Aesthetics of extreme futures

I am a Franco-American philosopher. Before being appointed Senior Lecturer in Francophone Black Studies at the University of Edinburgh, I was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I specialize in the history of francophone and anglophone black thought, social and political philosophy, critical race theory, and black masculinities studies.

I’m also a member of the board of the Fondation Frantz Fanon, and occasionally intervene as an art critic and political commentator.

My first book, Dignity or Death: Ethics and Politics of Race (Polity, 2022), develops a critique of continental philosophy from the black radical tradition. It is also available in French and Spanish. My second book, Noirceur: Race, Gender, Class and Pessimism in African-American Thought in the 21st Century (Divergences, 2022), focuses on the contemporary resurgence of a long tradition of black radical pessimism, as manifested today through intellectual currents such as Afropessimism or Black Male Studies.

My theoretical approach is twofold. On the one hand, it proposes a theoretical updating of the black radical tradition on a global scale; on the other, it explores the repressed racial unconscious of Western philosophy. This undertaking is guided by the conviction that the specific type of dehumanization to which black populations have been subjected for centuries has engendered singular forms of revolutionary organization, philosophical thought and artistic creation. I thus explore the interstice between life and death inhabited by African slaves, colonial subjects and today’s dehumanized Blacks.