1st Edition
Black Hopes/Black Woes Early African American Optimism and 21st Century Afro-Pessimism
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The Early Negro: A Repository of Freedom and Democracy
Chapter 1. Slave Songs and Their Legacy
Chapter 2. WEB Du Bois vs. Saidiya Hartman: Two Opposite Views of the Negro
Part II. Afro-Pessimism and Its Philosophical Issues
Chapter 3. Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2000)
Chapter 4. Blackness and Marxism
Part III. The Fanon Matrix
Chapter 5. Was Frantz Fanon an Afro-Pessimist?
Chapter 6. Hegelian Dialectics, Corpsing, and Stigma
Chapter 7. Fanon/Marriott: Is Wretchedness Blackness?
Chapter 8. Fanonian Sovereignty / Black Sovereignty
Coda. The Postcolonial Connection
Conclusion: Afro-pessimism Goes Mainstream
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Raphaël Lambert has lived in Japan for over 23 years. He resides in Kyoto and teaches African American literature and culture in the Department of American and British Cultural Studies at Kansai University in Osaka. His book, Narrating the Slave Trade, Theorizing Community (Brill), came out in January 2019. He also published essays in the Journal of Modern Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and African American Review. He is coeditor of The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century (Brill), a collection of essays published in December 2024.
