Introduction
Contemporary critical theories of Black life, particularly Afropessimism as formulated by Frank Wilderson and the postcolonial fatalism found in Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001), have produced a striking impasse: frameworks seeking to disclose the depth of Black negation increasingly foreclose the possibility of Black agency. In these accounts, Black subjectivity is rendered ontologically closed and politically immobilized, often appearing as the recursive performance of domination or the residue of gratuitous violence. While attentive to the structuring force of anti-Black violence, such frameworks risk collapsing Black life into an endless repetition of negation, where critique outpaces possibility and political becoming is suspended in advance.
This foreclosure is not simply a matter of pessimism but a misreading of the very figures these critical thinkers often cite. Frantz Fanon is invoked as a theorist of rupture, yet detached from the intersubjective and therapeutic praxis central to his politics. Walter Rodney is reduced to a chronicler of Africa’s underdevelopment; his dialectical method is evacuated of its generative insight into struggle and contradiction. What is lost is their theorization of alienation not as terminal, but as the condition for new forms of relation and resistance.
In what follows, I return to Fanon and Rodney to reconstruct their epistemological commitments—namely, historicity and intersubjectivity as modes of praxis grounded in the unfinished project of Black becoming. Historicity is a critical engagement with history as contradiction and collective reorientation; intersubjectivity, the psychic and political labor of reconstituting Black relations within the wreckage of colonial and racial domination. These epistemologies, I contend, are not abstract but lived.
Wilderson, Mbembe, and the Poverty of Normative Emancipation
Contemporary Black critical thought has witnessed a theoretical turn that frames Blackness not as a site of cultural affirmation or generative resistance but as a condition of intrinsic negation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Wilderson, whose Afropessimism locates Black life within the paradigm of “social death.” Wilderson positions Blackness not just outside the category of the Human, but also as its constitutive other. “Blackness is social death,” he writes, “which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life.”
This is not merely a historical argument, but an ontological claim: Blackness, for Wilderson, is irredeemably tied to gratuitous violence, beyond social repair or political agency. There is no dialectic, no unfolding historical contradiction, only an endless repetition of domination. From this vantage point, Black political action is either futile or preemptively co-opted—not because it fails in execution, but because the very category of “Black” is structurally incompatible with political being. As Wilderson puts it, “the ongoing accumulation of Black death at the hands of the police, even despite increased visibility in recent years, it becomes apparent that a Black person on the street today faces open vulnerability to violence just as the slave did on the plantation” (8–9).
This ontological foreclosure leads to a theoretical impasse. If Blackness is always-already dead, then what becomes of struggle? If violence is not simply historical but structural, non-contingent, irreducible, then politics itself becomes a fantasy. Such a framing collapses history into ontology and renders the specificity of political conjunctures analytically irrelevant. Black existence is reduced to pure abjection, with no capacity to reroute or reimagine its positionality.
One crucial limitation here is that Wilderson’s framework remains overwhelmingly U.S.-centric. The abstraction of Blackness from historical struggle, especially beyond the U.S., generates what Gloria Wekker describes as a vision of Blackness that is “loveless, hopeless, and divisive” (86). For Afropessimism to function, Black life outside of the U.S. must either be ignored or assimilated into the same grammar of abjection. This is not just an empirical oversight but a conceptual narrowing that flattens the diversity of Black experiences and the incommensurate political and historical structures that condition them.
A similar narrowing appears in Mbembe’s work, though through a different analytical register. Mbembe offers in On the Postcolony a diagnosis of political exhaustion, where postcolonial African societies become sites of “mutual zombification”: a condition in which rulers and ruled are locked in recursive, affectively saturated performances of power that sap the possibility of transformation. Power in this context is not merely repressive but intimate, an “intimate tyranny,” he writes, “that links the rulers to the ruled” (128). This zombified condition that Mbembe describes blurs the boundary between consent and coercion, thereby making resistance a parody of itself. Black agency, then, is not merely constrained; it is structurally impotent.
A striking instance of this zombified politics is visible in the recurrent waves of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Disillusioned citizens, betrayed by a state that promised transformation but delivered precarity, direct their rage not at state actors or appropriate institutions, but at fellow African nationals, especially Nigerians, accused of “taking jobs, homes, and even women.” These public eruptions, far from being viable articulations of autonomous political will, are symptomatic of larger structural deficits. Here, resistance does not unsettle power but instead repeats its logic: a displaced ambivalence that reinforces state failure and structural abandonment. This is what Mbembe’s concept of zombification captures: not apathy or failure, but the recursive depletion of political vitality forced through public complicity.
Mbembe’s analysis, much like Wilderson’s, veers toward total foreclosure. By emphasizing the intimacy of domination and the eviscerated nature of political life, he risks reinstating the impossibility of reconstitution. The danger here is in mistaking the symptom for the totality. The metaphor of “mutual zombification” is interesting, but it remains a diagnosis without a prescription. It is a vision of political life suspended in paralysis. What unites both thinkers is a deep suspicion of traditional redemptive narratives. Yet in refusing redemptive closure, they risk overstating the impossibility of agency. Wilderson flattens history into ontology; Mbembe suspends it in postcolonial fatigue. Both see the Black subject as trapped, either in a structure of absolute negation or in a cycle of affective complicity. But this occludes the discontinuous, insurgent, and situated forms of Black political becoming that persist. What tends to be missed is the unevenness of the practices through which Black communities theorize and organize life otherwise.
Rodney, Fanon, and the Dialectics of Black Liberation
The critique of the alienating effects of racial capitalism and colonialism has been central to revolutionary thought, with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Steve Biko, and Lewis R. Gordon consistently articulating that the conditions for liberation are not spontaneously generated but are forged through active struggle. Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa extends this tradition by exposing how colonial capitalism, with its economic, political, and epistemic modalities, systematically deformed African subjectivity. By situating Africa as an “unhistorical” entity, colonialism sought not only to exploit labor and resources but also to render African identity and history inconsequential to global narratives of progress. Rodney contends that the very processes through which colonialism underdeveloped Africa also violently eradicated its historical consciousness by subordinating the continent’s temporal realities to a Eurocentric framework that defined Blackness as inherently outside history.
Rodney’s critique of colonialism moves beyond a mere exposé of economic exploitation; it situates the underdevelopment of Africa as the intentional and systematic outcome of imperialist conditioning. Colonialism did not serve the same “civilizing” or “modernizing” functions that liberal or Eurocentric historical discourses may claim. Rather, Rodney unearths how the colonial project intentionally disrupted indigenous African productive systems and social relations by reordering them to meet the extractive needs of the colonizers. Europe’s so-called “technological superiority” was not, as many historical narratives suggest, a neutral tool for the mutual development of all societies; it was a calculated mechanism of domination. Rodney asserts, “European technical superiority did not apply to all aspects of production, but the advantage which they possessed in a few key areas proved decisive” (78). This “technical edge” wielded by imperial powers did not lead to Africa’s development. It led instead to its structural dependency and historical disfiguration, a legacy that remains entrenched.
The political implications of Rodney’s analysis are profound, as he proposes that colonialism’s contradictions—between Africa’s vast natural wealth and its entrenched poverty, between nationalist rhetoric and the persistence of neocolonial structures—present the very grounds for defiance and transformation. The struggles for liberation within Africa, though shaped by material factors, are also profoundly historical. Rodney illustrates that history is not a passive backdrop but a battleground for the restoration of African agency.
Yet, while Rodney’s materialist critique of colonialism is indispensable, his analysis tends to sidestep the insidious psychic and existential dimensions of colonial displacement—that is, the psychic violence that fractured Black subjectivity. Although Rodney exposes the economic and structural underpinnings of colonialism’s violence, he does not fully account for the affective deviation in the consciousness of the colonized and the fractured sense of self that undermines the very possibility of collective action. This is where the work of Fanon becomes essential.
Fanon, in his phenomenological and psychoanalytic exploration of colonialism, locates its violence not just in material deprivation but also in its ability to disfigure the colonized psyche. While Rodney interrogates the exploitation of labor and resources, Fanon’s focus shifts to the inner life of the colonized subject. Fanon’s concept of alienation, particularly the “epidermalization” of inferiority, reveals how colonialism operates on both an economic and a psychological level. Fanon insists that the colonized subject is not merely an economic pawn; they are fundamentally alienated in their very sense of being. He writes that “the effective disalienation of [the Black] entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily, economic; subsequently, the internalization, or, better, the epidermalization of this inferiority” (4). For Fanon, Black alienation is not simply the result of external exploitation but of an internalized inferiority that becomes inscribed upon the body, thus disfiguring the sense of self.
This psychological trauma, Fanon argues, has profound implications for the potential for liberation. Whereas Rodney emphasizes the structural, economic conditions that sustain colonial oppression, Fanon focuses on how these conditions are internalized and manifest in the consciousness of the colonized subject, thus obstructing the very possibility of emancipation. Fanon advances critiques of cultural movements like Négritude, which, while useful in affirming Black cultural identity, often fall short of addressing the structural and existential roots of Black alienation. For Fanon, true liberation requires more than the reclamation of cultural identity; it demands a radical transformation of social and psychological relations.
Historicity and Intersubjectivity as Epistemologies of Liberation
While thinkers like Wilderson and Mbembe emphasize the structural endurance of anti-Black violence by framing Blackness through the lens of ontological death or perpetual victimhood, Rodney and Fanon offer a very different orientation. They insist that even within conditions of profound alienation, Black agency is neither extinguished nor deferred; it is formed, reconstituted, practiced, and struggled for. Their frameworks of historicity and intersubjectivity do not deny the violence of (neo)colonial and postcolonial worlds but refuse to see Black life as reducible to that violence. Instead, they offer epistemologies forged in the heat of contradiction, and tools for thinking and living through negation toward transformation.
Rodney, grounded in historical materialism, treats the past not as a closed narrative of loss but as a space of contradiction pregnant with possibility. His concept of “development by contradiction” captures the dialectic at the fulcrum of colonial systems: while intended to entrench subjugation, they often produce the conditions for their own undoing. For instance, colonial education, designed to enforce subjugation, paradoxically produces intellectuals capable of resisting and transforming colonial domination. This dialectical subversion within the colonial system aligns with Rodney’s broader vision of Black liberation, which he locates in grassroots movements that disrupt the oppressive status quo.
The Ogoni resistance in the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria during the 1990s offers a striking example of how this historical consciousness is resurrected and activated in struggle. Confronted by the extraction of oil and the collusion of the Nigerian state with multinational corporations, the Ogoni people, through the leadership of Ken Saro-Wiwa, articulated a political vision that called for self-determination, environmental justice, and the reclamation of their historical space. As Ekpali Saint documents, “between 1976 and 1991, more than two million barrels of oil polluted Ogoniland in 2,976 oil spills,” devastating the local environment. The Ogoni Bill of Rights laid bare not only the environmental and economic injustices imposed by external actors but also the historical erasure of Ogoni political subjectivity. Their resistance, grounded in a recovered sense of collective memory and political sovereignty, exemplifies the radical reactivation of history and identity under the shadows of neo-colonial control and extractive capitalism. Here, political life becomes the medium through which fractured historicity is reactivated, and agency reassembled under very contradicting conditions.
Fanon complements Rodney’s materialist critique by turning toward the fractured interiority of Black subjecthood. Where Rodney shows how structures of domination can be turned inside out, Fanon shows how the colonized psyche and social relations, deformed by violence and misrecognition, can become the very terrain of liberation. His account of recognition, in his critique of Hegel, is vital: “man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him…as long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions” (169). The issue at hand is not just material exploitation; it is the denial of relational legitimacy, the refusal of Black humanity as such. In response, Fanon does not retreat into abstraction or despair; he calls for the reconstruction of the self through collective processes of healing and struggle.
Fanon’s work in colonial Algeria and Tunisia puts his intersubjective epistemology into practice. In psychiatric clinics, he rejected Western models that saw African patients as pathologies to be corrected. Instead, he developed group therapies, like psychodrama, that allowed people to work through colonial trauma socially and politically. The goal is not assimilation or individual recovery; it is disalienation. And disalienation, for Fanon, is not a return to a former depleted self but instead is dedicated to the creation of a new one, in relation with others, and in defiance of the world that tries to annihilate it.
A striking historical manifestation of Fanon’s intersubjective conception of liberation can be seen in the Combahee River Collective, a radical Black feminist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The Collective’s 1977 statement outlined a vision of Black liberation rooted in an intersectional analysis with a critique of both mainstream feminist movements and Black Nationalism for excluding Black women, particularly lesbians. Their focus on collective care and self-determination exemplifies the type of emancipatory praxis that Fanon envisioned: liberation as a collective project that reorders social relations, restores dignity, and affirms humanity within radically transformed structures. As Gerald Izenberg notes, the Combahee River Collective’s framework prefigures the contemporary discourse of intersectionality through its recognition that liberation is not achieved through any single axis of identity but through the interrelations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Their work exemplifies how Black liberation emerges through the radical reordering of social relations that is rooted in solidarity, struggle, and self-redefinition, rather than through appeals to recognition within dominant systems.
To speak of transformative historical consciousness, then, is to speak of memory mobilized for transformation and not as recollection alone, but as refusal of imposed limits on what can be imagined, known, and built. And to theorize intersubjectivity is to center the everyday practices of care, solidarity, and reconstruction through which alienated Black life asserts itself as social life. The Ogoni resistance against petro-capitalist extraction and the Combahee River Collective’s Black feminist praxis exemplify how these epistemologies take form in struggle, not as perfect models, but as historical contradictions that weave memory into will, and fractured social life into renewed solidarities. Faced with environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and state violence, the Ogoni people transformed the very contradictions of petro-capitalism into a platform for radical political consciousness. Saro-Wiwa and his comrades did not simply react; they reorganized social life around the principles of self-determination and environmental justice. This was historicity and intersubjectivity in motion: the recovery of memory as a tool for collective reorientation, and the assertion of humanity through shared struggle. Likewise, the Combahee River Collective’s Black feminist praxis affirms that liberation is not only structural but also affective and intimate. Their statement remains one of the clearest declarations of the political life of Black agency and solidarity:
“We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” (27)
Against the disfiguring force of anti-Black violence, these epistemologies echo a refusal to be defined by negation or regressive historical moments. They are active spaces for epistemic reimagination and political reconstitution. Historicity without intersubjective repair risks uncritical atavistic slippage or rigid political reform; intersubjectivity without historical grounding risks liberal abstraction or reparative containment. But held together, they offer a generative praxis and an opening for transformative possibilities. In the dialectic of critical historical consciousness and intersubjective repair, we do not find an endpoint, but a generative horizon, one that is already laboring for breath via its refusal to concede to the finality of Black negation.
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