African American Fiction and Fictions of the Founding Fathers

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I have devoted most of the past academic year to my book project Black Hopes/Black Woes, which final manuscript is due in the Fall of 2024. I wrote a chapter of about 21,000 words about how contemporary African American scholar Frank B. Wilderson promotes the tenets of Afro-pessimism. The chapter focuses on Wilderson’s definition of antiblackness, rejection of Marxism through his criticism of Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, and slapdash borrowing of Cornel West’s concept of prophetic pragmatism. I have also laid the groundwork for my next chapter on how self-proclaimed Afro-pessimists David Marriott, Fred Moten, and Jared Sexton have appropriated the notions of violence and tabula rasa in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1962). Last November, I participated in a panel at the American Studies Association conference in New Orleans, LA. On that occasion, I discussed the concept of “lateral universalism,” which will be a central issue of the conclusion of my book. Finally, I wrote a lengthy essay on agency and property in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). That paper echoes some of the arguments I present in my book and will appear in The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century (Brill 2024), a collection of essays I co-edit with Professor Anna Pochmara at the University of Warsaw, Poland.