Frank B. Wilderson III | Afropessimism

Recorded April 28, 2020

Frank B. Wilderson III spent more than five years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress during the country’s transformation after apartheid. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, and he served as a dramaturge for the Lincoln Center Theater in New York and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Chair of African American Studies and professor in the Culture & Theory Doctoral Program at the University of California, Irvine, he has been honored with the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction and an NEA Literature Fellowship. In Afropessimism, Wilderson fuses innovative philosophy with trenchant memoir to argue slavery’s unique historical social position and its pervasiveness even today.