Between Hopelessness and Despair: Afropessimism and Black Nihilism in Ta-Nehisi Coates's Works
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.06Keywords:
Afropessimism, Black Nihilism, Hope, Ta-Nehisi CoatesAbstract
Most of the criticism that Ta-Nehisi Coates received in the aftermath of the publication of his work Between the World and Me orbits around its lack of hopefulness. Indeed, it is several times in the text that Coates tempers his son’s expectations about foreseeing an end to racial conflicts as he tells him that “I do not believe that we can stop [racists], Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves” (Between the World 151). Certainly, the previous contention has drawn critics into reading Coates’s work as an attack against black agency (Chatterton Williams). It is our contention that, far from being read as a manifestation of cynicism, Coates’s negativity also has a galvanizing dimension. In fact, by emphasizing the futility of hope, which for Coates traps black individuals in an “unending pursuit” of progress (Warren), he provides readers with many alternatives to confront the rampant racism that still pervades U.S. society nowadays.
Downloads
Metrics
References
ABRAMOWITSCH, Simon. “Addressing Blackness, Dreaming Whiteness: Negotiating 21st-Century Race and Readership in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me”, CLA Journal, 60, 4, 2017, 458-478.
ALEXANDER, Michelle. “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’”, The New York Times, 2015. <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html>
ANDERSON, Reynaldo, and Charles E. Jones. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. New York, Lexington Books, 2016.
ANYABWILE, Thabiti. “A Call for Hope in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, The Atlantic, 2015. <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/why-there-needs-to-be-more-hope/404977/>
ARCHIE, Andre. “The Hopeless Politics of Ta-Nehisi Coates”. The American Conservative, 2015. <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-hopeless-politics-of-ta-nehisi-coates/>
BALDWIN, James. The Fire Next Time. 1963. New York, Vintage International, 1993.
BELL, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York, Basic Books, 1993.
BERLANT, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2011.
BIEMEN, Walter. 1980. “The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of the Thing”, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 11, 1, 1980. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/43155291>
BRADY, James S. “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin”, The White House: President Barack Obama’s Archives, 2013. <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin>
BRAND, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. New York, Vintage Canada, 2001.
BROGDON, Lewis. Hope on the Brink: Understanding the Emergence of Nihilism in Black America. Eugene, Cascade Books, 2013.
BROOKS, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2006.
CAPERS, I. Bennett. “Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044”, New York University Law Review, 94, 1, 2019. <https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/faculty/1049/>
CHANDLER, Nahum. X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York, Fordham UP, 2013.
CHATTERTON WILLIAMS, Thomas. “Loaded Dice”, London Review of Books, 2015. <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/thomas-chatterton-williams/loaded-dice>
COATES, Ta-Nehisi. The Beautiful Struggle. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2008.
—. “The Case for Reparations”, The Atlantic, 2014. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/>
—. Between the World and Me. Melbourne, Text Publishing Company, 2015a.
—. “Hope and the Artist”, The Atlantic, 2015b. <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/hope-and-the-artist/417348/>
—. “Hope and the Historian”, The Atlantic, 2015c. <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/hope-and-the-historian/419961/>
—. “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, The Atlantic, 2015d. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/>
COTTOM, Tressie McMillan. “Between the World and Me Book Club: Two Texts Masquerading as One”, The Atlantic, 2015a. <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/ta-nehisi-coates-book-club/398972/>
—. “Between the World and Me Book Club: Not Trying to Get into Heaven”, The Atlantic, 2015b. <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/between-the-world-and-me-book-club-not-trying-to-get-into-heaven/400271/>
DERY, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”, Flame Wars: The Discourse on Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, Durham and London, Duke UP, 1994.
DOUGLASS, Patrice, Selamawit D. Terrefe and Frank B. Wilderson. “Afropessimism”, Oxford Bibliographies, 2018. <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190280024/obo-9780190280024-0056.xml>
DOUGLASS, Patrice, and Frank B. Wilderson. “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World”, The Black Scholar, 43, 4, 2013. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.43.4.0117>
DU BOIS, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
ENGLISH, Daylanne K. “Afrofuturism”. Oxford Bibliographies, 2017. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0004.xml?rskey=bYDhIu&result=2&q=afrofuturism#firstMatch.
EVANS, David, and Peter Dula. Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity, Eugene, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018.
FANON, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, translated by Richard Philcox, New York, Grove Press, 2008.
GLASS, Ira, and Neil Drumming. “707: We Are in the Future”, This American Life, 2020. < https://www.thisamericanlife.org/707/we-are-in-the-future>
GILROY, Paul. Against Race. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2000.
GORDON, Lewis R. “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday”, The C.L.R. James Journal, 11, 1, 2006. <https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/v1d3_LGordon.pdf>
HAILE III, James B. “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Phenomenology of the Body”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 31, 3, 2017. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.31.3.0493?seq=1>
HARTMAN, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1997.
HARTMAN, Saidiya, and Frank B. Wilderson III. “The Position of the Unthought”, Qui Parle, 13, 2, 2013. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20686156.pdf?seq=1>
HAYES, Floyd W. “Cornel West and Afro-Nihilism: A Reconsideration”, Cornel West: A Critical Reader, edited by George Yancy, Malden, Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. “The Thing”, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstader, New York, Harper Collins, 1971.
JANMOHAMED, Abdul R. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archeology of Death, Durham and London, Duke UP, 2005.
KEAGGY, Diana Toroian. “First Year Reading Program Selects ‘Between the World and Me’”. The Source: Washington University at St. Louis, 2016. <https://source.wustl.edu/2016/05/first-year-reading-program-selects-world/>
KLEIN, Ezra. “Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I Am a Big Believer in Chaos’”. Vox, 2016. <https://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/19/13952578/ta-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein>
—. “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Hopeful”. Vox, 2020. <https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21279530/ta-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein-show-george-floyd-police-brutality-trump-biden>
LEVITZ, Eric. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is an Optimist Now: A Conversation about Race and 2020”, Intelligencer, 2019. <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ta-nehisi-coates-race-politics-2020-elections.html>
LLOYD, Vincent. “From the Theopaternal to the Theopolitical: On Barack Obama”, Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology, edited by Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, and Elias Ortega-Aponte, Oxford, UP Scholarship Online, 2015. <https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5422/fordham/9780823268436.001.0001/upso-9780823268436>
—. “Black Futures and Black Fathers”, Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity, edited by David Evans and Peter Dula, Eugene, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018.
LORDI, Emily J. “Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and His Peers”. CLA Journal, 60, 4, 2017. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26557004?seq=1>
MARRIOTT, David. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. New York, Routledge, 2007.
—. “(A Reading That Is Too Black) Judging Fanon”. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 29, 2016. <https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e03>
MBEMBE, Achille. “Necropolitics”. Public Culture, 15, 1, 2003.
—. Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois, Durham and London, Duke UP, 2017.
MINEO, Liz. “The Kerner Report on Race, 50 Years on”. The Harvard Gazette, 2018. <https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/harvard-professor-reflects-on-the-kerner-report-50-years-on/>
MORRISON, Toni. “Between the World and Me”. Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015. <https://ta-nehisicoates.com/books/between-the-world-and-me/>
MOTEN, Fred. “Black Optimism/Black Operation”. Double-Operative, 2007. <https://doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/moten-black-optimism_black-operation.pdf>
—. “The Case of Blackness”. Criticism, 50, 2, 2008.
—. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112, 4, 2013.
PATTERSON, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, Harvard UP, 1982.
RANKINE, Claudia. Just Us: An American Conversation. New York, Penguin Books, 2020.
REID-BRINKLEY, Shanara R. “Debating While Black: Wake Work in Black Youth Politics”, The Future Is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education, edited by Carl A. Grant, Ashley Woodson, and Michael Dumas, New York, Routledge, 2020.
R. L. “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death”. Mute Books, 2013. <https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death>
ROLLINS, Andrew. “Afrofuturism and Our Old Ship of Zion: The Black Church in Post-Modernity”, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, New York, Lexington Books, 2016.
SEXTON, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
—. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, InTensions Journal, 5, 2011. <https://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf>
—. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts”, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 1, 2012. <https://doi.org/10.25158/L1.1.16>
—. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word”, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 29, 2016. <https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02>
SHARPE, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2016.
SEARERS, Tobin Miller. “Hope’s Vagaries: How Ta-Nehisi Coates and Vincent Harding Convinced Me that Hope Is Not the Only Option”, Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity, edited by David Evans and Peter Dula, Eugene, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018.
SPILLERS, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Diacritics, 17, 2, 1987. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/464747?seq=1>
STEINSKOG, Erik. 2018. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
WARREN, Calvin L. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”, The New Centennial Review, 15,1, 2015. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215>
—. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2018. Print.
WEST, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston, Second Vintage Books Edition, 1993.
WILDERSON, Frank B. Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. Cambridge: South End Press, 2008.
—. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham and London, Duke UP, 2010.
—. “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents”, InTensions Journal, 5, 2011. <https://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/frankbwildersoniiiarticle.pdf>
—. “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption”, Humanities Futures: Franklin Humanities Institute, 2016. <https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/>
—. Afropessimism. New York, Liveright, 2020.
WINTERS, Joseph. “Between the Tragic and the Unhopeless: Coates, Anti-blackness, and the Tireless Work of Negativity”, Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity, edited by David Evans and Peter Dula, Eugene, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Accepted 2021-05-18
Published 2021-06-25
- Abstract 1252
- pdf 854
