Frank B. Wilderson III

Frank B Wilderson, III (born April 11, 1956, New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Life

Wilderson grew up in a white "integrated" enclave during the height of the U.S. civil rights movement. As a child he lived around or near colleges or universities and was familiar with student activists and intellectuals who visited his parents' home.^[1]

In the 1990s, he lived in South Africa, teaching at University of Witwatersrand, was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress, and was a member of Umkhonto We Sizwe.^[2] During his time in South Africa he taught regularly at universities and helped the ANC to develop anti-apartheid propaganda.

Critical work

Wilderson's work is an unflinching paradigmatic analysis of the positions of Black slavery and Red genocide produced by white civil society through film. Wilderson's work is self described as afro-pessimist.

His work has appeared in Social Identities; Social Justice, Les Temps Modernes, O Magazine Konch, Callaloo Obsidian II, and Paris Transcontinental.

Dramatist work

He has worked as a dramaturge for Lincoln Center Theater's productions of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes's Mule Bone and Mbongeni Ngema's Township Fever; and for the Market Theater in Johannesburg's production of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum.

He directed the film Reparations…...Now.

Awards

• The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order
• The Judith Stronach Award for Poetry
• The Crothers Short Story Award
• The Jerome Foundation Artists and Writers Award
• The Loft-McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota
• The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America.
• 2008 American Book Award, for Incognegro

Works

• Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press).
• Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid. South End Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0-89608-783-5. 

Anthologies

• Joy James, ed. (2007). "The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal". Warfare in the American homeland: policing and prison in a penal democracy. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3923-6. 
• Ishmael Reed, Al Young, eds. (1978). Yardbird lives!. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-394-17041-1. 

References