Afro-Pessimism – Aliosha Pittaka Bielenberg

I presented this 10-minute talk at the senior thesis presentations for the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World on 19 May 2020. A video recording is available here; my presentation begins at 30:00. The full thesis is available through the Brown Digital Repository. A 26-page revised and condensed version is available here.

*Source: Kevin Davie, “The Storyteller’s Map,” Atavist, 2015. Original held in the Bleek-Lloyd collection at the University of Cape Town.*

I begin my thesis with this map. This object was created by //Kabbo, a prisoner in Cape Town who spoke /Xam, an indigenous language of South Africa, in collaboration with two philologists: Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. Between 1865 and 1875, they spoke with many prisoners in Cape Town who spoke San languages, to record stories and otherwise document their culture. Bleek and Lloyd, and many of the people who have accessed their collection since, saw their work as saving the relics of a people soon to be washed away by time. Thus, a nineteenth-century historian wrote that it was “a mere matter of time in an unequal struggle between the primitive bow and arrow, with which they fought, and the deadly gun in the hands of their invaders.” Indeed, the history of the San is marked by genocide and assimilation. Dutch settlers saw them as vermin; shooting four of them, an English traveler wrote in 1797, was discussed with “as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges.” In the nineteenth century, the San assimilated into the Coloured people of the Cape, a laboring underclass with mixed slave and indigenous origins. Since the end of apartheid, San people have re-asserted their indigeneity.

Starting from these objects and this history of representation, we come face-to-face with questions of objectivity and humanism. It is these questions that I elaborate on in my thesis in ways that I will show the contours of in my presentation today, before returning to another object of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. The question driving my project is: how can we assert both common rights and uncommon differences?

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In this time of crisis, I and many others find comfort in imagining what thinkers we feel close to would say about the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s idiosyncratic conception of the world. For her, it is human interaction that creates a world out of the earth; in The Human Condition, Arendt writes thatwe make a “home for men during their life on earth” by acting together and speaking to each other in a common space. It seems, then, that social distancing is quite literally the end of the world. What Arendt dreads has come to pass: men have become entirely private — that is, deprived of physical interaction with other human beings. What, then, do we do after the end of the world from COVID-19?

To answer this question, I want to suggest that we look to a bevy of recent works in indigenous and black studies that take seriously the ends of the world that have already happened. The apocalypticism of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 is not novel to people who survived the genocidal onset of modernity. The diseases that devastated indigenous populations in the Americas were many times more deadly than the novel coronavirus; the Middle Passage, too, cut short not just many lives but also spelled the end of entire families, languages, and cultures. In short, the creation and discovery of a new world spelled an end to many old ones. For people who survived these catastrophes and their descendants, the end of the world has long been on their minds.

Recent interventions have brought this rich legacy of thought to bear on the apocalypticism of the climate crisis. We would do well to turn to these recent works as we face another crisis. Just as we can learn much about crisis mobilization from the response to the pandemic, we can begin to imagine a different world post-pandemic by listening to the voices that remind us about the ends of the world that have already happened. In other words, we should think together the end of the world due to colonialism, climate change, and COVID-19. The point of this comparison is not to inspire unfounded hope: to say that the end of the world has happened should never be to diminish its severity. Yet the fact remains that people have always survived and persisted. We should turn to these voices to learn more about the stakes of apocalypticism and what to do after the end of the world.

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Tag: Afro-Pessimism

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