Black Existentialism

A discussion of Barry Jenkins' 2016 film Moonlight, with particular focus on the question of masculinity and race. How do touch, vulnerability, and beauty change the way we think about masculine identification? What does it mean to put this vision of masculinity in conversation with Richard Wright's rendering of re-masculation as violence, domination, and the capacity to injure and end life? What other world is possible?

A treatment of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," which examines the place of violence, guns, and respect in radicalized formations of masculinity. How does the main character Dave Saunders reimagine his masculinity in a world of emasculation? And how does the gun function as a phallic symbol that is indispensable for imagining manhood, respect, and dignity?

A discussion of the 1951 film adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son. I am particularly interested in the theme of race and guilt, a theme that is consistent across Wright's work and illuminates his existential themes of condemnation to death and the sociological construction of racial identity in the social relation.

A discussion of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground," which explores themes of visibility, invisibility, life, freedom, and death. In this process piece, I think through the meaning of the underground as invisibility and freedom - with reference to Ralph Ellison's treatment of invisibility in Invisible Man - and the above ground as visibility, exposure to antiblack racism, and death.

A discussion of Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep, with particular focus on the nihilistic, despairing pessimism of the film. Stan, the main character, has been worn down into an affectless figure whose sense of joy and human contact is all but eliminated. What space is there for joy and pleasure? Is escape possible? Is another sense of self and affect possible? Or does abandonment mean that the possibility of a confrontation and negation, as described by Angela Davis in her "Lecture on Liberation," requires deliberate leaving of the space of the neighborhood in search of the oppressor?

A discussion of Angela Davis' essay "Lecture on Liberation," which examines the structure of self and collective liberation. In particular, I am interested here in how she takes Frederick Douglass' description of his fight with Covey as exemplary of the structure of negation, a structure that tells a story about how to retrieve a sense of authentic self and self- and collective-transformation of an antiblack world. The insight from this is that struggle is the crucial component to our sense of transformation, not simply a change in beliefs or broad social arguments and disputes. Confrontation, violent in so many ways, is critical to becoming who and what we are at our best, against who and what we are at our worst.

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?

A discussion of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, with particular interest in his treatment of Louis Armstrong's song "Black and Blue" and its resonance across the Prologue, as well as the larger relation of the song and its sonic strategies to ideas of poetry, poiesis, 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? 

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.