KPFA Radio 94.1 FM and Marcus Books present:
Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 7:30 PM
Hillside Club
2286 Cedar St.
Berkeley
tickets:
$12 advance tickets: brownpapertickets.com T:800.838.3006, or Marcus Books, or East Bay Books, or Books Inc. (Berkeley), or Pegasus Books (3 shops), or Moe’s, or Mrs. Dalloway’s, or Walden Pond Bookstore
$15 door, KPFA benefit
Information: kpfa.org/events
In the tradition of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is a brilliant account of the experience of being black. The black radical tradition has drawn upon the term as a way to acknowledge the power, depth, and vitality of the resilience and radical imagination of people of African descent.
A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, Afropessimism presents the dynamic principles of an increasingly influentialIntellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting slavery through a Marxist framework of class oppression, Frank B. Wilderson demonstrates that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive , anti-black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but an almost necessary force in our civilization today, and that black struggles cannot be conflated with the experiences of any other oppressed group. In exceptionally clear prose, Wilderson juxtaposes his own seemingly idyllic upbringing mid-century Minneapolis with the harsh reality he would later encounter, whether in radicalized, late 1960’s Berkeley or in the slums of Soweto. Following in the ruch literary tradition of works by W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X and James Baldwin, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity.
A writer of hard, searing lyricism, Wilderson is, to my mind, an indispensable thinker.
Professor and chair of African Americkan studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Incognegro, A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction.
Kris Welch is a veteran, very popular KPFA on-air host, a mother, and a devoted grandmother.
