Human Conditions
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance t...
‘Black Music’ by Amiri Baraka
10 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of th...
‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thou...
‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois
10 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiogra...
‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam
10 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in e...
‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait...
‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western concep...
‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul
10 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Panka...
‘The Human Condition’ by Hannah Arendt
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, Judith Butler and Adam Shatz turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highes...
‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon
10 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its eff...
'The Second Sex' by Simone de Beauvoir
10 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The S...
'Anti-Semite and Jew' by Jean-Paul Sartre
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally pu...
Introducing Human Conditions
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’...