interesting how the question at the fulcrum of ethnographic research-the gathering of the observable and articulated "lived experience" of others-was not answered. what is lived experience-what does it even mean for black (student) subjects to give an account of their own racial subjectivity, again, what is black narcissism, to use psychoanalytic terms-is never directly spoken to, answered, or theorized; a question Fanon remains very troubled by and therefore theorizes heavily, I might add; it is, rather, historicized as concept through Hall's poststructuralism, Collins' black feminist epistemology, and then where Fanon is introduced none of what Fanon says explicitly about lived experience ("L'experience vécue du Noir") is operationalized-sociogeny is given in its place. also: sociogeny as affording a theorization of race as "malleable" appears to run counter, if not to Fanon, at least to Sylvia Wynter's account of Fanon's sociogeny, whereby "Fanon has therefore effected a shift from the “family situation" as the origin of the individual, to the overall social order, (of whose reproduction the family itself can now be seen as being but a proximate function), which he now posits as the source of the modality of the individual subject." this seems to describe a situation in which whether or not racial semiology is shifting and accumulable (something already given in Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the non-coincidence between being and meaning allows for the semblant), blackness describes something interruptive vis-a-vis phenomenology, or "lived experience" in all its impossible individuation. more engagement with the work of Frank B. Wilderson (on black narcissism), Tyrone Palmer (on affective experience), and David Marriott (on Fanon's phenomenological and sociogenic accounts) seems useful here. great conversation, obviously much to think with.

This was good until the cheap shots at Afropessimism... especially after articulating a particularity discussed in Afropessimism. The idea that Blackness becomes legible in and through suffering. But hey... many people have been accidental Afropessimists. I'm just gassed at how a particularly generative arena of Black thought is derided instead of engaged.