Hurston on Black Expressive Life and World-Making

A comment on Zora Neale Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression," with particular emphasis on how those characteristics - angularity, adornment - capture forms of resistance and world-making in an anti-black world. How does expressive life embody a sense of living in its fullest sense, rather than simply surviving regimes of white supremacy? 

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.