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.

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.