A discussion of Barry Jenkins' 2016 film Moonlight, with particular focus on the question of masculinity and race. How do touch, vulnerability, and beauty change the way we think about masculine identification? What does it mean to put this vision of masculinity in conversation with Richard Wright's rendering of re-masculation as violence, domination, and the capacity to injure and end life? What other world is possible?
Apr 27, 2023•23 min•Ep. 22
A treatment of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," which examines the place of violence, guns, and respect in radicalized formations of masculinity. How does the main character Dave Saunders reimagine his masculinity in a world of emasculation? And how does the gun function as a phallic symbol that is indispensable for imagining manhood, respect, and dignity?
Apr 26, 2023•22 min•Ep. 21
A discussion of the 1951 film adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son . I am particularly interested in the theme of race and guilt, a theme that is consistent across Wright's work and illuminates his existential themes of condemnation to death and the sociological construction of racial identity in the social relation.
Apr 26, 2023•22 min•Ep. 20
A discussion of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground," which explores themes of visibility, invisibility, life, freedom, and death. In this process piece, I think through the meaning of the underground as invisibility and freedom - with reference to Ralph Ellison's treatment of invisibility in Invisible Man - and the above ground as visibility, exposure to antiblack racism, and death.
Apr 26, 2023•20 min•Ep. 19
A discussion of Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep, with particular focus on the nihilistic, despairing pessimism of the film. Stan, the main character, has been worn down into an affectless figure whose sense of joy and human contact is all but eliminated. What space is there for joy and pleasure? Is escape possible? Is another sense of self and affect possible? Or does abandonment mean that the possibility of a confrontation and negation, as described by Angela Davis in her "Lecture o...
Apr 26, 2023•21 min•Ep. 18
A discussion of Angela Davis' essay "Lecture on Liberation," which examines the structure of self and collective liberation. In particular, I am interested here in how she takes Frederick Douglass' description of his fight with Covey as exemplary of the structure of negation, a structure that tells a story about how to retrieve a sense of authentic self and self- and collective-transformation of an antiblack world. The insight from this is that struggle is the crucial component to our sense of t...
Apr 26, 2023•20 min•Ep. 17
A discussion of Derek Walcott's 1974 essay "The Muse of History," focusing on how his repudiation of "paternity" impacts the question of identity in the black Americas. What is a black American? What is that identity's relationship to European and African ancestry, and the overwhelming frame of empire's history? What other identity stories can be told?
Apr 24, 2023•24 min•Ep. 16
A discussion of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man , with particular interest in his treatment of Louis Armstrong's song "Black and Blue" and its resonance across the Prologue, as well as the larger relation of the song and its sonic strategies to ideas of poetry, poiesis , and world-making.
Apr 21, 2023•19 min•Ep. 15
A comment on Zora Neale Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression," with particular emphasis on how those characteristics - angularity, adornment - capture forms of resistance and world-making in an anti-black world. How does expressive life embody a sense of living in its fullest sense, rather than simply surviving regimes of white supremacy?
Apr 18, 2023•20 min•Ep. 14
A treatment of George Lamming's 1956 essay "The Negro Writer and His World," with particular emphasis on the task of the colonized writer in creating a literary and readerly tradition, as well as the phases the writer moves through, from the singularity of the call of writing to the social relation of the writer to the highest form of literary composition: the universal human condition.
Apr 13, 2023•16 min•Ep. 13
A discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's introductory piece to a collection of Négritude poetry. The essay "Black Orpheus" describes the revolutionary power of Black consciousness and its capacity to transform how we understand collective identity. However, Sartre concludes the essay by calling for an eventual surpassing of that consciousness and movement toward a vision of the global proletariat. How are we to understand this transition, in terms of both its possibilities and its limits?
Apr 13, 2023•19 min•Ep. 12
A discussion of Aimé Césaire's 1956 essay "Culture and Colonization," with specific emphasis on the distinction between culture and civilization, and how that distinction generates his conception of diaspora.
Apr 13, 2023•22 min•Ep. 11
A discussion of Frantz Fanon's 1956 essay "Racism and Culture," which argues for the entanglement of racism and culture - both as a feature of culture and a condition of all cultural production. In particular, I am interested here in how arguments about culture function, per Fanon's insight, as deep political engagement: the reproduction of society is at stake in cultural change and conservation. So, what does this mean for revolutionary practice? It means embracing cultural struggle as a founda...
Mar 06, 2023•25 min•Ep. 10
Discussion of Fanon’s essay “West Indians and Africans,” with particular attention to his discussion of race and ethnicity. Fanon argues against the idea of racial identity as a generalized bond across the Atlantic world. Combined with his reflection on how the fall of France in World War Two, Fanon prepares the grounds to revisit the zone of non-being as full of revolutionary possibility - an opening to a new sense of being and knowing.
Mar 03, 2023•22 min•Ep. 9
Closing out our work on Black Skin, White Masks, this podcasted note explores how the dialectic in Chapter 7 and transition to Chapter 8 tie together Fanon's reflections on the zone of non-being and the white gaze. In particular, I focus on how the question of comparison and recognition bears within it the colonial terms of the struggle to be seen as human, but also the indicator of what would comprise revolutionary struggle and recognition. Recognition must be re-thought, here in terms of a new...
Feb 24, 2023•22 min•Ep. 8
A discussion of Chapter Five from Black Skin, White Masks, with attention to how the white gaze both structures lived-experience in an antiblack world and is a primary site of the reproduction of an antiblack world. Fanon's claim that the white person (child, in his example) naming his raced body - "Look, a Negro!" - is the equivalent of shouting a racial slur underscores the proximity of everyday language to the racist structure of the interracial world. That racist structure flows through, and...
Feb 24, 2023•22 min•Ep. 7
Summary and interpretations of themes in the first two chapters of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks . I am interested in two aspects of the text. First, how Fanon understands linguistic practice - speaking, diction, grammar, expression - as irreducibly colonial, bearing the marks of colonial racism, and how and why creole language formations are, for him, not sites of resistance or alternative paths for expressive life. Second, why Fanon sees interracial desire as pathological and bearing ...
Feb 17, 2023•22 min•Ep. 6
A discussion of the Introduction and opening chapter to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks , with particular attention to the relation between language and the zone of non-being. Fanon ties language and being together with such intimacy that the colonial command and control of language - its capacity to sustain culture, world, and civilization - is the cornerstone of antiblackness. Proper diction is no liberation, because racism works through our embodied presence to one another; race is epi...
Feb 14, 2023•28 min•Ep. 5
A discussion of the second half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew , exploring the relationship between the gaze, situatedness, and freedom and responsibility. Sartre is trying to maintain a balance between individual and institutional accounts of racism - that antisemitism is part of the antisemite's belief structure and also part of the infrastructure of the world - while not compromising his absolutism about freedom and responsibility. And so Sartre argues that we are not responsible fo...
Feb 13, 2023•30 min•Ep. 4
An exploration of the first half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew , with attention to the context of the book, how Sartre conceives the existential structure of antisemitic subjectivity, and the limits of "the democrat" or liberal humanism for addressing hate. I am interested here in how Sartre tried to shift European philosophy toward questions of racism and the racial construction of subjectivity, but failed, and yet underscored how little European thought found urgent in such question...
Feb 07, 2023•27 min•Ep. 3
Discussion of the first chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk , framing his work in that chapter as an existential characterization of and response to Black subjectivity in an antiblack world. In particular, I am interested in how we understand critical concepts like "the veil," "double consciousness," and "the color line" emerge from the everyday lived-experience of Black embodied presence to the world - living as the hyphen in "African-American." Du Bois deploys a series of anecdotes ...
Feb 02, 2023•25 min•Ep. 2
What is existentialism? And why append the qualifier "Black" to the title "Black Existentialism"? This first piece sets out the agenda for the course, a formal framework for thinking about the material and its sensibility. The existentialist emphasis on lived-experience and embodied presence to the world introduces, unwittingly for so many European innovators, questions of race, gender, and sexuality into the meaning of existentialist thinking. I try to outline how and why this is the case, maki...
Feb 01, 2023•33 min•Ep. 1
