The Contingency of Despair

This review essay situates recent scholarship on two nineteenth-century Black American political activists, Maria Stewart and Henry McNeal Turner, in relation to contemporary Black political thought on the role of despair in the Black freedom struggle. As Jared Loggins has argued in this journal (“Who Decides What We Should Do with Our Despair?,” Winter 2022), despair’s role is a question of political judgment: it is a decision to be made rather than an answer to be discovered. I argue that, by returning to the role of despair in nineteenth-century Black American political thought, we are able to enrich our political imagination concerning possibilities for despair and its counterpart, hope, in emancipatory politics. Maria Stewart offers us a vision of apocalyptic hope for the end of an unjust world, while Henry McNeal Turner despairingly declares that the Black freedom struggle must begin again.