It is tempting to regard the 2020 murder of George Floyd by law enforcement as a contemporary variant of the meaning of Blackness in society, a meaning traceable to slavery, colonialism, and then postcolonialism. In such a case, Blackness translates into a cynical and pessimistic outlook on life for Black people everywhere. Further, some see this pessimism manifested in so-called Black-on-Black violence. It is this very cynical outlook that Etoke challenges here. By analyzing Black people's creative productions—e.g., spirituals during slavery, the freedom songs of the 1960s, contemporary hip-hop and rap music, and Black theatrical performances—Etoke argues, contra the Afro-Pessimists, that Black people have constantly been affirming their humanity and subjectivity, hence optimism, even in the face of white supremacist domination and oppression. Etoke calls attention to oppressive structures specifically in France and the US but generally in the Global North, where the notion of Black citizenship seems like an oxymoron. Even so, Black people have not just been “singing the Blues” and waiting for death, but instead have been articulating forms of resistance and engaging in self-affirmation that bespeaks optimism and existential freedom. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Afro-pessimists have dared Black scholars to look into the abyss and suspend their belief in the illusion of humanity. Nathalie Etoke has accepted that challenge and found at the bottom of nothingness the power of struggle to create existential resources that shatter the shackles thought to ontologically bind Blackness to the condition of the slave. Black Existential Freedom takes the refusal of Blacks to BE what the white world demands to be a mode of theorization. Etoke’s text is an insightful analysis of racism in France, the United States, and Africa that cannot be ignored in these darkening times.

Tommy Curry, The University of Edinburgh, author of The Man-Not

Nathalie Etoke has written a beautiful and moving book that shows how the living practice of existential freedom has never been more important in resisting a politics of discouragement that gives into our seemingly desperate times. She not only answers Afro-pessimism, but also moves widely to bring back Black existentialism to the burning issues of the times—notably the attacks on LGBTQ people of color. She reminds us on every page that Black existential freedom was not and cannot be buried under the horrors of enslavement and colonization. The struggle for freedom is celebrated as what makes us human.

Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

With the characteristic lyricism that readers of Nathalie Etoke would expect, Black Existential Freedom weaves a throbbing counternarrative of continental and diasporic African unremitting insistence on life. Speaking on music, film, and fiction about an existence that includes disaster and hell as undeniable components, Etoke joins the rich history of struggle that generated Black Studies, refusing to see Africana existence through pessimistic, conservative, and distorting lenses that are all too in vogue. Warning that homophobia strengthens bonds between repressive post-colonial states and their disempowered citizens, she offers us a precious, multifaceted archive focused unflinchingly on freedom.

Jane Anna Gordon, author of Creolizing Political Theory and Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement

Against the death fetishism, Eurocentrism, and de facto political conservatism of Afro-pessimism, Nathalie Etoke offers, through meticulous scholarship and poetic insight, the existential dimensions—from the global perspective of Black political struggles to the practices of joy and pleasure in everyday life across the African diaspora—of Blackness as an affirmation of life. She exposes “the banality of white supremacy,” which attacks human agency, dignity, and freedom and argues that the humanity of Black people extends beyond moral and political forms of resistance. It is, as Etoke beautifully demonstrates, in the lived reality of Black people’s affirmation of life in contingency, in making meaning beyond the quagmire of despair. Black Existential Freedom reminds us that no better world can emerge without active, fought-for freedom. She counsels us to be inspired and learn from those whorose to the occasion of that responsibility and to draw upon the resources of our creativity at every aspect of existence, which, we should remember, also means life.Yes, this book is at birth a classic work in Black existential thought. Read it. Learn from it. And share it, as I plan to, far and wide.”

Lewis R. Gordon, professor of philosophy and Africana studies, University of Connecticut