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, Du Bois, Wright, Davis, Césaire, Sartre • antiblackness, colonialism, diaspora • gaze, language, identity, non-being • masculinity, violence, freedom • literature/film analysis • world-making, liberation, humanismThis podcast presents course-based audio “process pieces” that introduce existentialism through Black Atlantic thinkers and the intellectual, cultural, and political conditions that shaped mid‑century debates about race, colonialism, and freedom. Using Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks* as a central text, the discussions treat existentialism as a framework for analyzing lived experience under antiblackness—especially how social worlds are organized through embodied perception, language, and recognition.
Across the episodes, recurring themes include the “gaze” and visibility as structures that produce racialized subjectivity; the relationship between language and colonial power; and the idea of the “zone of non‑being” as both a condition imposed by racist social relations and a possible site for revolutionary rethinking of the human. The podcast also explores culture as a political arena, where debates about preservation, transformation, and “civilization” bear directly on social reproduction and anti‑colonial struggle.
Literature and film are used alongside philosophy to examine how these themes register aesthetically and psychologically. Discussions return often to masculinity, vulnerability, violence, and dignity, tracking how racial domination shapes gendered self-understanding and how fantasies of respect or re-masculation can become entangled with harm. Other strands consider diaspora and identity formation, the work of Black expressive life as world‑making, and tensions between particularist movements (like Négritude) and universalist political horizons. Existential responsibility, situatedness, and the limits of liberal responses to racism and antisemitism also figure as comparative reference points for thinking about freedom, complicity, resistance, and collective liberation.
