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Black Existentialism

John E. Drabinski

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.

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20 episodes
Avg 22 min
English

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#22
Apr 27, 2023 · 22 min
Jenkins on Masculinity, Touch, and Vulnerability
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?
#21
Apr 26, 2023 · 21 min
Wright on Guns, Masculinity, and Violence
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?
#20
Apr 26, 2023 · 22 min
Wright on Antiblackness, Guilt, and Death in Native Son
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.
#19
Apr 26, 2023 · 19 min
Wright on Visibility, Death, and the Possibility of Black Life
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.
#18
Apr 26, 2023 · 20 min
Burnett on Despair, Abandonment, and Pessimism in Killer of Sheep
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 on Liberation," requires deliberate leaving of the space of the neighborhood in search of the oppressor?
#17
Apr 26, 2023 · 19 min
Davis on Negation, Liberation, and Formation of Self
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 transformation, not simply a change in beliefs or broad social arguments and disputes. Confrontation, violent in so many ways, is critical to becoming who and what we are at our best, against who and what we are at our worst.
#16
Apr 24, 2023 · 24 min
Walcott on History, Race, and Identity
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?
#15
Apr 21, 2023 · 19 min
Ellison on Sound, Invisibility, and World-Making
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.
#14
Apr 18, 2023 · 20 min
Hurston on Black Expressive Life and World-Making
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?
#13
Apr 13, 2023 · 15 min
Lamming on Writing, Race, and the Human Condition
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.
#12
Apr 13, 2023 · 18 min
Sartre on Blackness, Liberation, and Dialectics
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?
#11
Apr 13, 2023 · 22 min
Césaire on Diaspora, Culture, and Colonization
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.
#10
Mar 6, 2023 · 25 min
Fanon on Racism, Culture, and Social Reproduction
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 foundational struggle.
#9
Mar 3, 2023 · 21 min
Fanon on Race, Ethnicity, and the Future of Identity
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.
#8
Feb 24, 2023 · 22 min
Fanon on Resistance, Humanism, and Futurity
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 conception of the human, in order for recognition to be liberatory. Never recognition on the terms of white humanity. Only recognition on the terms of a new sense of the human. And that sense lies in the future, not the past or present - which is why Fanon evokes the idea, rather than describing what a new humanism looks like.
#7
Feb 24, 2023 · 21 min
Fanon on the Gaze, Antiblackness, and Lived-Experience
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 is dependent upon, the power of the white gaze to organize the epidermal structure of lived-experience - we are embodied in our relation to one another - around terms of hate, subjugation, and abjection. In other words, the power of the gaze to see and reproduce the location of the Black body in the zone of non-being.
#6
Feb 17, 2023 · 21 min
Fanon on Language, Antiblackness, and Interracial Desire
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 all the markers of antiblackness: the desire of the Black woman to exit colonial relations through the white man, the failure of such desires, and the recurrence of antiblackness in the most intimate aspects of life.
#5
Feb 14, 2023 · 28 min
Fanon on Non-Being, Language, and Colonialism as a Total Project
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 epidermal, not biological or predetermined. But the epidermal builds a decisive, alienating exception into speaking: one is always black or white, no matter one's relation to diction, and that disjunct means everything in sustaining an antiblack world.
#4
Feb 13, 2023 · 30 min
Sartre on the Jew, Situatedness, and Responsibility
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 for our situation, but rather for our relationship to it. No matter our role in forming that situation, we can configure and reconfigure our subjectivity in relation to institutions of hate and racism - resistance, complicity, indifference, and so on. His argument about responsibility is not moralistic, but instead existential: how we relate to our situatedness is constitutive of who and what we are as subjects, and our capacity to adopt a subjectivity of critique and resistance pushes our sense of self toward a transformation, rather than reification, of the world as we know it.
#3
Feb 7, 2023 · 27 min
Sartre, Existentialism, Antisemitism, and the Democrat
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 addr

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