Black humanism does not necessitate a linear progress narrative. Rather, it acknowledges Black agency and the ethical imperative to make the world a better place as crucial to combatting antiblackness.

Based on the understanding of the world, Black humanists resist both naïve progress narratives prevalent in liberal humanism and the myth of a post-racial America that the US public so hastily embraced just a few years ago. They are reluctant to celebrate superfcial change and remain deeply critical of the Political process; nonetheless, they believe in political progression, especially through organizing radical and democratic social movements as well as individual actions dedicated to change. Just as small antiblack acts further antiblackness, so do anti-racist actions contribute to dismantling white supremacy on a social and political scale. That is precisely why personal relationships, local spaces of healing, and the challenge to whiteness in everyday encounters are equally relevant as organizing and political activism. All these actions are anti-racist because they confront the unjust racial status quo. I have argued that African American literature is saturated with a Black humanist worldview and driven by a fragile hope that change—though never easily achieved—is possible. Literary classics, alongside lesser-known works, are part of what I have identifed as the Black humanist genre. These texts both incorporate and develop Black humanist thought. One key argument of this book is that Black humanism is a counterdiscourse to liberal humanism. The twenty-frst century has seen the popular rise of posthumanist discourses that similarly pose alternatives to liberal humanism, making it necessary to comment briefy on the relationship between Black humanism and posthumanism. The latter, I maintain, has much to gain from the former. Firstly, posthumanism entails problems for conceptualizations of subjectivity and agency, two central concepts for the historically marginalized and consequently indispensable for Black liberation thought. Secondly, it has a troubled relationship with race: many strands are inherently colorblind and neglect or downplay race as an important factor in people’s lived experiences. Thirdly, it overlooks how ‘other’ humanisms have long provided an alternative to Western humanism. The posthumanist worldview thus reveals blind spots of its own especially because it cannot theorize the lived experiences of Black people. Andy Mousley rightly notes that “the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ are currently being recuperated within literary studies and across the humanities more generally” (2011: 1). This is not least due to the posthumanist discourses. In its broadest sense, posthumanism serves as an umbrella term for various approaches to the human condition of the late twentieth and twenty-frst century and is thus inevitably diverse so that Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner even fnd it “diffcult to identify a coherent posthumanist movement” (2014: 14). Generally, critical posthumanism is deemed the next step after antihumanism in the critique of Western humanism. Many posthumanists turn to matter and, in doing so, stress the commonality of all humans, nonhuman beings, and nonanimated life. Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and new materialists such as Karen Barad are prominent representatives. Since the 1990s, critical posthumanism has been a driving force in theoretical discussions within the humanities and has posed serious challenges for Western humanism. Posthumanists largely build on antihumanist critiques.1 Braidotti explains: “The posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism but goes further in exploring alternatives, without sinking into the rhetoric of the crisis of Man. It works instead towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject” (2013: 37). Whereas Braidotti sees antihumanists hamstrung by their fndings, she attributes posthumanism with the ability to present affrmative alternatives to the human. For Wolfe, the primary goal of posthumanism is not to reject the category of the human as such but to disenchant the humanist subject. For Wolfe, posthumanism “isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (2010: xv, emphasis in original). Posthumanists thus advance a post-dualistic worldview, ultimately removing “the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition” (xii). Being is fuid, multiple, and cannot be fxed. New materialism, an important strand in posthumanist theorizing, seeks to reverse the overemphasis on culture which dominated the humanities in the wake of the linguistic turn. Karen Barad captures new materialist observations: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (2003: 801). By reintroducing matter and the body in its materialized form to theoretical discussions, scholars counter what they sometimes exaggeratedly deem the “exclusive focus on cultural construction at the expense of natural production” (Grosz 2005: 44). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost explain: “Matter is no longer imagined here as a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways” (2010: 10). Instead of being inert, matter is regarded as active, both shaping and being shaped. New materialists view actions as the product of matter activating itself. Such new materialist formulations prove problematic for the Black liberation project. Agency is defamiliarized almost beyond recognition. In relying on theories that help de-center the human, posthumanism has the tendency to de-center subjectivity in a manner that renders meaningful acts of resistance impossible. As I have argued throughout, intelligently guided agency cannot be surrendered, especially by the historically oppressed. Embodiment theory rooted in critical phenomenology allows for this balancing act. Moreover, fully decentering the human is undesirable for most strands within Black thought. Stefan Herbrechter anticipates this argument but quickly declares it irrelevant. For Herbrechter, “the posthumanist critique of the humanist subject and the idea of a universalist ‘humanity’ cannot afford to be delayed” because “the humanist subject position, which from the perspective of the oppressed looks quite attractive, structurally depends on violence against nonhumans, i.e. that it ethically and ecologically may be far less desirable than it seems” (2013: 200). However, as I have argued, Black humanism has never been motivated by the wish to be integrated into the liberal humanist project but by the desire to be an alternative to the exclusionary Eurocentric humanist project. Two further problems relate to posthumanism’s intrinsic whiteness and colorblindness. Race is strikingly absent from its discussions even though antiblackness persists and forms the very basis of liberal humanism’s past and present. Alexander Weheliye rightly asserts in Habeas Viscus that these discourses “largely do not take into account race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity” (2014: 8). Posthumanism’s silence about race is worrisome. In their refusal to think through/with race, posthumanists can only disavow but not escape it, failing to regard race as an important dimension of people’s lived experience. Finally, posthumanism is ignorant of other humanisms and their critiques of Western humanism. Weheliye observes that “many invocations of posthumanism […] reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personifcation of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative versions of humanity” (2014: 9–10). Posthumanism often indirectly reinforces Eurocentrism because it fails to see that many theoretical advancements had already been made in other humanist approaches. Francesca Ferrando, who is a self-identifed posthumanist, stresses the importance of people’s differently lived experiences and histories: “Denying feminism, race studies, postcolonialism and all accounts made by subjects who have been historically located outside of hegemonic discourses, will offer a very limited notion of the human, and will stand as one more repetitive ego trip of the omniscient neutral subject, lacking on providing an accurate representation of humanity as an evolving life form rich in diversity” (2014: 223–224). Scholars need to repeatedly ask: “What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond?” (Jackson 2015: 215). In its attempt to move beyond the subject of liberal humanism, posthumanism tends to reinforce those elements that established just that. It overlooks the alternative humanisms that have long existed and consequently repeats the exclusion of Black and other historically marginalized voices in theorizing what it means to be human. In Chap. 2 of this book, I have laid out a Black humanist view of humanity. I have argued that Black humanism advances a conception of subjectivity as embodied. Since it takes embodiment seriously, it is aware of the pervasive forces of the social world and their impact on the lived body. The fact of embodiment has consequences for understanding resistance: agency is intelligently guided but does not necessarily come in the shape of intentional or conscious action. Often, agency is initiated on a pre-refective level. I have further suggested that the critical study of whiteness is a vital anti-racist tool in all Black humanist texts studied here. Against this background, Black humanism advances a view of the world where change, however unlikely, is possible and needs advocacy. It embraces the possibility of change through committed and caring action. Together, these refections formed the basis for the analyses of Black humanist literature in Chaps. 3–6. I have demonstrated that Black humanism as an anti-racist tradition has strongly infuenced African American culture over the past 70 years. During this time, it has also been in conversation with politics and social movements ranging from the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s to the most recent revival in the Movement for Black Lives. While it has not been my goal to outline a genealogy of Black humanist literature, I have demonstrated how the worldview saturates Black literature, which, in turn, has shaped discourses of social justice, racial equality, and human dignity. Even though the four novels analyzed exemplarily are ordered chronologically, there is no teleological or straightforward development. Rather, they circle around and cycle back to the lived experiences of antiblackness and intersecting systems of oppression that remain strikingly constant across time even though they are not identical. Challenges to the racial status quo take several forms: representing subjectivity and agency as embodied, exposing whiteness as embodied and not in conscious control, and emphasizing the individual’s need but also capacity for community, love, and self-love. All four novelists analyzed in this book are highly attuned to the past’s relevance due to the simple fact that they conceive of subjectivity as embodied. Thus, they continuously insist on the past’s infuence on the present, even when their novels are set in the respective present. Chapter 3 argued that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) emphasizes the necessity of breaking with oppressive ideologies and antiblackness in the struggle for true democracy. The novel decidedly advances self-reliance through committed action while reaching out for community in the very end. In Chap. 4, I traced John A. Williams’ profound analysis of the workings of race and how they impede on interracial relationships in Night Song (1961). At the same time, the novel offers glimpses of how a love ethic can begin to undo white supremacy’s impact. Consequently, it explores both the failure and possibilities of intersubjective ties. Chapter 5 examined Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) which not only narrates the pervasive nature of racism but also challenges the antiblack logic of Enlightenment humanism in its gendered dimensions. Building on slavery as the contextual reference allows Morrison to thoroughly explore subjectivity as continuously torn between structures and (individual) agentic acts. Both are constantly being negotiated because the past continuously encroaches on the present not only socially but also affectively and emotionally in the lived body. However, a vision of futurity remains and is rooted in Black feminist thought. Chapter 6 showed that Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) views humans as existing in extension with the natural world but still remains concerned with the heightened precarity of Black people. It explores the agony of Black motherhood in a racist nation where Black (male) lives are constantly policed and threatened. Even as it highlights the diffculties involved in raising Black sons under such circumstances, the novel insists on people’s ethical responsibility to try to make a difference. It thus assumes that a different tomorrow is neither guaranteed nor impossible. Practices of mourning that recognize the weight of the past and loving relationships frmly place possibility on the horizon. Alongside the attempts to bring to light the modes and operations of white supremacy, the texts display an interest in human healing. In fact, they all more or less explicitly promote self-love and the importance of reaching out towards others to form a community. This is the fipside of anti-racism: anti-racism as a practice of criticizing and fghting to transform the status quo is rooted in the desire to promote human well-being. Closely tied to this is another similarity these narratives share, namely their frm embrace of the tragic. They see it as part of human life; they neither deny its centrality nor allow the tragic to trump all efforts to break it. Glaude writes: “[O]ut of the broken fragments of the life lived those very shards […] provide a foundation, without the security of comforting illusions, to step forward and dare to be, wounds and all. That is revolution” (2018: 54).2 Black humanist literature is committed to exploring and negotiating the relationships between the individual and the various communities the individual is a part of; writers are concerned with “individual fulfllment within the context of concern and responsibility for others” (Pinn 2003: 159). Even an iconic frst-person narrative like Invisible Man aspires to bridge the individual and the collective, relentlessly reaching beyond the self even in the face of disappointments. The four novels insist on the importance of concrete action towards change in the here and now. The characters struggle for fuller modes of being, and the authors use their texts to move readers by challenging, uprooting, and addressing their affective capacities. Literary texts can trigger discomfort and vulnerability and can thus increase readers’ racial literacy (Moya 2016). The scope of Black humanist literature is, of course, not limited to the four novels analyzed in this book. They are but a selection of fctional texts that demonstrates the similarities and differences in the Black humanist genre. From this point of view, Black humanism is best described as a changing same. Thus, I want to exemplarily end on Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2019) which captures the worldview’s central ideas and puts its anti-racist critique on the theatrical stage. The play closes with a refection on the history of racism, the perception of Black people in the Western white supremacist imaginary, and their experiences resulting from this. Charlotte, an African American artist, and Charles, a white philanthropist who considers himself enlightened and non-racist, engage in heated altercation about antiblackness, the (in)visibility of whiteness, and the privilege whiteness always entails. The scene fnds a subdued yet climactic resolution: Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That sounds so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can begin to really see each other. (Rankine 2019: 87) Charlotte confronts Charles’ self-perception as a benevolent American by taking on America as a place that has never viewed Black Americans as fully human. His response to her accusation is predictable and he is appalled by her seeming hopelessness. The hopefulness he calls for, however, is misguided because it does not come from a profound engagement with the nation’s brutal and tragic past and present. Instead, he reiterates the progress myth by calling on her to look forward and not dwell on the continuous history of antiblackness. Not only is his demand harmful, but he also misreads her perspective. Charlotte does not preclude hope. For Charles, there seem to be only two possible positions: naïve optimism or utter pessimism. Neither of the two apply to Charlotte because she knows, to borrow from Linda Martín Alcoff, that “pessimism breeds the fatalism that excuses inaction and complicity” (2015: 92). Her hopefulness is rooted in a painful confrontation with the realities and lived experiences of white supremacy. For her, hopefulness is only justifed when acknowledging the ties of the present moment to the past and recognizing one’s own involvement in it. That is the prerequisite, Rankine asserts just like Ellison, Williams, Morrison, and Ward, for the possibility of a differently lived future. This fragile hope permeates Black humanism. It entails an ethical obligation to struggle for a better world even though success is never guaranteed and often unlikely. Jonathan Lear describes such an outlook as radical because “it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is” (2006: 103). Such hope is not simply a sentiment—it is a call to action. The future that Charlotte envisions is based on recognition of the intersubjective dimensions of subjectivity. Part of genuine mutual recognition is allowing pain and anger to be voiced. This begins to dawn on Charles and so the encounter puts a crack into what Charles Mills terms “white ignorance” which he defnes as “both false belief and the absence of true belief” (2007: 16): Charles: You’re right to keep me a part of it. My whiteness. It needs to be faced. Charlotte: (she faces Charles) At its deepest level, yes. Charles: It’s just skin and yet I know it’s power too. Charlotte: Dehumanizing power. Charles: What is skin? […] I’ve never actually looked at my skin. […] Good lord, all this skin shields me. It protects me from…being you. It’s like the badge of the police. (Rankine 2019: 88) Race is more than skin-deep and Charles (at least temporarily) begins to understand his whiteness. Even though processes of racialization rely on the principle of visibility, both race and racism are embodied. Racial seeing emerges from and affects intersubjective exchanges (Alcoff 2006: 169; Weiss 1999; Yancy 2008). Charles’ whiteness shapes his behavior, action, and (self-) perception, and is intricately linked to power. Any serious attempt to dismantle the workings of white supremacy already signals a level beyond pessimism because it refuses to give in to its logic. However, anti-racism requires continuous individual and collective efforts. This is evident when considering that many political achievements of the past are at risk today. For instance, 19 states passed 34 laws limiting Americans’ access to the vote in 2021 alone (Brennan Center for Justice 2022). Additional restrictive laws have been passed since and many disproportionately affect (and often target) Black communities. Thus, any achievement needs to be reaffrmed and constantly defended. Black humanists have insisted on this fact. Consequently, the humanistic framework also has much to offer for the present. As varied as Black humanisms are, they all delineate the tension of overarching structures and individual agency. Emphasizing human agency does not imply or envision human mastery over the world or systems of inequality. It simply means that humans do not only have the responsibility but also ability to make a meaningful difference. This position combines a realistic outlook with a healthy dose of cautiously utopian thinking. Our present is marked by overwhelming conditions from climate change to global threats to democracy and a pervasive hold of white supremacy. These conditions too often have a paralyzing effect because the systems that sustain them are frequently framed as being without an alternative. Black humanists have insisted that even or especially in times where it all just seems too much, every small act matters. They assert human responsibility while conceding the diffculty of genuine transformation and impossibility of quick fxes. Black humanist literature then might tell us a lot about our current moment and what is needed to brave the manifold crises that await. As Paul Taylor notes, the Black aesthetic tradition is rich in “culture workers who use their talents to reinforce the bonds of solidarity, to insist on the beauty of black life in a world that presumes its brutality and viciousness, and to remind each other that, as the slogan from another resistance movement reminds us, another world is possible” (2017: 229). Indeed, Black humanist authors have continuously exposed and resisted antiblackness in its various manifestations while also affrming the beauty, resilience, and complexity of Black humanity. This dual focus shapes their worldview and epitomizes the best of Black humanist literature.