Lamming on Writing, Race, and the Human Condition

A treatment of George Lamming's 1956 essay "The Negro Writer and His World," with particular emphasis on the task of the colonized writer in creating a literary and readerly tradition, as well as the phases the writer moves through, from the singularity of the call of writing to the social relation of the writer to the highest form of literary composition: the universal human condition.

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.