 The content of and motivation for this reading involves “both an epistemological and an ethical project” (Sexton 2016, par. 15). The ethical project involves resisting a lazy, bad faith optimism that bases struggle and activism on hope rather than on a clear-eyed confrontation with the challenges of Black life in an anti-Black world. The epistemological project involves finding the tools for achieving this clear-eyed confrontation. In the hands of figures like Hartman and Christina Sharpe, this means enacting certain vital conceptual reorientations, like insisting on the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade in contemporary modes of social organization.