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Phenomenology of Black Spirit

By Mandela Biko Gray and Ryan J. Johnson

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£95.00

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About this book

What if the protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology were Black? Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Black Thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis
  • The first philosophy book written, in a single voice, by a Black philosopher and a white philosopher
  • Dramatizes a dialectical parallelism between Hegel’s Phenomenology and Black Thought
  • Diversifies and transforms the history of philosophy by forcing canonical thinkers into direct dialogue with 19th-20th-century African American, African, and Africana thinkers
  • Expands Hegel Studies by including habitually excluded perspectives and voices
  • Champions the history of African American Philosophy
  • Articulates the expansiveness and interdisciplinarity of Black Thought

This staging of an elongated dialectical parallelism between Hegel’s classic text and major 19th-20th-century Black thinkers explodes the western canon of philosophy. Johnson and Mandela Gray show that Hegel’s abstract dialectic is transformed and critiqued when put into conversation with the lived dialectics of Black Thought: from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs through to Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

While Hegel articulates the dynamic logics that we see in these Black thinkers, when they are placed in parallel and considered together, the whiteness, both explicit and implicit, of Hegelianism itself is revealed. Forcing Hegelianism into the embodied history of Black Thought reveals a phenomenology of America whose spirit is Black.

Reviews

Thinking about Blackness historically—as a manifestation of the deliberate self-conscious efforts of Black people—is not only a worthwhile project but a necessary philosophical and conceptual grounding of Black theory and thought. Phenomenology of the Black Spirit is a commendable effort towards establishing a groundwork for the study of Black Spirit as a revelation of time and civilization.

Table of contents

Introduction: Black and White, Gray in Gray

Part I: Fighting, Uplifting, and Thinking

1. Master-Slave Dialectic: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

2. Stoicism: Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells

3. Skepticism: W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper

Part II: (Un)happy (Black) Consciousness

4. Devotion: Marcus Garvey and Zora Neale Hurston

5. Sacramental Work and Desire: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Ella Baker

6. Self-mortification: Malcolm X and Angela Davis

Conclusion: Idealism and Black Power

BibliographyIndex

About the contributors

Mandela Biko Gray

Biko Mandela Gray is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject (Duke University Press, 2023). He is co-editor of The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Ryan J. Johnson

Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina. He is the author of Deleuze, A Stoic (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (EUP, 2017). He is co-editor of Nietzsche and Epicurus (Bloomsbury, 2020), Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (EUP, 2017) and The Movement of Nothingness (Davies Group Publishers, 2012).