reflections on the African-American intellectual tradition
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. The generic course description: During the middle decades of the twentieth century, existentialism dominated the European philosophical and …
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 …
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.” It’s a short work, but draws on some …
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. Part of the aim of the symposium was to break a little …
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 …
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 …
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 …
From 30 December 2017 A small thought on Erica Garner. I was thinking today about the long, searching conversations I had with my Baldwin seminar last spring while we were reading his last great work Evidence of Things Not Seen. Baldwin in that book was able to make the lives of black Atlanta and the …
A first handful of thoughts on I Am Not Your Negro, which is a film worth thinking about in a couple of different ways. First, as a film about race and American life. Second, as a film about James Baldwin. Those both are and are not the same thing in Peck’s film, I think. These …
It was a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but my family and I managed to get tickets to the opening day of the National Museum of African American Culture and History on Saturday, September 24th. The museum is here forever, so the first day is just an especially festive day. And …