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.

What is Black Existentialism?

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.