SHIFTING GROUND: BODIES, SPACE AND AFRO-PESSIMISM* IN AFRICA

iLiso Magazine would like to extend an invitation to anyone who might be interested in contributing to our #ISSUE7, set to be published late June 2022.

THEME OUTLINE

Following our sustained inquiry into the place and function of World-making in the Black radical imaginary, we borrow the phrase ‘Shift[ing] ground’ from (and its use by) Hortense Spillers in her definitive text “All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Race” (1996), and reflect upon its preoccupation with the relation between race and psychoanalysis. We seek to consider the possibilities of theorising notions of space and the body through an Afro-pessimist lens: to explore what new or alternative questions and propositions might this undertaking produce? How can it edify our understanding of how violence continues to define how racialised bodies function in and outside of particular imaginaries?

Dismissed as a (Black) American Academy import and fatalistic/ultra-leftist discourse that superimposes “the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies”, as Jared Sexton (2016) puts it, Afro-pessimism continues to spread like wildfire. It is adopted as a primary framework of critical and aesthetic inquiry by thinkers and creatives alike, particularly in South Africa. In ‘our’ context, it’s proponents and detractors continue to debate its place in post-Apartheid South Africa and the validity of this ‘post’-ness. Though largely concentrated on social media platforms, the debates are lively and heated, from conversation about the perennial race vs. class conversation, anti-blackness, violence, suffering, political-libidinal economy, to concerns and questions about (anti-colonial) resistance and struggles, agency, and survival. Here, Jared Sexton’s question, “resistance or survival in the face of what, precisely?” becomes an important point of departure in opening up for us an explorative line of inquiry.