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 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 discussion of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel&nbsp;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.

Ellison on Sound, Invisibility, and World-Making

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.

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Ellison on Sound, Invisibility, and World-Making

Ellison on Sound, Invisibility, and World-Making