Participants: Gust Burns, Brittney Frantece, Patrick McGowan & Luis Resendez
Building an Afropessimist Archive is a project to produce an archive of Afropessimist (and relatable) materials to be used in EWP and other course curricula. The archive ranges across genres and disciplines including accessible theoretical and critical scholarly writing; literary, cinematic, artistic, and multimodal creative work; traditional and multi-modal historiographic work; and editorial and journalistic texts.
We see this project as a way to bring the critical acumen inherent and at work in movements, from the Black Liberation Movement to the recent uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, into the EWP program. Such work is crucial, especially as we understand anti-Blackness as the most basic force within the University, authorizing and conditioning the University of Washington's settler-colonialist and financial-capitalist elements, even while these latter have begun to be the objects of institutional and public scrutiny. Lastly, we want to facilitate the adoption of Afropessimist critical lenses within (EWP) courses as a direct and meaningful way to support Black students, by centering Black positionality within the University and society.