Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that (...) the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human. (shrink)

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and (...) the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy. (shrink)

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised (...) by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, the unshackling of political philosophy from the liberal moral theory setting the stage for the decolonization of justice and normative life, unleashing the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason. (shrink)

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article explores five ways in which philosophy could be colonized: (1) racial and ethnic origins, (2) coloniality of its norms, (3) market commodification, (4) disciplinary decadence, (5) solipsism—and what the author calls a teleological suspension of philosophy as consideration among other practices of thought.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article explores several philosophical questions raised by Rebecca Tuvel’s controversial article, “In Defense of Transracialism.” Drawing upon work on the concept of bad faith, including its form as “disciplinary decadence,” this discussion raises concerns of constructivity and its implications and differences in intersections of race and gender.

This article is a reflective essay, drawing upon insights on racism and related forms of oppression as expressions of bad faith, on several influential movements in contemporary philosophy of race and racism. The author pays particular attention to theories from the global south addressing contemporary debates ranging from Euromodernity, philosophical anthropology, and the racialization of First Nations or Amerindians to intersectionality theory, discourses on privilege, decolonization, and creolization.

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion (...) of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the “face” of political life and the importance of the concept of “home” for a cogent theory of freedom. (shrink)

Originally delivered to mark the fiftieth anniversary of both Frantz Fanon’s death and the publication of his seminal discourse on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, these remarks seek to offer a preliminary outline of Fanon’s continuing relevance to the present. Conceptually spanning such touchstone elements of Fanon’s thought as sociogeny, race, violence, the human, and the relation between decolonial ethics and decolonial politics, the authors turn our attention to diagnosing the neoliberal face of contemporary coloniality/modernity and contributing to movements (...) from the Arab (or North African) Spring to the Occupy movement, from Philadelphia’s “flash mobs” to the new Latin American Left. (shrink)

This article distinguishes thought on phenomenology and psychoanalysis versus doing phenomenology and psychoanalysis and argues that while Fanon was primarily concerned with the latter, his thought also offers contributions to the former. They include methodological critique and an interrogation into the human sciences that includes a psychoanalytical decolonial critical reflection on science linked to open possibilities of human conditions.

What does it mean for philosophy to be ‘colonised’ and what are some of the challenges involved in ‘decolonising’ it in philosophical and political terms? After distinguishing between philosophy and its practice as a professional enterprise, I explore six ways in which philosophy, at least as understood in its Euromodern form, could be interpreted as colonised: (1) Eurocentrism and its asserted racial and ethnic origins/misrepresentations of philosophy's history, (2) coloniality of its norms, (3) market commodification of the discipline, (4) disciplinary (...) decadence, (5) solipsism, and (6) appeals to redemptive narratives of colonial practice. The remainder of the article examines conditions for decolonising philosophy, which include unlocking its potential as a liberatory practice, identifying its humanistic dimensions, rethinking metaphysical assumptions, and embracing political responsibility wrought from the production of knowledge. (shrink)

This memoriam essay begins with a reflection on the author’s relationship to Drucilla Cornell, the famed activist, revolutionary legal theorist, social and political philosopher, playwright, and biographer. It then proceeds to examine her contributions to Africana existential revolutionary thought and the Caribbean-inspired project of shifting the geography of reason.

This introduction outlines why the author assembled a community of scholars with the task not of commenting on Jane Anna Gordon’s work on creolizing political theory but instead placing it in dialogue with their own. The idea is that the value of theory depends also on the extent to which it could be engaged as a communicative practice with other theories dedicated to a shared concern. In this case, it is scholars committed to thought devoted to concerns of dignity, (...) freedom, and liberation as well as the critical question of the ultimate value of doing theoretical work. (shrink)

The author discusses Jane Anna Gordon’s proposal, in the 2006 international meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of creolizing theory. He summarizes the research it generated, including Gordon’s monograph on creolizing political theory, and the set of articles in this forum on creolizing social and political identities and theory.

Commentary on essays in Forum: Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Fifty Years Later.

This article examines an Africana philosophy of culture of black existence through, after offering a critique of a theodicy of textuality and social reality, exploration of the construction of “problem people,” of people whose existence, marked by blackness, has been treated as a challenge to reason and the search for knowledge in the modern world. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case for the central importance (...) of philosophy of culture in modern and late modern thought. (shrink)

This article examines an Africana philosophy of culture of black existence through, after offering a critique of a theodicy of textuality and social reality, exploration of the construction of “problem people,” of people whose existence, marked by blackness, has been treated as a challenge to reason and the search for knowledge in the modern world. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case for the central importance (...) of philosophy of culture in modern and late modern thought. (shrink)

The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valorize democratic intellectual spaces of philosophical engagement.

The first part of this memoriam essay focuses on the author’s relationship with the famed Bajan intellectual George Lamming during his years at Brown University. The second part explores Lamming’s most famous work, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), which offers important tropes in Black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through Lamming’s portrait of the phenomenon of slime and its (...) correlate, the slimy individual. The author also discusses Lamming’s treatment of the Fanonian motif of colonizing notions of normative development. (shrink)

This chapter examines race in film through exploring what the author calls “cinema beyond the veil.” This involves addressing several themes. The first is historical—namely, the story of racial portraits in film. The second is hermeneutical—that is, interpreting the portrayal of race in film. The third is philosophical—pertaining particularly to the aesthetic quality of film where race emerges. And the fifth is political—whether race can be in film without subordinating aesthetic aims to political imperatives. Conceptual tools rallied in the service (...) of this analysis include audiovisuality, allegory, monstrosity, political aesthetics, and potentiated double consciousness. (shrink)