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 via Black Atlantic thinkers • antiblackness, colonialism, diaspora, identity • Fanon on language, gaze, non-being, recognition, futurity • masculinity, violence, vulnerability • culture, expressive life, world-making • liberation, negation, responsibilityThis podcast presents audio “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, using existentialism’s focus on lived experience, ambiguity, and freedom to examine Black life across the Atlantic world. It centers Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks* while placing Fanon in conversation with a wider set of mid‑century and diasporic thinkers, writers, and artists.
Across the episodes, the show traces how racism and colonialism shape subjectivity: how identity is produced in social relations, how the gaze and everyday language can structure embodied experience, and how antiblackness and other forms of racial hatred operate both institutionally and in intimate life. The discussions frequently return to questions of recognition and humanism—who counts as human, on what terms, and why liberation may require rethinking the human beyond dominant frames.
The podcast also explores masculinity, vulnerability, and violence, asking how racialized expectations of manhood can organize desire, dignity, and harm. Alongside these analyses, it considers cultural production as a political site: literature, film, music, and expressive practices are treated as ways of making worlds, contesting histories, and negotiating despair, pessimism, or abandonment.
Rather than offering only abstract theory, the episodes connect philosophical arguments to concrete scenes and narratives in novels, essays, and films, and they repeatedly foreground struggle, negation, and transformation as key existential themes. Overall, this podcast maps an intellectual tradition that links personal experience to the reproduction of social worlds and to the possibility of future-oriented forms of freedom and collective change.
