The difference between violence that positions the Black (Slave) within a paradigm of social death and violence that positions the non-Black (Human) within a paradigm of social life, manifests in the difference between gratuitous violence and contingent violence. This is why the stories of Black people cannot be reconciled with the stories of non-Black people. James Baldwin put it best when he commented on his antagonism with Norman Mailer. “[H]e still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.” Emplotment of the Black within a narrative arc produces more than a narrative aporia, or contradiction within the narrative. What happens to the narrative when “loss” and “redemption” do not constitute the narrative arc because there was no arc to begin with? Frank B. Wilderson III argues that social death, when storied, results in a meta-aporia that disrupts the ontology of narrative itself.

Frank B. Wilderson III is Chancellor’s Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine. During the apartheid era, he spent five and a half years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and was a cadre in the underground. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, winner of the American Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms; and Afropessimism, which was long listed for the National Book Award. Wilderson was educated at Dartmouth College (A.B/Government and Philosophy), Columbia University (MFA/Fiction Writing), and UC Berkeley (PhD/Rhetoric and Film Studies).

Campus community only, please.