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 • Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks • antiblackness, gaze, language, non-being • masculinity, violence, desire • liberation, negation, responsibility • literature/film analyses • diaspora, identity, culture, world-makingThis podcast presents audio “process pieces” drawn from a course on Black existentialism, using existentialism’s attention to lived experience, ambiguity, embodiment, and freedom to interpret Black life under colonialism and antiblack racism. Across philosophy, literature, and film, it traces how questions of subjectivity and identity are shaped by racialization, and how Black thinkers in the Atlantic world adapt and contest existentialist frameworks.
A central throughline is Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks*, treated as a keystone text for thinking about the “zone of non-being,” the white gaze, and the ways language and everyday social interaction reproduce racial hierarchy. The discussions emphasize Fanon’s account of how colonialism works as a total project that organizes bodies, desire, speech, recognition, and the terms on which the human is defined. Attention is also given to culture as a political terrain: debates about cultural change, conservation, and diaspora appear as sites where social reproduction and revolutionary practice are negotiated.
Alongside Fanon, the podcast draws on writers and theorists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Derek Walcott, Zora Neale Hurston, George Lamming, and Angela Davis to examine identity formation, liberation, and responsibility. Themes include the tension between individual freedom and institutional constraint, the limits of liberal humanism in confronting hatred, and the role of struggle and “negation” in both personal and collective transformation.
The podcast also uses narrative and visual media—especially mid-century and later Black literature and cinema—to explore existential themes as they appear in concrete social worlds. Particular focus falls on masculinity, violence, vulnerability, and respect, including how technologies of domination and the threat of death structure possibilities for Black life. Counterpoints include Black expressive practices and aesthetic world-making, treated as modes of resistance and as efforts to articulate fuller forms of living amid oppressive conditions.
