Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction

This thesis engages questions about the relationship between black life and black pain within the confines of a racist society to defend black subjects from the continued violence of systemic racism. Through a reading of three contemporary African American fiction texts, this thesis considers the implications of reading black life through its relationship to systemic racist violence to consider the possibilities of futures for black life beyond this circumscription of a relationship to black pain. This thesis reads Citizen: An American Lyric, Between the World and Me, and Get Out as texts which share a similarly afro-pessimistic understanding of black life as defined by this relationship to systemic racist violence. These readings protest the precariousness of black life to everyday racist violence by offering space for empathetic engagement between black subjects and a wider (white) readership. These texts insist that readers engage with the pain of racial embodiment, particularly the haunting awareness of history of racist violence and the fear of anticipating one’s own victimization to racist subjection. These texts demand a future for black subjectivity in which black life is not constructed by its relationship to black pain. This thesis considers the different possibilities these texts imagine for black life beyond its circumscription by a history of racist subjection to imagine what freedom could look like for black subjectivity.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Huggins, Kathryn

• African American fiction

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/90692

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/90692