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 philosophy via Black Atlantic thinkers • antiblackness, colonialism, race, identity • Fanon on language, gaze, non-being, culture • liberation, negation, resistance, humanism • literature/film on masculinity, violence, invisibility, expressive world-making • Sartre on antisemitism, responsibilityThis podcast presents “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, using existentialism’s focus on ambiguity, freedom, responsibility, and lived experience to examine Black life under racial domination across the Atlantic world. It centers Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks* while placing Fanon in conversation with other major mid‑century and earlier thinkers, writers, and artists to show how questions of being, recognition, and embodiment are shaped by colonialism and antiblackness.
Across the discussions, recurring attention is given to the ways racism operates not only as ideology but as a structure of social relations that organizes perception, language, desire, and the body. Themes include the “gaze” and visibility/invisibility; the “zone of non‑being” and the struggle to be recognized as human; and the idea that liberation requires transforming the terms of recognition rather than seeking inclusion on oppressive terms. Several segments treat language and culture as sites where colonial power is reproduced and contested, and explore how cultural politics relate to revolutionary practice and the future of identity.
The podcast also examines masculinity, violence, and vulnerability, including how dignity and respect can be tied to coercion, weapons, and domination, and how alternative visions of intimacy and beauty might reconfigure masculine identification. Literary criticism and film analysis are used alongside philosophy and political theory, engaging figures such as Du Bois, Wright, Ellison, Hurston, Lamming, Walcott, Césaire, Davis, and Sartre. Throughout, the emphasis is on how expressive life—sound, style, narrative, and aesthetics—can function as world-making under conditions of oppression, and how struggle and negation shape both self-formation and collective liberation.
