Putting the Antiblack World in Its Place

Abstract This chapter is devoted to examining the agentive crisis that blackness presents to the worldly significance of black action and what, if anything, can be done about it. This query finds that Afropessimists obscure the differences within critical black studies about the effect blackness has on black action, differences that are profound when it comes to the status of the political in the quest for black freedom in an antiblack world. To unearth the differences, this chapter is devoted to critically reconstructing the central claims of Afropessimism, and two central texts it conscripts within it’s project, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987) with an eye toward comparing and contrasting the claims they make about blackness and black action. Two main insights emerge. First, Hartman and Spillers depict black racialization as an ongoing practice that significantly shapes how race functions in the contemporary moment. Second, Hartman and Spillers diverge on their understandings of what black racialization does to the black body. Both of these insights open space within black studies for a conception of politics and subjectivity poised to address the challenge blackness poses to instantiating the worldly significance of black action.