Three important notes about this file

*1NC Fronline vs Wilderson’s Method*

The core of Wilderson’s argument is based in

a. Antonio Negri’s marxism

b. psychoanalysis in film study

c. sextons concept of the libidinal economy based on unconscious drives

Wilderson ’10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies – Cal-Irvine, Red, White, & Black, pp 7-8 ajones)

The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most unflinching meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., Marxism, as in the work of Antonio Negri, and psychoanalysis, as in the work of Kaja Silverman), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of socially or politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of, and the assumptive logic regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema? Charles S. Maier argues that a metacommentary on political economy can be thought of as an "interrogation of economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained."7 Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as "the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious." Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as "objective" as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. Sexton emphasizes that it is "the whole structure of psychic and emotional life," something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists call a "structure of feeling"; it is "a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation."8 This book interrogates the assumptive logic of metacommentaries on political and libidinal economy, and their articulations in film, through a subject whose structure of dispossession (the constituent elements of his or her loss and suffering) they cannot theorize: the Black, a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach far beyond film studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing and activism on the left.
a. the totalizing materialism of scholars like Negri is self contradictory and messianistic

Quinby ’04 (Lee, Chair Distinguished Teaching in Humanities – Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Empire’s New Clothes, p. 233 ajones)

Demonstrating Empire’s millennial drift is a complicated undertaking, in no small part because of Hardt’s and Negri’s tendency to say one thing and yet do another. For example, even though they explicitly claim a nonprophetic stance by stating that they can see “only shadows of the figures that will animate our future” (205), much of what actually animates the book is its prophetic vision of the nature and role of the militant, the poor, the nomad, the new barbarian, and the multitude. In place of specific and concrete analysis—a hallmark of a genealogical approach—they stamp their theory with messianic categories that diminish rather than expand our understanding of productive and reproduc­tive life. This contradiction is particularly noteworthy because Empire’s mil­lennialism is what makes it compelling. Millennial rhetoric stirs the imagination toward exhilarating poles of fear and hope, promising a culmi­nating and righteous telos to those who adhere to its tenets of belief. It is hard not to be drawn in. A second interrelated contradiction arises from the fact that Hardt and Negri specifically reject transcendence, making numerous explicit claims for the immanence of their materialist approach, often drawing on Foucault to help make their case. In their opening pages, for example, they “rule out” the “idea that order is dictated by a single power and a single center of rationality transcendent to global forces” (3). Nevertheless, their recurrent appeals to cer­tain categories of thought cast their theoretical framework back into transcen­dental molds integral to millennialism, which is both totalizing and abstractionist in its history and basic formulation.

b. Psychoanalytic film studies reintrench exclusion, conflate social structure with signification, and marginalize movements

Seiter 88 – PHD, Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. ( Ellen “ Re-vision: the limits of psychoanalysis” from Jump Cut, A Review of Contemporary Media no. 33, Feb. 1988, pp. 59-61 http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC33folder/ReVisionReview.html ajones)

Our attention turns from the woman's gaze to the woman's voice in Kaja Silverman's "Disembodying the Female Voice." Her formal analysis of the sound/ image relation in terms of gender concentrates on the conspicuous absence of a female voice-over in classical cinema. This absence symptomizes the exclusion of the female subject from the production of discourse. Silverman's essay has implications for the practice of feminist filmmaking, and it invites the re-analysis of Hollywood films with attention to the construction of the soundtrack and to the way the films obsessively refer the female voice to the female body. Silverman discusses the use of the "disembodied" female voice-over in a number of films directed by women, finding Yvonne Rainer's JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN (1971) a powerful example of this formal strategy. The final essay in the volume, Teresa de Lauretis' "Now and Nowhere: Roeg's BAD TIMING" is the most indebted to discourse theory. In its choice of topic, it seems the most puzzling essay to find in a book on feminist film criticism. Nicholas Roeg's film BAD TIMING concerns the police investigation of a psychoanalyst who is suspected of attempting to murder and then raping his lover. De Lauretis' choice of this particular film seems to be a kind of worst-case exercise in proving Foucault's assertion that "the points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network." She also admires the director as auteur a great deal. I cannot summarize Dc Lauretis' complex argument here, but I would suggest her analysis is seriously limited by concentrating on a film such as BAD TIMING, which does not offer most women what it has offered de Lauretis. These four essays contribute many original and stimulating ideas to feminist film criticism. The emphasis on theoretical perspectives derived from psychoanalysis, however, seriously limits their appeal to a wider feminist readership. Many feminist filmmakers and critics will certainly be troubled by the dearth of references to feminist theorists working outside of film or semiotics, and will be alienated by the frequency with which the names of the fathers appear here. Only Linda Williams' piece has the kind of skepticism about psychoanalysis that most feminists demand. When Mary Ann Doane cites Freud's case study on masochism, "A Child Is Being Beaten," she comes dangerously close to offering Freud's reports on women patients as empirical evidence of the structures of the feminine unconscious. The influence of psychoanalysis can also be seen in the choice of films to write about. Women's films and horror films contain a lot of vulgar Freudianism, which makes psychoanalytic approaches particularly inviting. Kaja Silverman discusses this work of many women filmmakers, such as Yvonne Rainer, whose films deal on an overt narrative level with psychoanalytic principles. Silverman excludes other filmmakers whose work has broader social implications, such as Michelle Citron. De Lauretis chooses a film that is literally about a psychoanalyst. Altogether they emphasize English-language and avant-garde cinema to the exclusion of other kinds of film and fail to consider class and Finally, the theoretical perspectives employed in these four essays have reproduced the heterosexism of their model, psychoanalysis. Lesbianism is scarcely mentioned in any essay except B. Ruby Rich's "From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (reprinted from JUMP CUT, No. 24-25. March, 1981). Lesbian filmmakers, writers and journals are consistently excluded from the historical overview in the introduction. Thus lesbianism is marginalized to one essay in the volume and one film in history (as something of the exotic past, Weimar Germany). In a book that purports to see "difference differently, revising the old apprehension of sexual difference and making it possible to multiply differences," this is inexcusable. B. Ruby Rich's article, along with Judith Mayne's "The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism" and Christine Gledhill's "Recent Developments in Feminist Film Criticism," are the broadest in scope and the most accessible articles in the book. While teaching feminist film courses at the University of Oregon for the past several years, I have found Rich's essay on MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM to have a profound impact on students, opening up a wide range of critical issues and stimulating discussion throughout the course. The integration of textual analysis of the film with its production history and a sophisticated analysis of the film's social, cultural and political context make Rich's essay an exemplary piece of feminist film criticism. In "The Woman at the Keyhole," Judith Mayne relates feminist literary criticism to issues addressed in films made by and for women. Mayne discusses the relation between the film and the novel, and she examines both as meditations on the split between the public and the private spheres, arguing that we should consider voyeurism in this context. Mayne's overview includes women as writers of fiction, as critics, and as filmmakers. She places some of the critical questions raised by feminist film criticism in an historical perspective. Mayne defines feminism as "the attempt to theorize female experience into modes of resistance and action." Christine Gledhill reflects this concern in her extremely useful theoretical summary and analysis, the first essay in the volume. Gledhill traces the ideas of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan as they have been used by feminist film critics, especially Pam Cook, Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey. This essay offers both a lucid explication of the theories involved and a careful analysis of the way these theories have directed feminist film criticism away from understanding women in social practices other than cinema by "conflating the social structure of reality with its signification." These theories have also pulled feminist film criticism away from considering the "intersection of gender with class and racial differences among others" because they have adopted Lacan's theory of the subject with its attention to the constitutive force of language. Gledhill describes the entrapment that has resulted from these theoretical applications in this way: "The unspoken remains unknown, and the speakable reproduces what we know — patriarchal reality." She calls for feminist critics to pay attention to what they have left out as they have emphasized the power of narrative structure, to pay attention to "the material conditions in which it functions for an audience." We must not privilege film discourse to the exclusion of all other discourses and practices, according to Gledhill, and we must attend to the interactions and contradictions among these. The act of re-vision will involve an ongoing evaluation of the consequences of employing psychoanalysis, semiotics and structuralism as dominant theoretical paradigms. We will need to integrate a much broader spectrum of feminist thought in our work. We will need to listen to women of color, lesbians and working class women. And as teachers and critics we must keep in mind Adrienne Rich's words: "Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges — however precarious under patriarchy — can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts — and whose very being — continue to be thwarted and silenced."[1]
c. Sexton ignores other forms of racial opression, erases identity, and cherry picks evidence—reject his ideas

Spickard 09 - University of California, Santa Barbara (Paul Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127 ajones)
One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of study, and that is not a fair assessment. The main problem is that Sexton argues from conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around. That is, he begins with the conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves. It is a pretty tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even have opened up a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this is not that book.
theres no basis for the unconscious model

O’Brien & Jureidini, 2 (Gerard & Jon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide & PhD (Flinders) is a child psychiatrist who has completed a doctorate in philosophy of mind, “Dispensing With the Dynamic Unconscious,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2, project muse ajones)
IT IS THE PRIMARY TENET of psychoanalysis that there is a subterranean region of our minds inhabited by mental entities—such as thoughts, feelings, and motives—that are actively prevented from entering consciousness because of their painful or otherwise unacceptable content. These mental entities, in spite of being consciously inaccessible, are assumed to have a profound impact on our conscious mental life and behavior, and in so doing are thought to be responsible for many of the psychopathologies, both major and minor, to which we are subject. This conjectured subterranean region of our minds is nowadays known as the dynamic unconscious, and there is no more important explanatory concept in all of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, despite its importance to psychoanalytic thought and practice, and despite almost a century of research effort since its first systematic articulation, the dynamic unconscious is in deep trouble. The methodologic difficulties associated with theorizing about this putative mental underworld are legion (Grunbaum 1984), and recent years have seen a growing skepticism about the very notion of a dynamic unconscious and with it the whole apparatus of psychoanalysis (see, for example, Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to contemporary cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and Westen 1998). Their aim has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive a great deal of support from the empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to cover psychical entities and processes traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious (Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier counterpart in cognitive science. It is our contention, however, that this hope is misplaced. Far from supporting the dynamic unconscious, recent work in the cognitive science suggests that the time has come to dispense with this concept altogether. We will defend this claim in two ways. First, we will argue that any attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former as it is traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we will show how psychological phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means. But before we do either of these things, and to set the scene for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.
Agency Disad

a. Wilderson’s social death argument is too sweeping, denies Black agency, and cannot translate to politics

BÂ 11

(Dr. Saër Maty, Professor of Film – University of Portsmouth and Co-Editor – The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, “The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation”, Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), September, p. 385-387 ajones)

—WILDERSON’S WHITE WATCH SEES RED ON BLACK: SOME WEAKNESSES A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time before Wilderson’s black‐as‐social‐death idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, ‘The Narcissistic Slave’, where he critiques black film theorists and books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwood’s Black Film as Signifying Practice (2000) ‘betrays a kind of conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of study— ... it clings, anxiously, to the film‐as‐text‐as‐legitimateobject of Black cinema.’ (62) He then quotes from Yearwood’s book to highlight ‘just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwood’s attempt to construct a canon can be’. (63) And yet Wilderson’s highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the ‘Diaspora’ or ‘African Diaspora’, a key component in Yearwood’s thesis that, crucially, neither navel‐gazes (that is, at the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage with black film. Furthermore, Wilderson separates the different waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent. Again, his approach is problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the inter‐connectivity of/in black film theory. As a case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lott’s mobilisation of Third Cinema for black film theory to Yearwood’s idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course, Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since Lott’s 1990s’ theory of black film was formulated. Yet another consequence of ignoring the African Diaspora is that it exposes Wilderson’s corpus of films as unable to carry the weight of the transnational argument he attempts to advance. Here, beyond the US‐centricity or ‘social and political specificity of [his] filmography’, (95) I am talking about Wilderson’s choice of films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to acknowledge ‘a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black “body”, the Black “home”, and the Black “community”’ (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing. The above examples expose the fact of Wilderson’s dubious and questionable conclusions on black film. Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by Wilderson’s propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness. In chapter nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the issue of ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but also ‘the “moment” of no time at all on the map of no place at all’. (279) Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ‘belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti‐ Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffleapproaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)


b. Denying Agency is independently wrong – should be rejected

Mahoney ‘92

(MARTHA R. MAHONEY – Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law. Southern California Law Review – University of Southern California – March, 1992 – “Exit: Power and the Idea of Leaving in Love, Work and

the Confirmation Hearings” 65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1283 – lawrev; lexis ajones)
Once exit is defined as the appropriate response to abuse, then staying can be treated as evidence that abuse never happened. If abuse is asserted, "failure" to exit must then be explained. When that "failure" becomes the point of inquiry, explanation in law and popular culture tends to emphasize victimization and implicitly deny agency in the person who has been harmed. Denying agency contradicts the self-understanding of most of our society, including many who share characteristics and experiences of oppression with the person who is being harmed. The conservative insistence that we are untrammeled actors plays on this sensibility, merging rejection of victimization with an ideology that denies oppression. The privatization of assaults on women makes it particularly difficult to identify a model of oppression and resistance, rather than one of victimization and inconsistent personal behavior.

Fatalism Disad

a. Wilderson’s ontology makes fatalism inevitable and offers no alt

Bâ (teaches film at Portsmouth University (UK). He researches ‘race’, the ‘postcolonial’,  diaspora,  the  transnational  and  film  ‘genre’,  African  and  Caribbean cinemas  and film festivals) 11

(Saër Maty, The US Decentred, Cultural Studies Review, volume 17 number 2 September 2011 ajones)

In chapter nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the issue of ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but also ‘the “moment” of no time at all on the map of no place at all’. (279) Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ‘belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti‐ Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)
b. Turns their args – greatest comparative threat

Miah quoting West in 94

(Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079 ajones)

In the chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” West observes “The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America.” (12-13) “Nihilism,” he continues, “is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.” (14) “Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact,” West explains,”the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.” (14-15)


Wilderson is too extreme in his opposition to reformism – his book does not offer much of a contemporary strategy.

Graham ‘9

Dr. Shane Graham – Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. Review of Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2008, 501 pp. (pbk) 978-0-8960-8783-5 – Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 479–494 – via Taylor & Francis Online Database ajones)

Were you upset, offended, or outraged by Breyten Breytenbach's recent article in Harper's Magazine, in which he took Nelson Mandela to task for all the failings of the post-apartheid administrations? If you were bothered by Breytenbach's piece, I would recommend avoiding Frank Wilderson's Incognegro. In it, the author recalls declaring in 1989 that Madiba would be of greater service to the revolution dead than alive. Throughout the book he repeatedly rails against “Mandela's people” as agents for an accommodationist, neo-liberal agenda. He even recounts a speech he attended in 1994 by the newly elected state president, in which he stood up and grilled Mandela about plans for the Reconstruction and Development Program. This all culminated in 1995 with a phone call from a Mail & Guardian reporter who asked for a comment because “Nelson Mandela thinks you’re a threat to national security” (470). The book jacket declares that Wilderson is one of only two Americans ever to be a member of the African National Congress (ANC). An African American, he first visited South Africa in 1989 on a brief research expedition, during which he met the Tswana woman he would later marry. He settled more permanently in Johannesburg in 1991, where he was soon elected to the executive council of the local and sub-regional branches of the ANC. But even as he was holding aboveground positions in the newly unbanned liberation party, he was also working with an underground cell loyal to Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela, in defiance of Nelson Mandela's decision to disband Umkhonto we Sizwe and cease all covert operations. In this capacity, Wilderson “gathered information on [visiting] Americans and worked on psychological warfare, propaganda, disinformation, and general political analysis” (276). From his position as lecturer, first at Wits University and later at the Soweto campus of Vista University, he was charged with capturing “as much territory (real and imagined) of the university-industrial complex before the ANC came to power as possible” (143). Wilderson's perspective on the events of 1989–1996 is unique: he sees the seminal moments of South Africa's transition both as an insider (as an elected official in the ANC) and as an outsider who never fully gains the trust of the party's power structure. And whereas even a couple of years ago his condemnations of the “New South Africa” and its economic policies might have struck many middle-class South African readers as strident and delusional, the predictions he recalls making now seem undeniably prescient in light of the recent power shift within the ANC. After all, one wonders whether Jacob Zuma's demagoguery would have ever found political traction had Thabo Mbeki's wing of the party not succeeded in prioritizing laissez-faire liberalism above material reparations for the poor. Had Wilderson been content to write a political memoir of his modest but interesting role in the South African transition, it would have been a slender but compelling, occasionally even gripping, book. Instead, Wilderson gives us a sprawling 500-page tome that attempts to serve not just as political memoir but also as autobiography, therapeutic exercise, and character assassination against former colleagues, to whom he gives very thinly veiled pseudonyms. As an account of growing up black in the white United States, Incognegro offers a few engaging stories: he visited Fred Hampton's house in Chicago at age thirteen, soon after Hampton had been shot dead by police; and he took part in battles with the police and national guard in Berkeley in 1969. Otherwise, though, the book's representation of the black experience in America covers familiar ground and adds little to our understanding of that experience beyond fresh layers of indignation and rage.
Reject Wilderson’s call for absolutism – no movement is anti-establishment enough for him
Graham ‘9

Dr. Shane Graham – Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. Review of Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2008, 501 pp. (pbk) 978-0-8960-8783-5 – Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 479–494 – via Taylor & Francis Online Database ajones)

The difficulty of reviewing a book such as this is that the author would no doubt respond to any criticism (of the book's tone, for instance, or of its clumsy, self-consciously postmodern structure, which jumps randomly between time frames) by attacking the reviewer as a deluded quisling of the global capitalist establishment and “blah, blah, blah” (to quote Wilderson's own paraphrase of Mandela's response to his aforementioned question). In my pre-emptive self-defence, I can only emphasize again that it is this memoir's narcissism and self-indulgent tone that made it an unpleasant read for me, not its politics. There is no doubt that the revolution let down a lot of people. But it was always going to let down Frank Wilderson because it seems that, for him, nothing can ever be pure enough.