Black Unhappiness: The Philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois

In Black Unhappiness, Grant Farred offers an incisive philosophical investigation of Black Being through the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Farred takes up a single chapter of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John,” in which Du Bois allegorizes unhappiness in the lives of John Jones, a fictional Black student of a Northern Negro college, and his sister Jennie. Farred treats this chapter as a philosophical treatise and, through close analysis, articulates the dimensions of John and Jennie’s unhappiness as a critical map for understanding the structure of Black Being in-the-world. Farred engages with a wide array of thinkers like G. W. F. Hegel, Ralph Ellison, Edouard Glissant, Martin Heidegger, and Fredric Jameson to explicate Du Bois’ philosophy of unhappiness in the Reconstruction South. Through a series of meditations and concepts, Farred illuminates the ways that thought and thinking are integral to Black Being, that Black Being is Black consciousness, and that this consciousness is critically, necessarily, and productively unhappy.