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In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk , W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem. Zalloua argues that today''s anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society . Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism - a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance. To Exist as a Problem provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle.
About the author
Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA and Editor of
The Comparatist. He is the co-author, with Ilan Kapoor, of
Universal Politics (2021), and the author of
Fanon, Zizek and the Violence of Resistance (Bloomsbury 2025),
The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024);
Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality,
Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2021),
Zizek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future ( Bloomsbury, 2020),
Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018),
Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017),
Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (2014), and
Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005).
