#black studies

okay actual thing I need help with

Thus the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by thematerial relations of chattel slavery. In lightofthis, is it tooextreme or too obvious to suggest that Rankin's flight of imagination and the excitements engendered by suffering mightalsobe pleasurable?

“To be blunt, Afropessimism is wordplay and sophistry. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection is a formalist exercise of linking airy ontological assertions to their apparent logical negations; although her moves are often clever on their own terms, their argumentative effect is that nothing ever changes. Wilderson makes bold, empirically groundless assertions, repeats them emphatically and relentlessly, and spins accounts of how things would seem to be if those assertions were correct. And he often extrapolates the bold assertions from fiction—the film 12 Years a Slave (AP 276); the Sethe character in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved (AP 242, 303); and an episode of the reactionary television series, Homeland (AP 192f)—which he then blends with and takes as the normative basis for interpreting actual events. Critical appraisals of Wilderson’s work in particular can be read allegorically as a contemporary update of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The gullible and the dilettantish strain to argue that Wilderson’s and other Afropessimists’ more outlandish, clearly absurd assertions should not be read as intended to be claims of literal fact.[11] Academic reception of Wilderson is even more revealing than the popular assessments. I daresay that, if the academy were more like an honest craft guild, professors who blurbed his Afropessimism or otherwise have praised and recommended it might be at risk of having their doctorates revoked, as could happen, say, to a shoddy and irresponsible member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the quality of American intellectual life, particularly at its nexus with civic and political concerns, few acknowledge the extent of social harms that can ensue from academic malpractice.”

But the prospect of upward mobility, either intra- or intergenerational, was always problematic as an egalitarian ideal. It is an individualist remedy for a collective problem of inequality. The promise of upward mobility has been a poor substitute for a robust system of social protection, and it has rationalized the existence of degraded employment by characterizing it as part of the natural order of things, in principle temporary and justified based on desert or merit. Most of all, the ideology was tied to a presumption of continuing economic growth that promised indefinitely expanding opportunity structures.The past half century of wage stagnation and even declining living standards for an increasing share of the population has undercut the ideology’s power as a popular faith.