What grounds the ethical and political imperative to survive? What is the cost of survival under captivity? How can we think survival beyond self-preservation? Is a commitment to the flourishing of children and future generations at odds with Queer and Trans critiques of reproductive futurity? What are the roles of death and the dead in the politicization of survival? And how do Black feminist treatments of survival challenge familiar responses to ecological destruction and catastrophic climate change? In this seminar, we ask these questions by focusing on survival in Black feminist thought. Beginning with the ways that Black feminist thinkers and philosophers conceptualize reproduction through the frame of slavery and its afterlives, we consider survival as a vexed terrain and explore its implications for theories of agency, freedom, and revolution, social ontology, the politics of time, care ethics, and the meaning of the good life. You can expect to read work by figures such as: Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Kristie Dotson, M. Jacqui Alexander, Denise Ferreira da Silva, C. Riley Snorton, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler.