Human Conditions

‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde

In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance to contemporary grassroot

‘Black Music’ by Amiri Baraka

In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz s

‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire

Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to

‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois

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 autobiography, history, biography, fi

‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam

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 exile before dying in t

‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unma

‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity a

‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul

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. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam S

‘The Human Condition’ by Hannah Arendt

In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, Judith Butler and Adam Shatz turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human acti

‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon

Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the psyche. At tu

'The Second Sex' by Simone de Beauvoir

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 Second Sex incorporates a

'Anti-Semite and Jew' by Jean-Paul Sartre

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 published in French as Ré

Introducing Human Conditions

In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately