Title Pending 85419

Since the emergence of Afro-pessimism in early 2000s, focus much critical conversation and around discourse has been on viability its ontological claims as to non-‘Human’ status blackness. Departing from these essential debates, this article turns rather generic qualities Afro-pessimism, suggest that discourse’s formal choices reveal discrepancies theses being argued. In comparing two key texts, Frank Wilderson’s memoir, Afropessimism (2021) Stefano Harney Fred Moten’s The Undercommons (2013), I illustrate how memoir performs thesis anti-blackness through failures first-person singular narration; expressive impossibility black ‘object’ claiming access memoir’s institutions authorship authority. By contrast, reading critique university genre manifesto shows their depersonalized plural adopt an appositional ‘fugitive’ relation totalizing political authority entailed genre. Whereas text enact, then, a kind refusal participate enshrined singular, utopian ‘we’ ‘refuse[s] refuse’. Their ‘undercommons’ addresses, at once, Enlightenment-born institution university, related genre, representation, and, ultimately, subjectification. Through orientation manifesto, Moten propose Afro-pessimist formally substantively different Wilderson’s—one arguably less predicated failure.