2023 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
African American Fiction and Fictions of the Founding Fathers
| Project/Area Number |
20K00459
|
|---|
| Research Institution | Kansai University |
|---|
Principal Investigator |
|
|---|
| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
|
| Keywords | Afro-pessimism / Frantz Fanon / Franck B. Wilderson, III / David Marriott / Frederick Douglass / WEB Du Bois |
|---|
| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Initially, my research aimed to explore the Founding Fathers’ unfulfilled promise of freedom, equality, and justice for all. Gearing my project toward Afro-pessimism has helped me develop a state-of-the-art analysis of the issue. I devoted this final fiscal year to my upcoming monograph, Black Hopes/Black Woes: Early African American Aspirations and Twenty-first Century Afro-pessimism, which final draft I will submit to my editor (Routledge) in October 2024. This last year, I wrote a chapter on how contemporary African American scholar Frank B. Wilderson promotes the tenets of Afro-pessimism and another chapter on how Afro-pessimists David Marriott, Fred Moten, and Jared Sexton have appropriated the notions of violence and tabula rasa in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1962). I have also laid the groundwork for my conclusion, which will show how Afro-pessimism percolates mainstream culture and to what effect. In addition to this monograph, I co-edited The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century (Brill, upcoming), a collection to which I contributed a long chapter, “Agency and Property in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” whose contents overlap with some of the concepts I develop in my monograph project.
|
