Cultural Contexts
Afromexicans: The Forgotten People View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Magdaleno Manzanárez, Julieta Altamirano-Crosby, Laurence French
In 1946 a seminal ethnohistoric study about Afro descendants was published in Mexico and aside from few scholars, policy makers, and educators who lauded the work, the groundbreaking research was ignored. Mexico had built by then a powerful sense of being a mestizo—mixed race—nation founded on the encounter of the Spanish conquerors and the native population. For three centuries Mexicans lived under a caste system, which was abolished upon independence in 1821. The new country began to shape its ideology of nationhood based solely on the notion that those two groups conformed the roots of its existence. It completely erased the contributions of thousands of the Afromexicans. It took two hundred years after independence to formally begin to recognize that Mexico is a mestizo country based on three broad groups: Indigenous, African, and Spanish. This paper examines Afromexican historical development and the current efforts to resurrect the “third root” of the nation’s mestizaje. In doing so, the study analyzes three broad periods, colonial, post-independence, and post-revolution to contextualize the contemporary conditions of Afromexicans.
Burning Down the Ship from "the Inside Out": Afropessimism’s Ethics of the Real
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frances Louise Restuccia
My study explores the question of “Black desire” (Frank Wilderson’s phrase in Afropessimism) as it pertains to Lacanian ethics (as conveyed in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar VII). Like Antigone, Afropessimism is “a turning point” in the field of ethics. Lacan poses the same question about Antigone that Wilderson poses regarding the Black: “What does it mean . . . [to] go beyond the limits of the human?” After elaborating on Fanon’s notion that “the black . . . is not,” Marriott’s conception of ab-sens as blackness, and Wilderson’s idea of the Black as Slave, I use and then reverse Žižek’s notion of parallax to suggest that the shift (which these theorists call for) in the (Black) phobogenic nightmare/object (petrified by the “white gaze”), can effect not only collapse of the (white) subject (as it pulls the black rug out from under it) but also a dissolution of the subject-object (racist) structure. As the object refuses to accept its reification (parallax), resisting its relegation to social death, through confrontation with and ownership of the Real hell that especially Wilderson’s Fanonian/Lacanian work insists on, the entire edifice will undergo a sea change as the eye that now looks at the Human sees it as what it is: nothing (reverse parallax). Herein lies the revolutionary desire—which can only arise through an “absolute condition”—that Afropessimism, in the spirit of Antigone, aims to ignite. “Social death can be destroyed,” writes Wilderson, once the ship is burned “from the inside out.”
