The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal?
At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications.
Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.
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Information
Publisher
Fordham University PressYear
2026Print ISBN
9781531512378
9781531512361
Edition
1eBook ISBN
9781531512385
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Dedication
- Prologue: SembèNe, Teno, And The Work Of The Outside
- Introduction: Whithering the Decolonial
- 1. Social Death as a Kind of Deconstruction
- 2. Racial Formation and the Remainder in Baldwin’s Nonfiction
- 3. Nihilism and the Refusal of Refusal in Wright and Fanon
- 4. The Lower Frequencies after Afropessimism
- Postscript Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
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Yes, you can access At the Margins of Nihilism by John E. Drabinski in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Literary Criticism Theory. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.