Abstract

This essay unpacks ambient whiteness as it operates through what I have coined the Theology of Boetism. Drawing on Frank B. Wilderson’s Afro-pessimist framework – in which anti-Blackness is constitutive of civil society – I examine how benign cultural rituals perpetuate structural violence via exclusionary genres of relationality. Locating Boetism in dialogue with the ‘Theology of Zamalek’ and Buddhist ontological looseness, I argue that cultural formations maintain racial hierarchies by sustaining the ontological framing of Blackness as “social death.” I treat material culture, speech acts, ritual, and memory as conduits for whiteness’s retention of comfort, cohesion, and deniability.

. . .

[Research discontinued due to lack of funding]

. . .

Relevant Readings:

Achterhuis, H. (2001). American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Indiana University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics (S. Pleasance & F. Woods, Trans.). Les Presses du Réel.

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press.

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

Mills, C. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press.

Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.

Wilderson III, F. B. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press.

Wilderson III, F. B. (2020). Afropessimism. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Rhythm of Life. (n.d.). The Theology of Zamalek. Available at: https://rhythmoflife.co.za/a-theology-of-zamalek/

© Matt Watt 2025. All rights reserved.