At the Margins of Nihilism - by John E Drabinski

About the Book

Documenting senses of life and practices of refusal hidden at the edges of Black literature and thought.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"A fascinating book that we need now more than ever. Brilliantly juxtaposing the literatures on deconstruction and social death, Drabinski poses clearly a central dilemma, though its solution is daunting: How can an ostensibly socially dead being (e.g. a Black person in a society founded on antiblack animus) ever become free and live free in a polity constructed to ensure that person's unfreedom?"--Neil Roberts, Williams College

"At the Margins of Nihilism offers a wide-ranging series of reflections on issues of enduring importance and interest--colonialism, racism (specifically antiblackness), and social death--through an engagement with major figures in continental philosophy and Black Studies. The book is the work of a mature thinker who moves between philosophical and literary traditions with ease and comfort."--Lisa Guenther, Queen's University

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.

John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American and Africana Studies and English at the University of Maryland.

Review Quotes

"At the Margins of Nihilism offers a wide-ranging series of reflections on issues of enduring importance and interest--colonialism, racism (specifically antiblackness), and social death--through an engagement with major figures in continental philosophy and Black Studies. The book is the work of a mature thinker who moves between philosophical and literary traditions with ease and comfort."---Lisa Guenther, Queen's University

"A fascinating book that we need now more than ever. Brilliantly juxtaposing the literatures on deconstruction and social death, Drabinski poses clearly a central dilemma, though its solution is daunting: How can an ostensibly socially dead being (e.g. a Black person in a society founded on antiblack animus) ever become free and live free in a polity constructed to ensure that person's unfreedom?"---Neil Roberts, Williams College

About the Author

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).