Black Hospitality: A Theoretical Framework for Black Ethical Life

This book addresses the paucity of robust reflections on ethics as a distinct field of experience in recent Black Studies scholarship. Following the intervention of the Afro-Pessimist school of thought―spearheaded by the likes of Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton―there has been much needed attention brought to the totalizing nature of Black political degradation and vulnerability in America. However, an in depth reflection on the ethical implications of this political positionality is lacking and in places even implied to not be possible. Black Hospitality conceptualizes what the author argues is the aporetic experience of Black ethical life as both excessively vulnerable within and yet also ultimately hostile to an anti-black political ontology. Engaging the work of scholars such as Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Nahum Chandler, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, and Toni Morrison, along with the concepts of fugitivity, Black sociality, im-possibility, and paraontology, Black Hospitality insists that Black ethical life provides a necessary broadening of the contours of Black experience.