At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death by Drabinski, John E.

At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781531512361)

Vendor: John E. Drabinski
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$105.00
$105.00
$105.00
Subtotal: $105.00
At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death by Drabinski, John E.

At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death

$105.00
At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death by Drabinski, John E.

At the Margins of Nihilism: Deconstruction and Social Death

$105.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal?

At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications.

Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.

Author: John E. Drabinski
ISBN-10: 1531512364
ISBN-13: 9781531512361
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/06/2026
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
By John E. Drabinski
By John E. Drabinski
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John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is author of So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern, 2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minnesota, 2019), Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh, 2011), Godard Between Identity and Difference (Continuum, 2008), and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (SUNY, 2001).

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