Biko Mandela Gray (Syracuse University) & Ryan J. Johnson (Elon University), "Phenomenology of Black Spirit"
Edinburgh University Press, 2022
Despite what the title may suggest, Phenomenology of Black Spirit is not a book about Hegel. Instead, it is a conversation – between a dominant and canonical philosophical text and a chorus of thinkers, writers, and activists who either illuminate or trouble the Phenomenology’s assertions and conclusions. Most of all, it is an artifact of forging a relationship between two philosophers who are deeply troubled by the state of affairs in this world.
And this relationship began on a plane – sort of.
We were both headed to the same conference, but we did not yet know each other. After a full day of presentations, we started talking, drinking, eating, and laughing together at the hotel bar.
           Then, the question.
Ryan asked it sheepishly, though straightforwardly: I’m thinking about this book on Hegel and Black thinkers. Would you be interested? You do not have to answer now. During a phone call few weeks later, Biko agreed, and the rest is history.
Except that it isn’t.
Around that time, Ryan had been trying to make sense of his own complicity in antiblackness as a white man, and Biko was struggling both with the reality of antiblackness as well as imposter syndrome in academia. From this delicate position, a trust was formed, and a friendship forged. We taught each other – one taught Hegel; the other taught Blackness and Black studies – until the two began to intertwine into something unexpected, something material, something we think is quite beautiful.
Our Phenomenology of Black Spirit is the raw expression of a philosophical conversation and a real relationship, one that traverses time and space to make sense of one deceptively simple question:
What if the protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology was Black?
We ask this because we believe reading the Phenomenology without attention to Blackness is bad philosophical magic; it is a smoke and mirror show that is no longer understood as mere smoke and mirrors. And it is dishonest (and implicated).
Focusing on the Blackness internal to Hegel’s dialectical thinking in this way does not simply expose Hegel; it announces the centrality of Blackness to the development of philosophical thought from modernity moving forward. To think with the chorus of Black lives we chronicle is to recognise how Black life shapes modernity, how it informs and influences the movements and changes of the world – even if this shaping, informing, and influencing occurs through violence. To be sure, the stories we tell here are not always pleasant. They are sometimes tragic, often beautiful, always insurgent.
Yet by reading the Phenomenology through and alongside Black thinkers – and by reading those thinkers against and across the Phenomenology – we attempt a mode of shared thinking that illuminates both. We call it dialectical parallelism, though maybe it is more of a parallax. There are six moments:
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs name and claim nothingness as resistance and subterfuge (Chapter 1); Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells underscore how nothingness can be both naively foolish and soberingly realist in its stoic commitments (Chapter 2); W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper announce the double- and triple-divisions with (in and through) which nothingness must wrestle (Chapter 3). So split, Black spirit struggles with unhappiness in three phases: first, Marcus Garvey and Zora Neale Hurston devote themselves to externally transcendent or immanent ideals (Chapter 4); finding little solace there, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ella Baker do the sacramental work of desiring to change its conditions – even as while constantly getting in their own ways (Chapter 5); and eventually, recognising that it does get in its own way, Malcolm X and Angela Davis engage in the work of self-mortification, either living into the nothingness that it is, or channelling that nothingness into larger transformative projects of collective revolution (Chapter 6).
This book will not satisfy everyone, we well know. Drawing from Hegel scholars and Black studies, we likely will satisfy neither and irritate both. But this is a risk we are willing to take – for any engagement with Hegel, we think, is already an engagement with the problematics of slavery and its afterlives. Neither Hegel nor his thought can be disentangled from the antiblack violence of modernity; to dismiss this or suggest otherwise is to misread the past.
Perhaps more than anything else, our Phenomenology of Black Spirit is about trying to change things. At its core, it is an attempt to lay bare and criticise the violence of antiblackness – as well as articulate other possibilities within that violence, within and beyond Hegel. But that is the thing with normative texts: though they seek to transform, they rarely, if ever, do everything they set out to do and they always do more. This text is no different, it has its limitations, and we could never deny that.
Part of this is due to both of our subject-positions. We are both cisgendered males, and we realize that such a position necessarily entails violent blind spots, realities with which we have not yet engaged, or engaged sufficiently.
Recognizing, if not forwarding, our limitation, we hope to position multiple Black thinkers in relation to the one text as a structural attempt to overwhelm Hegel’s Phenomenology with the Blackness that already constitutes it – and constitutes in its very exclusion – but that it cannot acknowledge.
Again, the thinkers we engage do more than fulfil or embody the movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology. They augment, critique, and diffract it through their lives, their work, and, when available, their writings, and they do so obliquely, immanently, and unexpectedly.
If we have accomplished anything, it is surely far more Hegelian and anti-Hegelian than Hegel ever could have, but always should have, been. As Hegel says of the emergence of new truths or new forms of consciousness, this work ‘takes place for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness’ (PS 87; emphasis added).
Working behind the back of philosophy, we are trying to do contribute to the much larger work of calling our discipline to account for its violence, to recognize and behold the brutal—and brutally antiblack—effects of its own logics. This work must deal with what philosophy has designated itself to be. This work must, therefore, deal with and deconstruct those thinkers and texts that have been central to its development and maintenance through what is immanently unsaid and unseen, that is, from the innermost outside. If it is to mean anything to the future of philosophy, Hegel’s Phenomenology has to be dealt with; it has to be subjected to rigorous ethical and philosophical scrutiny because it has become so canonical.
The trick, then, is to engage with the canon in ways that situate it and its violence and tarry with it, as George Yancy says. The work to be done, we think, is to relativise the prevalence of these canonical thinkers and texts by announcing their limitations, their violence, their constraints, not to cancel but in order to grapple with the weight and shadows we all carry and live within.
For in the end, Hegel was just a man; the Phenomenology is just a text. It is a brilliant one, to be sure. But at the end of the day, it is the ruminations of one man who, armed with a certain set of violent assumptions and an uncharacteristically keen epistemological eye, developed a philosophical approach and method to contend with the problems of his day.
We make – we have made – him important, which means that our readings of his work must wrestle with the quotidian reality that he was no more special than the enslaved Black people who, through various strategies and tactics, survived and/or revolted against the overwhelming epistemological, political, religious, and social violence visited upon them.
Such an account does not minimise Hegel or his contributions (and even if it does, we can live with that). But it does situate the man and his work, giving us a different lens through which to understand his work and its implications. As we said at the outset, this book is not about Hegel. It is not about Hegel.
Or, put most precisely, it is not about Hegel. It is about a true friendship founded on the desire for a world in which Blackness is so disruptive that the very notion of world needs to be reconfigured.
           For those that read our book, we ask you to come with an open mind. Beneath whatever successes we had and alongside all the failures and limitations we certainly brought, we hope that you sense the very real relationship at the heart of it.