Left critics reject Afro-pessimism’s ontological framing as anti-solidarity and anti-utopian

Evidence

The appeal of these “poetheories” and nihilisms is undeniable, and inarguability is baked into their ethos. Therefore, it is crucial to appreciate the critiques and counterpositions offered by more materialist and dialectical thinkers of racialization, such as Angela Davis, Achille Mbembe, Olúfmi Táíwò, or Anthony Reed, who, in turn, find inspiration in the internationalist anti-imperialism of Frantz Fanon or Gayatri Spivak. Davis explicitly criticizes the “nationalism” and idealism of the paradigm of “anti-Blackness,” because the “center on pain and injury … can create barriers to developing solidarity” and because “the importance of black people’s histories in the Americas resides precisely in the fact that there has been an ongoing freedom struggle for many centuries, the centrality of black struggles is much more about freedom than it is about blackness.” Mbembe concurs that the “absolutization” operates in the realm of the ideal, reifying contingencies and eclipsing freedom and solidarity: “Afro-pessimism is also premised on the idea of a categorial antagonism that cannot be transcended.” … Táíwò, in stark contrast to Yusoff’s demolition, takes the concept of the Anthropocene as an opportunity to advocate for “constructive” reparations: since “the connection between climate crisis, slavery, and colonialism flows from distributions of wealth and vulnerability created by centuries of global politics and its ecological consequences, layered with more recent histories of pollution in the Global North and corporate fossil fuel interests,” it is necessary for there to be centralized restitution that anticipates future suffering. Reed powerfully argues that “the turn to theorizing (anti)Blackness as ontology, and the (re)turn to theorizing the inner life/subjective experience are two sides of one anticollective ultimately anti-utopian coin.” The obverse of immediacy’s immutability and spiritualization is this embrace of construction, contradiction, contingency—of struggle and solidarity. Mediations are many-textured compositions that sustain inconsistencies and de-complete or de-immanentize, holding open the possibilities of practical connection in and through action to build. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 313

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to her core thesis that immediacy-style theorists absolutize immutable categories; here she extends that critique of immediacy to Afro-pessimism’s ontological Blackness, directly pertinent to her broader argument against immutability/spiritualization as features of immediacy’s style.
• QUESTION: The passage positions materialist thinkers (Davis, Mbembe, Reed) against immediacy-laden ontological framings — worth checking whether she’s eliding genuinely distinct intellectual traditions under her immediacy rubric for argumentative convenience.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘Ontology is immediacy’s metaphysics’ — how the turn to the ontological register in race theory mirrors the economic-epochal immediacy she diagnoses across culture.