The [Black] Good Life

This course reads the long Black intellectual and artistic tradition for its prescriptive stream: not only its description of Black life or its correction of the racist record, but its instruction-- in how to live a good life. Where the dominant canon of the good life runs from Aristotelian eudaimonia through the contemporary science of happiness; this tradition has theorized flourishing from music, literature, and the art of everyday life evident in the Black proverb, sermon, kitchen, and dance floor — it has largely gone unread as philosophy. Organizing that archive around five values (pleasure, duty, rest, friendship, and making) and across the diaspora from Havana to Harlem, Port of Spain to Nairobi, the course proceeds as an ethnography of an idea.

Black thought is most readily admitted into the curriculum as evidence of the wound —suffering, power, and subjection — while the normative question of how one ought to live tends to remain the European canon’s to keep: the Greeks are granted eudaimonia, and Black studies the seminar on its own subjection. This course relocates that question. Following Hurston’s account of vernacular form (“Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 1934) and Gwaltney’s ethnography of ordinary Black thought (Drylongso, 1980), it treats everyday practice as already-constituted theory and reads it as such.

The habit of mind here insists on the preciousness of Black life as a present, non-foreclosed claim —aliveness rather than impossibility. Taking seriously and departing from Hartman’s, where beauty remains shadowed by a death still arriving. The departure is temporal and paradigmatic:

Alongside Hartman’s central analytic of subjection and recovery of the “beautiful experiment” inside the wayward life (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019); this course reads from inside and after the end (Sun Ra Arkestra, It's After the End of the World, 1971)— amid and after the levees break(ing), within and after an epi-  ot pan- demic, for example— for aliveness as a totality rather than as the negative of antiblackness (Quashie, Black Aliveness, 2021), and for the tradition’s own instruction in how to live (Griffin, Read Until You Understand, 2021; Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989). The good life is approached not as a future the revolution will deliver or the empire permit, but as a present claim. It is offered in the spirit Du Bois named whe