After Blackness, Then Blackness: Afro-Pessimism, Black Life, and Classical Hip Hop as Counter-Performance

Kevin Eubanks
2017
Just as Frank Wilderson cites the propensity of the black performance to obscure and evade black life and reality and calls for a more "direct reflection" on the "ghosts and grammar" that haunt the enactment of black subjectivity, Jared Sexton's critique of Fred Moten's optimism lies in the latter's emphasis on the "fugitive ontology" of blackness, an ontology that has the black always on the run from the structures that govern a priori the anti-black world into which it would pretend to
more » ... Consequently, the challenge of afro-pessimism is to imagine, amidst the afro-pessimist negation, a black movement that is not or other than performative, something more than a "narrative strategy hoping to slip the noose of a life shaped by slavery," but instead a more visceral apprehension of and engagement with the structural violence against blackness as "a grammar of emergence and being." The question I would like to answer here is whether in Hip Hop one can discern just such a movement and apprehension. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in [...]. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed-upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.
doi:10.34718/g4rr-5e15 fatcat:tvk5ccpbind63dgzb7zou7vc2m