Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the transatlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts.
[3] Jared Sexton locates the foundational thread of Afro-pessimism in the "motive force of a singular wish inherited in no small part from Black women's traditions of analysis, interpretation, invention, and survival".
Wilderson writes that "Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers' agendas.
[6][7] Sharpe has named Dionne Brand, particularly her 2001 work A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, as writing in conversation with the concepts of Afro-pessimism by "mapping and creating a language for thinking, for articulating Black (social) life lived alongside, under, and in the midst of the ordinary and extraordinary terror of enforced Black social death".
[9] In the late 20th century, scholars including Derrick Bell, Lewis Gordon, and Cornel West developed concepts of antagonism and abjection that bear similarities to components of Afro-pessimism but without reaching the same conclusions.