In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Biko Mandela Gray, Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, and Ryan J. Johnson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elon University, discuss their new book, Phenomenology of Black Spirit. By examining the relationship between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the work of twelve Black thinkers, this book asks the question, “What if the protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology was Black?” In this interview, Gray and Johnson discuss their motivation for writing the book, the response it has received, and the experimental pedagogy that influenced its development.
What is your work about?
We can put it in two ways. First, a technical way: Our book stages an elongated dialectical parallelism (although Rebecca Comay suggests a dialectical parallax) between Hegel’s classic Phenomenology of Spirit and twelve Black, mostly American, thinkers from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis that seeks to show how Hegel’s abstract dialectic is transformed and critiqued when put into conversation with the lived dialectics of Black Thought. Now, a less technical way: our book is the result of forging a relationship between a Black and a white philosopher who are both deeply troubled by the world and how it came to be. Put together, our Phenomenology of Black Spirit is the raw expression of a philosophical conversation and a real relationship, one that strives to make sense of one deceptively simple question: What if the protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology was Black?
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Because we believe reading the Phenomenology without attention to Blackness is bad philosophical magic, and it is dishonest (and implicated). Focusing on the Blackness internal to Hegel’s dialectical thinking does not simply expose Hegel. It announces the centrality of Blackness to the development of philosophical thought from modernity forwards. We try to think with a chorus of Black lives in order to recognise how Black life shapes European modernity, how it informs and influences the movements and changes of the world—especially since this shaping, informing, and influencing occurs through violence. The stories we tell here are not always pleasant; they are sometimes tragic, sometimes 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 also wrote this text out of a profound existential concern about the current state of affairs. We mentioned this earlier, but the world’s anti-Blackness has only deepened—more killings of black people by cops, more black people in jail, more black people dispossessed by capitalism—and this kind of context produced an urgency to think about how philosophy has contributed to this anti-Blackness. Though it often doesn’t like to see it this way, philosophy is always implicated in the logics of anti-Blackness; it is not a value-neutral discipline, nor is its purported “universalism” as universal as it often likes to say it is. We wanted to mobilize philosophy to different, perhaps more ethically and politically generative, ends.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
Wildly different! Overall, people seem intrigued, just for very different reasons. Drawing from both Hegel scholars and Black studies, we are well aware that it will satisfy neither and irritate both. But this is a risk we are willing to take. In fact, it is a risk we are all taking, whether or not we admit it. From the start, any engagement with European modernity is already an engagement with the problematics of slavery and its afterlives. Here we are convinced: Neither Hegel nor his thought can be disentangled from the anti-Black violence of modern history. If we have accomplished something, it is surely far more Hegelian and anti-Hegelian than Hegel ever could have, but (we think) always should have, been. As Hegel says of the emergence of new truths or new shapes of consciousness, this work ‘takes place for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness’ (PS 87; emphasis added). Perhaps more than anything, our book is about trying to change things, from back to front and back again. At its heart, our book tries to lay bare and criticize the violence of anti-Blackness – as well as articulate other possibilities within that violence, within and beyond Hegel. But that’s the thing with normative text—although they seek to transform, they rarely, if ever, do everything they set out to do, even as they always do more (and different). This text is no different, it has its limitations, and we will never deny that.
And while the text has its limitations, it’s nevertheless provocative. The book is still relatively new, but the few times we’ve engaged people in discussions of it, we’ve found that the more “faithful” Hegelians have been frustrated by our claims. Why turn to the Phenomenology, which is the least “racist” of Hegel’s texts? Why interpret the Phenomenology in this way? These are some of the kinds of questions we’ve received. We expected this, but it nevertheless speaks to the provocation of the text—and hopefully, in its provocations, philosophers will want to think differently about their discipline and its effects.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
So much! Really, so much was left out. This both pained us but is also something we must accept because that is the nature of every book. Many people ask: Why these twelve Black thinkers and not others? This is a totally fair question, and we accept our limitations. We just ask that readers not overlook our dedication: “We dedicate this book to the innumerable Black lives we failed to name.” Here we humbly echo Toni Morrison’s dedication to Beloved: “Sixty Million and More.” To give a specific example of a challenge here, we’ll relay one of our most important topics: gender. Some readers have suggested that the women in the book sometimes appear as less significant. This is definitely not true for us personally, but we recognize there is much more work to be done here. We carried this concern with us through the book and through our lives and careers. To guide us, we follow Hortense Spillers, that is, we think the phenomenology of Black spirit must begin and end with the reality that Black flesh is ungendered, and that those who are not figured as ‘men’ are the preeminent enfleshments of this ungendering. To this extent, we are also acutely aware of the implicit heteronormativity and gender binary present in the unfolding of this work. To this we simply say: we can and will do better, and we hope that others will join us in destabilizing the normative structures inherent to western philosophical thinking. To follow through with this promise, our respective next books will take up these questions and failures directly.
On this gender question, we also recognize that we inadvertently figure the black female figures as the primary sites where (the undoing of) gender occur, as if the black males are not also implicated in this ungendering. We wanted to do so much more, but as we’ve already said, this book is an invitation to think more broadly about these ideas and issues.
What effects do you hope your work will have?
Many! One is to provide ways (if not force!) for Hegelians and scholars of European philosophy to do the much-needed work on excluded, oppressed, and violated voices and perspectives. The task, we think, is to engage the canon in ways that situate it and its violence and tarry with it, as George Yancy says. The work we tried to do in our book is to relativize the prevalence of these canonical thinkers and texts by announcing their limitations, their violences, their constraints, not to cancel but to grapple with the weight, wakes, and shadows we all carry and live within. In the end, Hegel was just a man, the Phenomenology just a text. It is a brilliant one, to be sure, but still the ruminations of one man who, armed with a certain set of violent assumptions and a dazzlingly discerning epistemological eye, developed a philosophical approach and method to contend with the problems of his day. We make—we have made—Hegel 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 violences set upon them. Such an account does not simply minimize 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, and hopefully thereby to transform and differently center the canon.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
In so many ways. For one, much of the book was written as a class. After we met on a plane to a conference and later sketched the book, Ryan taught a Senior Seminar that was structured as the writing of the book. To do this, Ryan formulated a writing pedagogy he called “Parallel Writing Apprenticeships,” where students went through the process of writing seminar papers alongside him as he went through the process of writing a professional philosophy book. During this semester Biko visited Elon several times to give talks. While in North Carolina, we read and wrote together. By the end of the semester, we had 90,000 words! Ryan has adapted that Parallel Writing Apprenticeship model ever since, just as Biko has continued to develop fascinating new critical approaches to the canon in his classes and with his students at Syracuse.
What’s next for you?
More books! Biko is working on a trilogy of books, the first of which is about the nineteenth-century feminist and queer abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Ryan is writing the first philosophical book on John Brown, whose structure is based on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (and may have an actual album of original music corresponding to the book). Here is where it gets really fun. Truth and Brown lived quite parallel lives in abolitionist circuits in the U.S. North, and the possible ways they might have related (or could relate!) fascinates us. We thus hope to co-write a chapter that will appear in both books. That is, the same co-written chapter will be in the middle of Biko’s book on Sojourner Truth (tentatively titled, Ethics After Truth) and Ryan’s book, The John Brown Suite. Now we just need to find a publisher open-minded enough to publish them!
Biko Mandela Gray
Biko Mandela Gray is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Biko’s work focuses on the relationship between blackness, ethics, and (philosophy of) religion; his first book, Black Life Matter (Duke Press, 2022), was an exploration of subject-formation as an antiblack enterprise; his next works will explore Sojourner Truth’s life as a critical site for thinking about ethics in/through blackness and black life. He is also working on a collection of essays on religion, race, and politics, as well as moving through the early phases of a text that develops a philosophy of black religion through the works of Toni Morrison.
Ryan J. Johnson
Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina. Ryan’s early work focused on 20th-century French and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy – such as his books The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (2016) and Deleuze, A Stoic (2020). His recent work focused on the German tradition and Black Thought, and his future work will take up the radical abolitionist John Brown as well as a project on Spinoza and Black Radicalism. He also loves trains and John Coltrane.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
