Despite what the title may suggest, this is not a book about Hegel. Or, put slightly differently, this is not a book about Hegel. It is about a text he wrote, his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. To the extent that the Phenomenology gives us insight into what he, as well as many other white men, were thinking in early nineteenthcentury Germany, Hegel shows up in this text as merely one of many characters. He might be a main character, but he is not the only one. This book, then, is a conversation – between the Phenomenology and Black thinkers, 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. Perhaps it is more a conversion than a conversation.

For some, this kind of approach will feel lopsided, since it is very specific. At first glance, this text will reveal that it does not engage with the Phenomenology in its totality, but only its fourth chapter: ‘Self-Consciousness’. We begin at the master-slave dialectic, and end with the third movement of what Hegel calls the ‘unhappy consciousness’. In the Gesammelte Werke edition, we only cover about forty pages. There are times where we acknowledge the deep resonances between the Phenomenology’s phases and some of the thinkers we chronicle in this volume. An equally brief glance at this text might lend itself to the conclusion that we are reading Black thinkers through Hegel, but while this is partly true, it is not the whole story. Cursory glances, after all, never suffice; what appears at first can be deceptive; immediacy is pretence. So, from the outset, we ask that you, dear reader, take your time. The prose will not be difficult, but even simple prose can be deceptively complicated. And so we repeat, from the outset, please take your time.

We do not ask this of you lightly. We ask you to take your time because writing this book took some time – a lot more than we anticipated. The pandemic, antiblackness, and global neoliberalism got in the way. The book was drafted during the period when Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery were killed.

Afterword, or the Phenomenology of Afterlives

As always, the dialectical movement relinquishes (entäußert) yet bears forth and recollects all that has come before. Everyone from Douglass and Jacobs to X and Davis, to the many, many others who we have not named, compose Black spirit’s coming-to-be and relinquishing into time. This ‘relinquishing, however, is likewise the relinquishing of itself ‘ (PS 807). ‘In its own self ‘, Hegel continues, ‘this self-relinquishing relinquishes itself [diese Entäußerung sich an ihr selbst entäußert] and, in that way, is in its extension as well as in its depth, in the self ‘ (PS 808). This is especially true of Black history, marked as it is by irremediable loss, violent erasure, and a wake of dispossession.

Black spirit, we think, resonates strongly with how Hegel speaks of the path taken through his Phenomenology – ‘a path of despair’ (PS 78). For the protagonist moving along it, Hegel writes, ‘this path has negative meaning …, and what is the retaliation of the concept will count, instead, to it, as the loss of itself, for on this path, it loses its truth’ (PS 77). In Black history, there is an even deeper kind of loss, one that is more Hegelian than Hegel could have realised: a loss that loses itself. Given this loss of loss, Black spirit cannot simply turn inward and recollect all that has gone before, but must instead formulate what Hartman calls wayward lives in spaces, often in ‘urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them’. Perhaps the best way to think of this improvisational recollective insistence of previous moments in later moments, of all that was lost and forgotten in the fire and sea, is to evoke Hartman’s notion of afterlives. In this book, we have recomposed Hegel’s Phenomenology so that it becomes a book about the intersecting afterlives of slavery and loss, as well as the joy and vitality bound up with them; or perhaps it is a book of afterlives of afterlives, weaving and unfolding until the movement of these entangled afterlives unfolds itself through a gallery of shadows, the dispossessed absolute living in its own wake.