As Kendrick Lamar apostrophizes an unnamed racist antagonist in “Blacker the Berry,” he declares “I mean it’s evident I’m irrelevant to society / That’s what you’re telling me, penitentiary would only hire me / Curse me till I’m dead / Church me with your fake prophesying that I’mma be another slave in my head.” It is a lyrical articulation of the structures of anti-blackness consonant with Saidaya Hartman’s assertion that today remains the “afterlife of slavery.” But how, more precisely, should this afterlife be understood? Within contemporary Black Studies, the scholarly conversation surrounding that question has been recently enlivened by the varied thinkers heralded under the rubric of Afro-pessimism, including Hartman, Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, as well as—of particular interest here—Frank Wilderson and Fred Moten. Though all these theorists emphasize continuities of racial subjection after 1865, Wilderson and Moten appear to differ in conceptualizing the structural possibilities open to Blackness as such. The form of Afro-pessimism espoused by Wilderson locates Blackness at the “outside of Humanity and civil society” within the structure of contemporary white supremacy such that to be black remains ontologically a form of social death in slavery, understood in Orlando Patterson’s terms as “open to gratuitous violence,” “void of kinship,” and “generally dishonored.” Without denying those realities, Moten seeks to herald in Blackness a “fugitive sublimity […] the thing that escapes enframing”; in Moten’s reading, such fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed.” I use the distinct positions elaborated by Wilderson and Moten to register a negative dialectic developing in Kendrick Lamar’s work, shifting from the paradigm of fugitivity in good kid, m.A.A.d city through the transitional To Pimp a Butterfly to the Afro-pessimism of DAMN.
About the presenterAaron Chandler
Associate Professor of English at Stevenson University. Primary literary research interests include post-1945 fiction in the United States; representations of poverty in literature and the social sciences; African American literatures and cultures; theories of emotion and affect; race, ethnicity, and migration; class, identity, and poverty; postmodernity; American studies; and twentieth-century American popular culture.