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 existentialist thought • Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: language, gaze, non-being, culture • antiblackness, racism, colonialism • masculinity, violence, vulnerability • liberation, negation, humanism, futurity • diaspora identity • Black literature/film world-makingThis podcast presents audio “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, approaching mid‑century existentialist questions through Black Atlantic thinkers and the cultural works they engage. Across the episodes, existentialism is treated less as an abstract school and more as a method for examining lived experience under antiblackness, colonialism, and racialized social structures—especially how freedom, responsibility, and selfhood are shaped by the world one inhabits.
A recurring focus is Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks*, using Fanon’s account of the white gaze, language, desire, and the “zone of non‑being” to explore how racialization is produced in everyday perception, speech, and intimacy, and how struggles over culture can be revolutionary struggles over social reproduction. Alongside Fanon, the podcast reads existentialism across debates about identity and collective consciousness, including the promises and limits of Négritude, diaspora, and projects of humanism that claim universality.
The show also turns to literature and film to track existential themes in narrative form: visibility and invisibility, guilt, condemnation, and the possibility of Black life amid violence and exposure. Questions of masculinity, respectability, vulnerability, and the symbolic role of weapons and domination are analyzed as racialized formations of subjectivity. Attention is also given to Black expressive practices—sound, style, adornment, and poetics—as modes of world‑making and resistance, as well as to the role of the writer and artist in articulating both social conditions and the “human condition.”
