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?” What makes the question obtrusive is its ontological quality: what is foregrounded as a problem is not a set of circumstances but being itself. In this talk, Zalloua considers how becoming Black or becoming Palestinian transforms you into a particular kind of object: a phobic object, a criminalizable object, or even a genocidable object. These forms of objecthood mark the violent ways racialization and colonial domination structure white ontology, the very grammar of being. Yet alongside these imposed forms, I also imagine objecthood otherwise, not only as a sign of depletion or loss, but as a site of cross-racial solidarity, a militant call for ontological upheavals and psychic divestments, and a refusal of the world’s partitions of being and nonbeing at home and across the globe.

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College. He is also editor of The Comparatist. His teaching and scholarship engage critical Black studies, the posthuman, and the Palestinian question. His most recent works include To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian (2026); Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance (2025); The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023); Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021); Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020); Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018); and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).