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Andrew Santana Kaplan

Andrew Santana Kaplan (they/them/their) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Emory University studying at the intersections of radical Black thought, continental philosophy, political theology, and aesthetics. Andrew’s project speculatively posits “the Black messianic” as a paradigm of allegorical and liturgical reading that constellates politico-theological signatures of anti-/Blackness in order to elaborate modes of destituent potential in fundamental antagonism to the World. Their dissertation develops this project through the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Frank Wilderson, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida. Andrew’s writing on the Black messianic has appeared or is forthcoming in The Comparatist, Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, Political Theology, Chiasma: A Site for Thought, and Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future.

Essays

Anti-Black Original Sin and the Unnarratable Catastrophe of Modernity

For Afropessimism, the World is the katechōn, rather than a particular institution within it. The language of the katechōn as the “restraining power” facilitates how the structure of anti-Blackness is not only a structure of domination and gratuitous violence, but also the foreclosure of a more radical mode of what Wilderson calls gratuitous freedom—which is precisely freedom from the World.