Here is my revised syllabus for a course I’ve taught a bunch of times: Black Existentialism. This revision includes more work with cinema, as well as pushing some of the existential themes into conversation with afro-postmodern sensibilities. Read more
Seminar on Angela Davis
Here is the syllabus for my F/19 course on Angela Davis. The centerpiece of the course in Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism book, which is my favorite of her works. Early readings build toward it with considerations of the history of race-gender liberation, conceptions of freedom, and related stuff. When we get to the Blues Legacies book, I plan to add in readings from Hurston, Locke, Ellison, Baraka, and Murray to underscore the uniqueness of Davis’ contribution to understanding the political significance of vernacular culture and expression. Read more
Vernacular Culture and Belonging
Neil Roberts hosted a fantastic symposium on April 13th, putting together an eclectic group of political theory oriented folks to discuss the theme “Democracy Between Past and Future.” It was a great meeting and I gave this short talk titled “Vernacular Culture and the Problem of Belonging.”
ReBIT19 – Pessimism as Interpretative Frame
The second annual symposium under the rubric Re-Thinking the Black Intellectual Tradition was held on March 30th, 2019. We gathered under the theme “Pessimism as Interpretative Frame” and explored the meaning of pessimism for thinking about the histories and lives of Black people. Read more
The Poetics of Beautiful Blackness
Broadly: How can the abjection of blackness under regimes of anti-blackness be (or has it already been) reversed, disrupted, disputed, and resisted? Specifically: what is Négritude to James Baldwin, who is Baldwin to Négritude?
My essay, linked here in final draft form, is forthcoming in a volume on James Baldwin and his influences and sites of intervention. Baldwin did not talk in any detail about the Négritude movement in his non-fiction, despite the fact that it was one of the most important movements in the mid-century black Atlantic world. Read more
Event and Passage
What is the Middle Passage to philosophical thinking?
My talk at Society for French Historical Studies, linked HERE in very draft form, explored this question in Édouard Glissant’s work. I frame the discussion in terms of “event,” drawn from Martin Heidegger’s late work Identity and Difference. In particular, I am interested in how event or Ereignis names the appropriation of thought and thinking by moments of fissure, fracture, and radical breaks from the past. Glissant’s account of the Middle Passage is just that: an event that fractures relation to the past, but also generates new conditions of thinking – inside, but also outside, the disaster. Read more
Preface to Glissant and the Middle Passage
Here is a preview of my new book Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss with University of Minnesota Press. The book offers a long argument for understanding the Middle Passage as a philosophical event, transforming our understanding of memory and its constitutive relation to subjectivity, aesthetics, and the nature of intellectual work. Read more
ReBIT18 – The Question of Medium
Texts, conversation, and friendship … I value these three things more than anything else. Whether books or gestures or habits or art, conversations about texts among friends – new friends, old friends, everyone in between – just make me happy. It’s the sort of thing that makes work-life worth living.
I do small, seminar-style symposia every year. Read more
Draylen Mason, photographed
The last couple of days have had a bunch of photos of Draylen Mason circulating, the kid who was killed by the somehow suddenly sympathetic bomber in Austin. You can guess all my feelings about that last part.
But these photos of Mason … I find them so moving and so difficult to look at, captivating and important.
“A School Shooting”; or, Necropolitics Again
I went to bed and woke up with the same troubled conscience of all decent people. Yet another school massacre, and all the senses of hopelessness that come with the news. Knowing it is unspeakably sad and awful, knowing we’ll be here again sooner than later.
I didn’t wake up worrying about my kids at their school. I’ll be honest about that. I’ve gone there before, in the past, after a shooting. Read more