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This course takes its title from Nahum Chandler’s X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. Chandler’s title is itself a riff off of the landmark 1903 publication The Negro Problem. Chandler here reminds us that theoretical investigation into blackness always does more than simply pose a problem in theory. It poses a problem for theory, for its sedimented methods and practices. This class therefore promises to not only expand our understanding of the topic – “the Negro”, blackness – but of the very philosophical enterprise within which we attempt to make sense of that topic.
We often say that we hope to teach our students more than a list of concepts: we want to teach them a way of thinking, a philosophical method. As admirable as this is, we often fail to interrogate the boundaries we set up around that method. This failure becomes particularly pressing when we consider topics marginalized by the philosophical academy, and thus the philosophical method. This course is thus designed with two aims in mind. First, to consider one such topic: blackness. Second, to refuse to be limited by “the philosophical method”, to let that topic guide us beyond the bounds we take for granted.
I think this second aim will be the greatest hurdle for this class, then, both for the instructor and the students. At this point in their undergraduate career, many of your students will likely have become sedimented in their conceptions of philosophical practice. You will have to directly problematize this, rather than take it for granted or disregard it. But I suggest you refrain from turning that concern into a settled question or set of hermeneutical rules. I urge that you embrace being unsettled and urge your students to do the same. I take the emphasis on being “amateurs” from Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith’s introduction to Otherwise Worlds. They insist that an obsession with philosophical mastery often leads to the erection of exclusive schemas that reify old ways of thinking. Being an amateur, on the other hand, means being open to being changed by the unknown. The best way to encourage your students to think this way will be to think thusly yourself. Don’t be daunted by these texts or practices; we gain nothing by refusing to be amateurs. Be ok with going off the deep end!
Week 1 consists of two well-read and accessible (and quite fantastic) “standard” philosophical essays that directly problematize philosophy. Mills asserts blackness as a reframing First Philosophy that allows access to deeper philosophical truths than could be accessed without it, while Dotson argues for a conception of philosophical method beyond and deeper than the standard notion of “critical argumentation”. Use these as an easy opportunity to prime your students for the kind of metaphilosophical openness they’ll need to cultivate all semester.
They’ll need it to tackle the first two which, which will challenge the presumption that we already have some grasp of the nature of our object of inquiry – blackness – prior to our philosophical investigations. For example, Hartman and Spillers argue that even the notion of “human” must be thrown into question – at an ontological, rather than epistemological or political, level. The actual constitution of the “black subject” – the subject to whom “blackness” as an experience or category adheres – is fundamentally dis- or re-organized by antiblack violence. Chandler and Glissant will push even further: adequately studying “blackness,” they contend, will require abandoning presumptions about what it means to have an “object of thought” at all, to embrace indeterminancy and phenomenological looseness. If it helps you and your students, compare these approaches to social ontology or conceptual engineering.
These metacritiques will continue in the next two weeks. One response to the dilemmas discussed above is to take a genealogical approach: to locate “real, material” blackness in history. The next two readings will problematize this way out. First, you will read Wynter’s landmark essay, in which she proposes a metatheory of intellectual inquiry: such inquiry, she argues, is constrained by historical epistemes, or transcendental conditions of thought, that make particular inquiries possible and others impossible. A genealogical inquiry must attend to those epistemes and their constraints. Then, you will turn to Best, who comes to a strikingly different conclusion. Best contends that locating blackness in history will be impossible, even at the meta-level Wynter demands. The precise violence of antiblackness results in the annihilation of the possibility of historical inquiry, of genealogy, altogether.
This first half of the class will reach a zenith of sorts with the sixth week. These two gorgeous readings by Da Silva and Crawley summarize a metaphilosophical position that might be seen to underpin everything you have read thus far. Both argue that attempts to schematize and categorically define reality into distinct categories – one might say, the essence of philosophy as we know it – fails to capture blackness. What is needed is a vibratory kind of theorizing, imbued with a frenetic energy and eternal desedimentation. I think this will be an immensely thrilling week. It gives you a chance to directly problematize the experiences your students’ will have had thus far. Emphasize how radically different this is than traditional philosophy’s project to “carve the world at its joints.”
Next, you turn to the shadow that has been haunting the class at its every turn: antiblackness. In the seventh week, you’ll read two central works from the Afropessimist tradition (a corner of black studies that sees antiblackness as fundamentally and irrevocably structuring the entirety of the world). Sexton and Martinot’s paper will, sadly, always be relevant to your students, as it discusses the repetition of police brutality. It will be hard, but I urge you not to reduce this to an intellectual exercise. Wilderson’s paper will be controversial and fruitful. It asserts that antiblackness is unique among experiences of marginalization, and has a deeper priority in the modern world than misogyny, imperialism, and nonblack racism. Your students will likely have strong opinions on this: welcome them. The next week will ask what, if anything, survives this totalizing antiblackness. (This question, in fact, is the project of the entire second half of the course). Sharpe imagines what it means to survive in an antiblack world by asserting what she calls “wake work”: the various ways we make meaning in the meaninglessness of global genocide.
Next, Moten and Davis will provide two ways of understanding how black art emerges out of violence. The Davis reading is one the easiest and cleanest of the semester. It provides a deep look at blues women (Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, in particular) and the ways the blues reveals the possibility of black reflective and poetic subjectivity amidst violence. The Moten reading is sharply different. Poetic, meandering, and intense, the excerpts I have selected (available upon request) seek to reveal the ways in which black poetics and black pain are irrevocably tied together. The course will return to this basic theme in Week 12, as you read Jeremy O. Harris’ recent Broadway debut Slave Play. A magnificent and terrifying work, Slave Play will be hard to read and hard to talk about. It dramatizes the commingling of sadism and erotics, of love and pain, that is the birth of blackness. Use it as an opportunity to let your students feel the text, to engage with it, and the course at large, as art, at the level of affect.
But of course, art is not the only response to antiblackness. Week 10 turns to politics. But rather than examine the discrete policy questions discussed in political philosophy, these readings imagine black politics as a general radical orientation or mode of being. The chapter from Robinson’s landmark text will argue that black life, and its strivings, always precedes black politics, whether in academia or on the Senate floor. It will help to contrast it with vanguard accounts of socialism and communism. Bey, on the other hand, argues for a form of black anarchism entwined with black abolitionism. Black politics, they argue, ought to be animated by a resistance to organization and sovereignty of any kind. These readings will allow you to problematize the scope of possible black politics and subject them to uncharacteristically deep critiques.
Lastly, Week 11 will zoom back out to metacritique. Both readings think about the place of “black theory” in the material conditions of knowledge production and exchange. Moten and Harney examine and critique the modern university, urging the radical intellectual to develop an antagonist, fugitive relationship with it. Nash, meanwhile, argues that love ought to be the central and motivating affect of engagement with black theory. This reading in particular, I think, will serve as a meaningful and engaging capstone to the course, an opportunity to ask your students: what does it mean to love blackness, and to love black philosophy?
As you will see, the boundaries between these subjects and these readings are porous. It will be helpful if you make an effort to track and stay conscious of the relationships between the readings; teaching them as a network will be key.
Some of these readings will be difficult, others relatively straightforward. In some cases, the difficulty will be (as suggested above) methodological. Sometimes, the methodological difficulty is the result of the complexity or foreign context of the reading. But sometimes the methodological difficulty is a result of the opaquely poetic nature of the texts. In these cases – and here is where you and your students can actively embrace methodological amateurism – I actually encourage you to resist the urge to dispel the opacity and distill the poeticism to premise-based arguments. Those arguments may exist, but I think you’ll do yourself and the students a favor by letting the poetic nature of the texts take center stage. It might be useful to base the class discussion of these on subjective experiences, on the feel of the text. There’s robust argument within them. But your students will have a much harder and less pleasurable time with these readings if they feel expected to penetrate the poetry for premises: let them be caught by and invested in their literary beauty; let that guide them to the arguments.
For the most part, assignments are fairly standard. The exception is, of course, the art presentation. This is designed to really push students to desediment their notions of “philosophy text,” and “philosophy presentation,” for that matter. If you’re worried about how to evaluate such a thing, think of it this way. The aim is for your students to a) see philosophy in black works of art and b) to develop an aesthetic and affective relationship to black philosophizing. Be lenient and understanding – this will be new for many of your students.
This class is unorthodox and odd, and demanding. But I think – I hope – that that is precisely what will make it so valuable, both for your students and for you. It’s an opportunity to shake off the cobwebs, to let blackness guide you to new ways of thinking, and being in community with your students. It’s worth noting that I’ve yet to successfully pitch this course myself. As such, this course remains wishful thinking, an unrealized dream, but one worth realizing. My notes are suggestions, ideas, possibilities. This course remains undefined and yet to be decided; the only way to concretize it is for one of us to take the leap and make it real. If you do so, let me know; we can build together. I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
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Nicholas Whittaker
Nicholas Whittaker is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Their research is focused on a cluster of interrelated questions bubbling out of contemporary black studies, philosophy of art, phenomenology, philosophy of language, and metaphilosophy. Their publications, published and forthcoming, include essays on the work of "black duplicity," blackface, the work of Adrian Piper, aesthetic experience, and abolitionism in popular culture.
