This seminar aims to explore literary texts, films and television productions which adopt or challenge Afro-Pessimistic visions of Black life in a systemically anti-Black world. It asks whether Black subjects could be defined beyond their experiences with slaveness, systemic violence and  racial prejudice by exploring the different possibilities that could emerge from an Afro-Pessimistic reading of Black life inside as well as outside the context of the United States and its “Middle Passage Epistemology”.

Afro-Pessimism has developed as a school of thought that analyzes contemporary actions of systemic anti-black violence and oppression as the “still unfolding aftermaths” of the transatlantic slave trade (Sharpe 2016: 2). It understands transatlantic slavery as a “relation of property” rather than “a relation of (forced) labor” in which “the slave is objectified in such a way that they are legally made an object (a commodity) to be used and exchanged” (Wilderson III, Hortense J. Spillers, et al 2017: 8). According to Frank B. Wilderson III, Afro-Pessimism is premised on the claim that Blackness “is coterminous with Slaveness”, a situation of “social death”, in which “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black is not an arc at all, but a flat line” (Wilderson III, Hortense J. Spillers, et al 2017: 7-8).

In this seminar, we invite papers that explore topics at the intersection of literature, film, television and Afro-Pessimistic thought in relation to Black population groups’ experiences with slaveness (continuous forms of enslavement), systemic violence and racial prejudice worldwide. Questions we hope to address include, but are not limited to:

• How do authors, filmmakers and television directors describe experiences of slaveness,  systemic violence and racial prejudice towards Black subjectivities in and/or outside the context of the U.S (in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East for example) ?


• How do these authors, filmmakers and television directors engage with U.S-centric theoretical paradigms like Afro-Pessimism?


• Do these authors, filmmakers and television directors propose stories and plotlines on forms and experiences of slavery outside the U.S? Do these stories propose conceptions of race that differ from European and U.S. centered frameworks ?


• What are the generic and aesthetic choices these authors, filmmakers and television directors adopt to describe experiences of anti-Black violence in their projects ?


• How do these authors, filmmakers and television directors depict stories of racial prejudice that intersect with forms of gender, class, caste or tribe discrimination?