Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death

Abstract

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and FrankWilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes DuBois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soulof an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded toshape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “formof life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm ofsocial death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward socialdeath