Frank B. Wilderson III: February 14, 2019

After Steve Dickison introduces Frank B. Wilderson III and the Black Study Series, recalling a prior appearance by Wilderson at The Omni in Oakland, following the Oakland Book Festival, Wilderson prefaces his reading by announcing his forthcoming work, tentatively titled Afro-Pessimism, as well as describing the strong influence of his mother, who recently passed, on his life and his career as a writer and educator. He then reads "Blood Redemption," an excerpt in manuscript from Afro-Pessimism.

Frank Wilderson takes questions from the audience. He recalls the role his parents, educators themselves, played in developing his political consciousness, citing Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill Books, 1988) and The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (English translation, Grove Press, 1963) as essential texts in this process. He notes how David Marriott's On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2000) was integral to his realization of antiblackness as "a necessary structure of human relation," and the impact of this structural and psychic violence on his creative process, activism, and educational work. Wilderson describes his ongoing reconciliation between critical/theoretical language and his "creative skillset," recalling the influence of his time at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis with David Mura, and of Gabriele Rico's book Writing the Natural Way (TarcherPerigee, 1983). Asked for a tentative publication date for Afro-Pessimism, Wilderson predicts a late 2019 or early 2020 release. The conversation concludes with his speaking, in response to a request, to his earlier use of poetry (his own and that of Simon J. Ortiz, at a public talk at the Omni Oakland) as a kind of "philosophical document" for revealing the failures of certain social theory, political movements, and creative organizations to address, variously, black suffering and indigenous genocide. Here he notes a fundamental difference, on which Afro-Pessimism insists, between the deployment, effects, and resilience of white supremacy, and of antiblackness.