How does one write about black suffering, and specifically, about black women’s suffering without reinscribing the consumption of black pain? Is it possible to make palpable the specificity of black women’s suffering while at the same time showing how this suffering is constitutive of modernity? What rhetorical repertoires are available, if any, for mapping the extraordinary complexities of a global order structured by cruelty? In this talk, I explore a line of scholarship inaugurated by black feminism, particularly as brought into view by literary and cultural thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman. These thinkers, I suggest, open up a way of writing black suffering that invites us to reimagine the relationship of theory and story. Through a close reading of Hartman’s scholarship, one that focuses particularly on her latest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, I argue that one of the innovations of her work is to pose the question of black suffering as a constitutive problem of writing.