RSS • Apple PodcastsDescription (podcaster-provided):
Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experience, had such a deep impact on Black thinkers across the diaspora. We will see these existentialist insights register in literature, philosophy, and film. Old and new.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Black existentialism across diaspora • Fanon on antiblackness, gaze, language, non-being • race, identity, culture, colonialism • masculinity, violence, guilt, death • liberation, resistance, humanism, world-making in literature/film/philosophyThis podcast presents “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, introducing existentialist concerns—freedom, ambiguity, responsibility, embodiment, and lived experience—through Black Atlantic thinkers and through literature, philosophy, and film. It regularly returns to how racialization shapes subjectivity: how antiblackness organizes perception and recognition, how the social world forms identities, and how these forces are lived at the level of the body, language, intimacy, and everyday interaction.
A central throughline is Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks*, used to examine the colonial ordering of language, the racializing power of the gaze, the “zone of non-being,” and debates about culture as a site of political struggle and social reproduction. Alongside Fanon, the podcast engages Black expressive life and world-making—how sound, style, and artistic form can register resistance, create meaning, or open alternative ways of being within oppressive conditions.
The episodes also explore masculinity, violence, respectability, and vulnerability, probing how domination and injury can become entangled with “re-masculation,” and how tenderness, touch, or beauty might disrupt inherited scripts of manhood. Questions of history, diaspora, and identity recur, including tensions between ancestry, empire, and new identity narratives. There is sustained attention to liberation and transformation—both individual and collective—through struggle, negation, and confrontation, as well as to existential accounts of racism and antisemitism that balance institutional structures with personal responsibility and situatedness.
