Intrusions of violence: Afro-pessimism and reading social death beyond solitary confinement
| Author | Ernest K Chavez |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619846132 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619846132
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 3 –22
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619846132
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Intrusions of violence:
Afro-pessimism and reading
social death beyond solitary
confinement
Ernest K Chavez
University of California, USA
Abstract
Any serious engagement with the theory of social death must contend with Afro-pessimism.
Socio-Legal Studies advances social death as an un-raced and universalizable phenomenon.
Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, is exemplary of this kind of work. In order to
construct a phenomenology of race, Guenther attempts to analogize a theory of slavery
(social death) with a theory of phenomenology and solitary confinement. Furthermore,
Guenther takes up a humanistic reading of Frantz Fanon’s work, as if Fanon was affirming
the possibility of a “new humanism” that could restore social life against social death in
the post-colonial wake. This essay is an attempt to provide an Afro-pessimist reading of
social death; one that engages anti-blackness as a fundamental condition of civil society
and provides a close reading of Fanon’s psychopolitics of racial violence.
Keywords
Afro-pessimism, anti-blackness, social death, solitary confinement, Albert Woodfox
Recent Socio-Legal scholarship has produced a surge of literature suggesting that social
death—a theory of slavery introduced by Orlando Patterson’s (1982) text Slavery and
Social Death—can be extended by way of analogy to various modes of subjugation
under the carceral state: the unraced prisoner placed into solitary confinement (Guenther,
2013); families forcibly separated under the authority of state institutions (Price, 2015);
and the “disintegrating subject” whose position of legal exclusion is exemplified through
Corresponding author:
Ernest K Chavez, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.
Email: ekchavez@uci.edu
846132TCR0010.1177/1362480619846132Theoretical CriminologyChavez
research-article2019
Article
4 Theoretical Criminology 25(1)
deportation or isolation within the supermax prison (Reiter and Coutin, 2017). According
to such interpretations, social death is constituted through experiences of isolation and
suffering that emerge from carcerality. However, this body of literature fails to account
for the intrusions of structural and psychic violence that fundamentally entangle social
death to anti-blackness. Hence, two bodies of literature are pivotal to this essay. First,
Lisa Guenther’s (2013) Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives presents
social death as a universalizable experience, conditioned upon confinement, which can
in turn be overcome through a commitment to humanistic racial relations. Against this
presentation of social death, I will offer a reading of Afro-pessimist texts including David
Marriott’s (2018) Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being, Frank Wilderson’s
(2010) Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, and Jared
Sexton’s (2016) “The vel of slavery: Tracking the figure of the unsovereign”.
In pursuing an Afro-pessimist critique of social death, I will argue that social death is
essentially conditioned through anti-blackness, and therefore, is not reducible to solitary
confinement.1 Afro-pessimism articulates social death as a theory of racial antagonisms
fundamental to civil society’s economic, libidinal, and social structure. As such, the social
life of civil society’s subjects, white and non-black, is parasitic upon anti-black violence.
Frank Wilderson (2010: 90) states, “[a]nti-blackness manifests as the monumentalization
and fortification of civil society against social death”. Accordingly, the subject of civil
society and its privileged access to freedom and transformative capacity—that is, “[h]
umanism’s infinite conceptual trajectories” (Wilderson, 2010: 22)—is structured in such
a way that it depends upon black social death. Hence, this freedom in actuality is not infi-
nite; it is conditioned upon a negation of black life.
Building upon an Afro-pessimist critique of social death, this essay pursues two cen-
tral questions. First, if the practice of solitary confinement is a catalyst for madness and
social death, as recent publications in Socio-Legal Studies claim it to be (i.e. Guenther,
2013), then why is it that certain prisoners can spend decades in solitary confinement
without coming psychologically undone? I will return to this question in the final section
of this essay by analyzing Albert Woodfox’s experience with solitary confinement in
order to argue that whereas solitary confinement has a literal and figurative “outside”,
social death does not. In other words, the suffering resulting from the solitary cell cannot
be abstracted at the same level of meaning as the suffering produced through social
death. A second question that is crucial to this essay centers upon the construction of
subjectivity: if solitary confinement does not equate to social death, or put another way,
if imprisonment does not equate to slavery, then what differentiates the positionality of
the prisoner from that of the slave? This question will be explored throughout the follow-
ing sections of this essay which offer different readings of social death.
In the first two sections of this essay, I want to suggest that in its attempt to generalize
and de-racialize social death, Socio-Legal scholarship places blackness under erasure
and therefore reinforces a broader epistemology of anti-blackness. Throughout the first
section, I will offer an analysis of Solitary Confinement, for this text provides the theo-
retical grounding for a Socio-Legal conception of social death. Solitary Confinement
argues that social death should be understood through an “inter-relational” subject,
meaning, a subject who establishes “personhood” through physical contact and commu-
nication with other people (Guenther, 2013). A person placed into the isolation of a
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