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?

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.