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.

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.