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Black Existentialism

John E. Drabinski
Black Existentialism
Latest episode

22 episodes

  • Black Existentialism

    Jenkins on Masculinity, Touch, and Vulnerability

    2023/04/27 | 22 mins.
    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?
  • Black Existentialism

    Wright on Guns, Masculinity, and Violence

    2023/04/26 | 21 mins.
    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?
  • Black Existentialism

    Wright on Antiblackness, Guilt, and Death in Native Son

    2023/04/26 | 22 mins.
    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.
  • Black Existentialism

    Wright on Visibility, Death, and the Possibility of Black Life

    2023/04/26 | 19 mins.
    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.
  • Black Existentialism

    Burnett on Despair, Abandonment, and Pessimism in Killer of Sheep

    2023/04/26 | 20 mins.
    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?
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About Black Existentialism
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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