BACK
JAFA
SUMMER 2025
I'm really glad to hear that! I'm happy that we get this chance to talk face to face. Your participation in and speaking to the debate community has been so active, and I'm really glad that we get this time to talk. I am very excited to get into the meat of our interview today, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about how much I enjoyed reading this book — in large part because you are an excellent writer, and also because the book is organized in a very compelling way. It is written as a memoir, and the narrative is the heart that drives the book, but it is told through the lens of Afropessimism. Going into the book, I have to say I was almost nervous, because I didn't really know what to expect. Was the theory going to be heavy-handed and overwhelm the autobiographical portion of the text? Or was the narrative going to act as a substitute for theory? But truly neither is really the case. The theory acts as a lens by which to read the narrative, and that really blew me away. Another compelling element of this writing style is that both elements of the text complement each other — the narrative is illuminated by theoretical insight, and the theory is made more material and fleshed out by the narrative, lending itself to a very full, robust, and truly unique text. What I want to spend a little bit of time talking about is how you came to write this book. Why did you feel that this was the moment — in your life, and in the climate of Black studies as a discipline — that this book needed to be written?
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