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 • Fanon and antiblackness: gaze, language, non-being • diaspora, colonization, Négritude • race, identity, responsibility • Black masculinity, violence, vulnerability • literature/film analysis • liberation, resistance, world-makingThis podcast presents audio “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, approaching mid‑century existentialist thought through Black Atlantic writers, philosophers, and filmmakers. Across the episodes, existentialism is treated less as an abstract doctrine than as a way of analyzing lived experience under racial domination—especially the ambiguities of embodiment, freedom, identity, and social constraint. Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks* serves as a central touchstone, repeatedly returning to how antiblackness is reproduced through everyday perception and interaction: the power of the white gaze, the racialization of the body, and the “zone of non‑being” as both a condition of dehumanization and a site where new possibilities might be imagined.
A major throughline is the relationship between culture and power. The podcast examines how language, expressive forms, and aesthetic practices can sustain colonial orders or become arenas of struggle, including debates about diction, creole formation, and the politics of cultural “authenticity.” Related discussions explore how diaspora and colonial history shape identity narratives, and how movements like Négritude are theorized in terms of both their revolutionary potential and their conceptual limits.
Literature and film are used to foreground existential themes such as visibility and invisibility, guilt, condemnation, and the pursuit of recognition. The podcast often links these themes to questions of masculinity, violence, and vulnerability—considering how racialized expectations of manhood emerge through touch, beauty, weapons, respectability, and the imagined capacity to dominate or harm. Alongside diagnosis, there is sustained attention to liberation and self‑formation: what struggle, confrontation, and “negation” mean for individual and collective transformation, and what it might take to rethink humanism and recognition beyond the terms set by whiteness.
The result is an interdisciplinary, text-centered exploration of Black existentialism as a framework for understanding race, culture, subjectivity, and futurity across the Black Atlantic.
