This week we are joined by Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson to talk about their book Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which reads Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit against the tradition of black thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. It is a stunning demonstration of a relationship to philosophy that is at once creative, breaking the boundaries between exegesis and history, and politically committed, reading for the struggle for liberation. It is a book that profoundly challenges what it means to do philosophy, and raises the question as to what philosophy offers the struggle for abolition and black liberation. In our conversation we talk about the book, Hegel, dialectics, and what it means to do philosophy. 

In this episode we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson, The Phenomenology of Black Spirit
• The Traitors (Australian version)
• The Fishing Shacks at Willard Beach 
• Ceasefire in Gaza 
• Zone of Interest
• Slow Horses 
• Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic 
• Martin Luther King, Jr. as a reader of Hegel 
• Booker T. Washington
• Zora Neale Hurston 
• Cornel West, “Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience”  
• Harriet A. Jacobs
• Jason’s blogpost on Phenomenology of Black Spirit
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 
• Angela Davis
• Vaginal Davis 
• Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation  

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