In black studies, Afro-pessimism came to prominence in the first decade of the twenty-first century, primarily through the contributions of University of California Irvine professors Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton. Ironically, though both Afro-pessimism as development discourse and Afro-pessimism as black studies epistemology engage issues of structural lack, failure, and incapacity as they relate to African-derived peoples, they are autonomous and unrelated, with distinct genealogies and modes of analysis. As an interdisciplinary project that combines, among other approaches, film studies, literary theory, poetics, critical discourse analysis, critical theory, and political theory, Afro-pessimism aims to theorize within the irreducible 'anxiety of antagonism' the paradigmatic position of the black in a world structured by anti-blackness and Negrophobia the position of ontological death. As a black studies epistemology, it 'theorize[s] for battle, to go to war in theory, to fight without experiencing a breakdown or detour in language'. It is grounded in the argument that undergirding the political ontology of modernity is blackness: the singular commodification of human existence that transforms the body into flesh to be accumulated and  
exchanged. Such commodification positions the slave as paradigmatically black, and renders racial blackness inextricable from enslavement. This structuring, coupled with the historical failures of abolition, maintains slavery in the 'here and now', reduces the black to the non-ontology and non-being of the slave, and fundamentally emplaces her outside of the modern conjuncture of civil society, citizenship, and humanity (Sexton, 2016; Wilderson III, 2010).