Black Hospitality Open Access

Abstract

My dissertation entitled "Black Hospitality" argues that French philosopher Jacques Derrida's conception of unconditional hospitality provides the most accurate and advantageous framework for describing and conceptualizing Black ethical behavior in a white supremacist antiblack America. Antiblack racism and white supremacy express their power, for the most part, by attempting to undermine the ethical nature and political expression of Blacks by means of severe physical and psychological violence. Jacques Derrida's unconditional hospitality offers a framework and logic of ethics that identifies the resistive power of Blacks against the almost insufferable hegemonic and homogenizing momentum of antiblack racism and white supremacy in America. Questioning the motives, contesting the practices, and undermining the reality of antiblack racism and white supremacy are the catalysts that motivate Black critical thought and this dissertation will continue this tradition with Derridian deconstruction guiding its core argument.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction 9

2. Chapter One: Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability 20

a. Introduction

b. White Supremacy and Antiblack Racism

i. The Systematic Constitutive Violence of White Supremacy

ii. The General Economy of White Supremacy and Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability

iii. The Shifting Presentation of Whiteness

iv. Antiblack Racism

c. Vulnerability in Mind and Body

i. Double Consciousness

ii. From Double Consciousness to the Black Body

iii. The History of the Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability of the Black Body

1. The Middle Passage

2. Slavery

3. Reconstruction

4. Jim Crow

5. Post-Civil Rights

d. Conclusion

3. Chapter Two: The Black Home 65

a. Introduction

b. The Unthought, The Dispossessed

c. Fred Moten's Blackness: Setting the Foundations of the Black Home

d. The Black Home as Black Agency

i. Celebration

ii. The Dialogic and Feminine Intervention of Wright

iii. The Black Home in Beyoncé's Lemonade

e. Conclusion

4. Chapter Three: Black Hospitality 114

a. Introduction

b. Nahum Chandler and the Negro as Problem for Thought: Refiguring the Positionality of the Black Subject

c. Derrida, Hospitality, Blackness

i. The Vulnerable Host

ii. The Impossibility of Black Hospitality: Transgression and Criminality

iii. Self-Interruption and Responsibility

d. Three Vignettes of Black Hospitality: Charleston, Sandra, Eric

e. Conclusion

5. Chapter Four: Beloved 171

a. Introduction

b. Vulnerability

c. The Black Home…124 Bluestone Road

i. The House

ii. Temporality

iii. Community

d. Black Hospitality

e. Conclusion

6. Conclusion 203

a. Review

b. Remarks

7. Works Cited 207

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Philosophy
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Philosophy
Keyword	Hospitality Ethics Black Studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Willett, Cynthia, Emory University
Committee Members	Rogers, Melvin L, Brown Lysaker, John, Emory University Rogers, Melvin, Brown Meighoo, Sean , Emory University Yancy, George D, Emory University

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