity of what Europeans did to Native Americans than Wilderson. In what way does White civil society, whether now or under Andrew Jackson, put more stock in the humanity of Indians than of black people? Last I checked, Native Americans were the victims of a systemic genocide for the purpose of taking their land, leaving their population decimated and impoverished. How is that materially better than the fate of black people vis-à-vis the White settler's reluctant embrace of each race's humanity? Native Americans can't even get a loud enough voice to speak up and definitively assert that "Redskins" is racist, yet somehow, black Americans, with their heavy political presence, are even less regarded than that?
A note on the actual writing style. I haven't made up my mind about Wilderson's prose, and I don't think I will for a while. It is insanely dense and difficult to pick up. Yet, amazingly, it never seems egregious. I think that his message exists in the rarefied realm of high theory so exclusively that he couldn't substitute in simpler language. It wouldn't work. It's never beautiful - this is workmanlike academic argot - but it does convey his message precisely. I can only hope I picked up enough of it to be left with relevant thoughts here.
One last note: for all the intellectual integrity this radical theory predicates upon, I thought it was funny that it holds a dissection of the infamous sex scene from Monster's Ball as a carrot. A still from the scene is on the book's cover, and after only a few pages in, every single reader says to themselves, I can't wait to see what he's going to say about that scene. It arrives, vibrantly and satisfyingly, at the very end. Nice marketing!
A challenging read both intellectually and physically. At the end of it, though, I can't see it as more than as a signpost on the far end of racial pessimism.
December 8, 2017
I was overwhelmed with his persuasive and devastating account of the Modern world's ontological foundation of anti-blackness only to be surprised by how well he could articulate this through such lucid and insightful film criticism. Amazing and unnerving.
September 16, 2012
thrilled to be taking a film class with this man next week.
May 30, 2017
I keep coming back to this book, and every time I pick up something new. Really important for my thinking.
January 15, 2024
Good film analysis. Unfortunately afropessimism is not my cup of tea.
March 7, 2025
Rarely do you come across a piece of scholarship that completely shatters your worldview and forces you to reexamine everything, but this is one of those books. To me, the film analysis was secondary and at times contestable, but Wilderson's theory of the antagonistic relations that structure the U.S. and Western society at large, as well as their grammars of suffering, is so thought-provoking that, even though the prose is challenging and I know I'll need to revisit this book many times to fully grasp its contributions, it is impossible to remain unchanged after reading it.
September 4, 2019
"I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject-effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology, a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture. The value in this rests not simply in the way it would help us rethink cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life" (p. 57).
July 12, 2024
As w Afropessimism (and Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death), Wilderson has articulated something brilliant here.
No idea if I agree with him or not.
But he’s definitely developed a coherent framework and it applies remarkably cleanly to the concept of Black film and into the archive as a whole.
No idea if I agree with him or not.
But he’s definitely developed a coherent framework and it applies remarkably cleanly to the concept of Black film and into the archive as a whole.
July 8, 2018
Interesting, disturbing, and completely unnecessarily academically worded.
January 12, 2025
CLASSIC. FOUNDATIONAL. MUST-READ.
July 20, 2025
Underratedly probably the most widely, cross-disciplinary influential book to emerge from film studies in the 21st century (maybe not since Mulvey's male gaze?)... Not that he is very committed to the methodologies of film studies. Misses an opportunity to take up questions of film form outside of the mise-en-scene and its relation to the narrative, but he makes it pretty clear that disciplinary loyalty is not his first priority. While many theorists he categorizes as afro-pessimist have rejected the label (while others not mentioned have taken it on), and indeed his formulation of social death is itself not really loyal to Patterson's transhistorical conception of slavery. I think he is more interesting for how he diverges from all these theories (and from Fanon as well). It would be nice if he emphasized these divergences more (and it might save him some controversy, but again I'm not sure if that's his first priority).
People who critique his ontological totalization often neglect Wilderson's redefinition of violence. IMO Wilderson's critique of violence must be addressed if one wants to either assume or critique his ontological totalization and its implications have still not been fully understood, much as Spillers notion of the flesh and the violence it entails is still being better explicated.
sidenote It would be a mistake to think of Wilderson's critique as being limited to a universality notion of the human, it is far more wide reaching than that, encompassing the contingency of a 'matrix of possibility' that is not limited to something like Wynter's overrepresented Man.
People who critique his ontological totalization often neglect Wilderson's redefinition of violence. IMO Wilderson's critique of violence must be addressed if one wants to either assume or critique his ontological totalization and its implications have still not been fully understood, much as Spillers notion of the flesh and the violence it entails is still being better explicated.
sidenote It would be a mistake to think of Wilderson's critique as being limited to a universality notion of the human, it is far more wide reaching than that, encompassing the contingency of a 'matrix of possibility' that is not limited to something like Wynter's overrepresented Man.
August 20, 2025
You grew up with two professor parents in minneapolis and you are The Slave????
Intro + chapter 1 and epilogue cos I just can't go on with the offensive dismissiveness of the sufferings of nonblack peoples.
Intro + chapter 1 and epilogue cos I just can't go on with the offensive dismissiveness of the sufferings of nonblack peoples.
July 16, 2020
(If I had any background in film theory and was able to understand some of the references to elements of films, this would have been 5 stars)
November 11, 2025
Read:
- Various excerpts
- Various excerpts
July 29, 2012
this is a powerful book. afropessimism is an intervention whose conclusions are open ended and whose imagination is unlimited. its power is frightening and what frank achieves in this books seeps past the bounds of cinema to describe how fundamental antiblackness is to what we know as the world. frank is a great writer, powerful thinker and great teacher. glad to have met him and spoken with him while i was uc irvine.
January 19, 2016
If Dr. Wilderson can find a receptive audience, the Pulitzer will come to him.
June 23, 2019
✋🏻✋🏽✋🏿📼📼📼💏⛓👁
July 30, 2025
A must read polemic.
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