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.

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.