Frank B. Wilderson III

Explore about the Famous Playwright Frank B. Wilderson III, who was born in United States on April 11, 1956. Analyze Frank B. Wilderson III’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Frank B. Wilderson III dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Frank B. Wilderson III?

Frank B. Wilderson III Biography

Frank B Wilderson III (born April 11, 1956) 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.

Wilderson was born in New Orleans, and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota during the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In his youth, Wilderson lived around or near colleges or universities as his father was a university professor. He began engaging in activism at a young age. In middle school in Chicago, where his family lived when his father was on sabbatical, he organized a civil disobedience campaign to make the “Pledge of Allegiance” non-mandatory at his school. When Wilderson’s family moved to Berkeley, California he joined the civil rights riots there. Student activists and intellectuals were regulars in his parents’ home throughout his early life, and his family was supportive of the Black Panthers.

Wilderson moved across the country to study European Philosophy and Comparative Government at Dartmouth College in September 1974 to begin his undergraduate education. Wilderson’s sister Fawn Wilderson-Legos also attended the school. He continued to organize protests and engage in civil disobedience while in university and was suspended for two years after being arrested in relation to a protest against the poor conditions of immigrant construction workers there. While suspended, Wilderson worked as a labourer, freelance writer, and garbage man, hitchhiking around the U.S.

In the 1990s, he lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for five years, teaching at University of Witwatersrand, Vista University, and Khanya College. There, he was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1992 led by Nelson Mandela, and was a member of the paramilitary guerrilla group Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) led by Nelson Mandela. During his time in South Africa he taught regularly at universities and helped the ANC to develop anti-apartheid propaganda.

His political memoir Incognegro: a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid chronicles his time in Johannesburg when he participated in the African National Congress (ANC) and worked as a university professor there. The book ends after he returned to the US and began his graduate program at UC Berkeley. Wilderson describes the complex relationship he had to the US coming back. Incognegro won the 2008 American Book Award, and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Non-Fiction, among other awards.

“As I told a friend of mine, ‘yeah we’re going to help you get rid of Israel, but the moment that you set up your shit we’re going to be right there to jack you up, because anti-Blackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life.’”

In “Grammar and Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom,” Wilderson, the emergence of the nation(ality) is the violent grammar that originates in slavery. He writes, “No other place-names depend on such violence. No other nouns owe their integrity to this semiotics of death.” This violence gives way to a mark (“let’s face it”), where to be African, to be African American, to be Caribbean, is to be “shaped and comprised by slavery.” African descended “peoples,” share a history and a violence in every gesture and thus, Wilderson’s tracing of history begins with slavery and thus, the violence that configures the “African” does not only misstep in attempting to cohere around a nationality but also fails in attempting a coherence of the identity at all.

What's Frank B. Wilderson III Net Worth 2024

Frank B. Wilderson III Family