Black Existentialism

Discussion of the first chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, framing his work in that chapter as an existential characterization of and response to Black subjectivity in an antiblack world. In particular, I am interested in how we understand critical concepts like "the veil," "double consciousness," and "the color line" emerge from the everyday lived-experience of Black embodied presence to the world - living as the hyphen in "African-American." Du Bois deploys a series of anecdotes that move away from autobiography and toward a full accounting for the structure of Black subjectivity and being as alienated, resistant, and full of beleaguered but also resilient forms of self-assertion. This roots his thinking in existentialist insight and thinking.

What is existentialism? And why append the qualifier "Black" to the title "Black Existentialism"? This first piece sets out the agenda for the course, a formal framework for thinking about the material and its sensibility. The existentialist emphasis on lived-experience and embodied presence to the world introduces, unwittingly for so many European innovators, questions of race, gender, and sexuality into the meaning of existentialist thinking. I try to outline how and why this is the case, making an argument along the way for the salience of existentialism for thinking about the Black experience in its unity and also its diversity.