Deleuze after Afro-pessimism

At first glance, there would seem to be nothing at all worthy in reading Deleuze and Guattari in the aftermath or wake of Afro-pessimism. There are a few scholarly connections where writers like Jared Sexton and C. Riley Snorton have briefly drawn on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and there is also the common debt to Franz Fanon. This seeming convergence is eclipsed when one looks at the details. At the simplest level, Deleuze and Guatarri are often hailed (and derided) as writers of joy and affect, while Afro-pessimism goes well beyond critique and suspicion to an insistent refusal of ‘the human’. For Calvin Warren, Black being, anti-Blackness and ‘the human’, are equiprimordial, with the humanity of free and world-forming affectivity being grounded on the non-being of Black existence:...