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 • antiblackness, gaze, language, desire • race, identity, diaspora, colonization • masculinity, violence, vulnerability • liberation, negation, responsibility • literature and film analysis • world-making, expressive lifeThis podcast presents audio “process pieces” from a course on Black existentialism, using existentialism’s focus on lived experience—ambiguity, vulnerability, embodiment, freedom, and responsibility—to examine how Black life is shaped under antiblack social worlds. Across discussions of major Black Atlantic thinkers and artists, the episodes treat philosophy, literature, and film as sites where questions of identity, subjectivity, and world-making come into view.
A central thread is Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks*, approached through themes such as the “zone of non-being,” the white gaze, and the ways language, recognition, and desire are structured by colonial racism. These analyses connect culture to politics, emphasizing how cultural production and debate can reproduce or contest social orders, and how liberation may require rethinking what counts as “the human” and what forms of futurity are possible.
The podcast also examines the formation of racial identity across diaspora and empire, including debates about Négritude, history, paternity, culture versus civilization, and the tensions between particular collective consciousness and broader universalist political horizons. Alongside these theoretical concerns, it returns repeatedly to questions of masculine identification, violence, dignity, and exposure—considering how antiblackness organizes visibility and invisibility, and how affect, touch, beauty, despair, and abandonment register in everyday life.
Throughout, existentialism is framed not as abstract doctrine but as a method for reading racialized experience and for thinking about struggle, negation, responsibility, and transformation at both individual and collective scales.
