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.