To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian with Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Oct 7, 2026

Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, explores how Black and Palestinian people are racialized as existential problems. He discusses Fanon’s zone of non-being, Orientalism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism, Jewish anti-Zionist traditions, and “becoming Palestinian.” The conversation turns to Afro-pessimism, creative resistance, and solidarity linking Black liberation with Palestinian liberation.

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INSIGHT

Why Black And Palestinian Liberation Belong Together

Zalloua argues that Black liberation and Palestinian liberation should be analyzed together rather than reduced to separate identity projects.
Black Lives Matter and Gaza reveal the persistence of anti-Blackness and coloniality within the supposedly liberal global order.

INSIGHT

Fanon’s Zone Of Non-Being Is Social Death

Fanon’s zone of non-being describes a quasi-permanent condition of social death, not a temporary existential crisis or ordinary prejudice.
Liberation requires dismantling the zone of being that produced non-being, rather than merely admitting selected outsiders into it.

INSIGHT

Why Legal Emancipation Does Not End Racial Domination

Formal emancipation can coexist with ontological subordination because racist classifications penetrate bodies and social existence.
Zalloua rejects liberal recognition and respectability as insufficient responses to structures that continually reproduce subhumanity.

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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: Being Black, Being Palestinian (Bloomsbury, 2026) 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

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA, and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent publications include To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian, Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance, The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment; and Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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