Black Existentialism

A discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's introductory piece to a collection of Négritude poetry. The essay "Black Orpheus" describes the revolutionary power of Black consciousness and its capacity to transform how we understand collective identity. However, Sartre concludes the essay by calling for an eventual surpassing of that consciousness and movement toward a vision of the global proletariat. How are we to understand this transition, in terms of both its possibilities and its limits?

A discussion of Aimé Césaire's 1956 essay "Culture and Colonization," with specific emphasis on the distinction between culture and civilization, and how that distinction generates his conception of diaspora.

A discussion of Frantz Fanon's 1956 essay "Racism and Culture," which argues for the entanglement of racism and culture - both as a feature of culture and a condition of all cultural production. In particular, I am interested here in how arguments about culture function, per Fanon's insight, as deep political engagement: the reproduction of society is at stake in cultural change and conservation. So, what does this mean for revolutionary practice? It means embracing cultural struggle as a foundational struggle. 

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.

Closing out our work on Black Skin, White Masks, this podcasted note explores how the dialectic in Chapter 7 and transition to Chapter 8 tie together Fanon's reflections on the zone of non-being and the white gaze. In particular, I focus on how the question of comparison and recognition bears within it the colonial terms of the struggle to be seen as human, but also the indicator of what would comprise revolutionary struggle and recognition. Recognition must be re-thought, here in terms of a new conception of the human, in order for recognition to be liberatory. Never recognition on the terms of white humanity. Only recognition on the terms of a new sense of the human. And that sense lies in the future, not the past or present - which is why Fanon evokes the idea, rather than describing what a new humanism looks like.

A discussion of Chapter Five from Black Skin, White Masks, with attention to how the white gaze both structures lived-experience in an antiblack world and is a primary site of the reproduction of an antiblack world. Fanon's claim that the white person (child, in his example) naming his raced body - "Look, a Negro!" - is the equivalent of shouting a racial slur underscores the proximity of everyday language to the racist structure of the interracial world. That racist structure flows through, and is dependent upon, the power of the white gaze to organize the epidermal structure of lived-experience - we are embodied in our relation to one another - around terms of hate, subjugation, and abjection. In other words, the power of the gaze to see and reproduce the location of the Black body in the zone of non-being.

Summary and interpretations of themes in the first two chapters of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. I am interested in two aspects of the text. First, how Fanon understands linguistic practice - speaking, diction, grammar, expression - as irreducibly colonial, bearing the marks of colonial racism, and how and why creole language formations are, for him, not sites of resistance or alternative paths for expressive life. Second, why Fanon sees interracial desire as pathological and bearing all the markers of antiblackness: the desire of the Black woman to exit colonial relations through the white man, the failure of such desires, and the recurrence of antiblackness in the most intimate aspects of life.

A discussion of the Introduction and opening chapter to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, with particular attention to the relation between language and the zone of non-being. Fanon ties language and being together with such intimacy that the colonial command and control of language - its capacity to sustain culture, world, and civilization - is the cornerstone of antiblackness. Proper diction is no liberation, because racism works through our embodied presence to one another; race is epidermal, not biological or predetermined. But the epidermal builds a decisive, alienating exception into speaking: one is always black or white, no matter one's relation to diction, and that disjunct means everything in sustaining an antiblack world.

A discussion of the second half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, exploring the relationship between the gaze, situatedness, and freedom and responsibility. Sartre is trying to maintain a balance between individual and institutional accounts of racism - that antisemitism is part of the antisemite's belief structure and also part of the infrastructure of the world - while not compromising his absolutism about freedom and responsibility. And so Sartre argues that we are not responsible for our situation, but rather for our relationship to it. No matter our role in forming that situation, we can configure and reconfigure our subjectivity in relation to institutions of hate and racism - resistance, complicity, indifference, and so on. His argument about responsibility is not moralistic, but instead existential: how we relate to our situatedness is constitutive of who and what we are as subjects, and our capacity to adopt a subjectivity of critique and resistance pushes our sense of self toward a transformation, rather than reification, of the world as we know it.

An exploration of the first half of Jean-Paul Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, with attention to the context of the book, how Sartre conceives the existential structure of antisemitic subjectivity, and the limits of "the democrat" or liberal humanism for addressing hate. I am interested here in how Sartre tried to shift European philosophy toward questions of racism and the racial construction of subjectivity, but failed, and yet underscored how little European thought found urgent in such questions. I then turn to the text and outline the meaning of the phrase "if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would create him." Why is the Jew so important to the antisemite, and to Christian Europe more broadly? And why is the liberal humanist - "the democrat," in Sartre's vocabulary - a failed strategy of redress and critique, ending up, tragically, a reiteration of the same antisemitic values as those embodied in the explicitly antisemitic subject?