Lewis R. Gordon

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Connecticut

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Sartre's political thought could be characterized by three elements: (1) his life as a political project and performance, (2) freedom as a challenge of the relationship of ethics to political life, and (3) the historical weight of history and an imposing social world on the task of creating institutions that do not inhibit the development of human...

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...

Este ensaio é a versão traduzida do inglês de “Fanon on cadavers, madness, and the damned” para o português, pela Profa. Dra. Rosemere Ferreira da Silva (UNEB/UCONN), de “Fanon: i cadaveri, la follia e i dannati,” em Violenza e Intimità Nell'Epoca Neoliberal. Etnophsichiatria Come Riparazione Della Storia, a cura di R. Beneduce, G. Bibeau, S. Talia...

The biomedical crisis of COVID-19 has opened up a floodgate for other kinds of crises like communal violence, racial discrimination, geographical hierarchies, socio-political hegemonies, academic exclusivities, etc. These crises are catalyzing massive geo-political shifts of the various epistemological and ontological frameworks of knowledge produc...

Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological...

This chapter provides a theoretical analysis of Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric, philosophical, and revolutionary thought as a clinical practitioner, polemicist, and soldier dedicated to nurturing, individual and collective self-emancipatory praxis among the colonized peoples of the Global South. Fanon’s, Black Skin, White Masks refutes Euromodern psych...

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, philosophi...

This book is a compelling study that charts the influence of indigenous thinkers on Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology. In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, this book examines how this groundbreaking work...

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 gend...

Disciplines are formed. And they are produced as such by human beings. This is not to say their content is anthropomorphic. But it is to say that, as human creations, they come into the world, enjoy some vibrancy, decay, and die. A “living discipline,” I will argue, is animated by a form of humility: that its methodological resources reach to reali...

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 t...

The authors summarize their theory of disaster as a sign continuum through which monsters—mythic agents of divine warning—raise questions of the meaning of political speech in the wake of colonialism. Unlike prior ages, where monsters had the social function of specialized speech, their warnings are ignored in the age of modern colonialism. Thus, i...

I offer in this article a brief exploration of some of the difficulties posed by the study of Jews of color, especially Afro-Jews, in the North American and Caribbean contexts, and I summarize the portrait of Jews today (and a little bit of yesterday) that follows from such study. There is much to support the reluctance to conjoin discussions of Je...

The author argues that disciplines are human phenomena that produce knowledge without having to collapse into anthropomorphism. Dying disciplines turn away from reality; living disciplines reach to reality without attempting to capture, colonize, or constrain it. The author refers to the former as " disciplinary decadence, " which, he argues, is th...

Frantz Fanon's contribution to ethics is, like that of Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean‐Paul Sartre, primarily metaethical in the form of a critique of Western moral philosophy and its relation to politics. Fanon offers, however, important critical considerations in the framework of what is today called global Southern thought and...

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and raci...

Based on a thematic and topical structure, this Handbook provides scholars and advanced students detailed description, analysis, and constructive discussions concerning African American theology—in the forms of black and womanist theologies. This volume surveys the academic content of African American theology by highlighting its (1) sources; (2) d...

Fanon as a Critic of « Methodological Fetishism » In this interview Lewis Gordon reexamines the way the political analyses drawn up by Fanon have contributed to a displacement and renewal of the epistemology of the human sciences. Gordon thus argues that it is “methodological fetishism” which often prevents the analyst from apprehending at a theore...

This chapter explores the anxieties, threats, twists, and turns of what it means to conjoin the concepts “reason” and “black,” and their implications not only for Africana philosophy but also Africana and Black studies. Among the difficulties the author explores are Africana studies as a form of desire for reasonability in a world of unreasonable r...

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of CODESRIA, an institution from the Global South devoted to taking responsibility for the production of social science knowledge, this article explores what it means to pursue such a task under the threat of colonial imposition at methodological and disciplinary levels, which, the author argues, carries d...

Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s insight that the theodicean grammar of racism is also a “biodicy,” this article explores its implications for an understanding of the formation of blackness as a modern phenomenon and its significance for models of rationalization and reason, on the one hand, and conditions of normative practice, on the other.

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....

Cet article est une critique du postulat selon lequel de l'essence découlerait nécessairement l'essentialisme, conformément à une conception de la métaphysique où les choses n'entrent pas en relation avec la réalité. Fort d'une métaphysique relationnelle et d'une phénoménologie libérée de l'ontologie, l'auteur démontre que les sciences humaines peu...

Speech held at the Icesi University in Cali at the Third Colombian Congress of Philosophy, Cali, October 21, 2010 by Gordon Lewis, director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and director of the Center for Afro-Jews. Professor of Philosophy at the Temple University and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

After offering a critique of what the author calls “the theodicy of the text”, where practicesare applied to the reading of canonical philosophers as one would to a deity or sacred text,this article then explores problems of justification in philosophy in relation to the expandedreach of instrumental rationality by virtue of scientific hegemony in...

This article examines the impact of racism on philosophical reasoning through an exploration of the thought of Frantz Fanon. How does one respond to forms of reason premised upon the rejection of one’s humanity? Such a challenge leads to melancholia, the author argues, in the face of what he calls disciplinary decadence, which calls for a teleologi...

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....

In 1960, Fanon was appointed ambassador in Ghana for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). He had devoted the prior six years of his life to the struggle for independence and had, among many efforts at articulating the FLN’s international image, composed L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959). The world had changed much by then; it was c...

E sta Universidad fue fundada como un instituto de negocios. La sabiduría de su administración ha consistido en saber que no se puede vivir únicamente de los negocios. Así, al expandir el conocimiento, ha tenido en cuenta que los estudiantes necesitan de la educación para no volverse esclavos del conocimiento de otros. La mayor parte de mi trabajo...

My aim in this essay is to explore some challenges in the philosophy of culture that emerge from its often repressed but symbiotic relationship with what Enrique Dussel calls “the underside of modernity.” 1 Philosophy of culture and its forms in various disciplines of the human sciences have often avowed French, Germanic, and Scottish roots, throug...

In April 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon met in a café in Rome. The meeting, at least as recorded by de Beauvoir, went on for hours, reportedly until two in the morning, to the point of Sartre’s 56- year-old body suffering fatigue. Sartre was in need of rest, urged de Beauvoir. Fanon, his 36-year-old body dying from leuk...

It has become a truism of recent thought that labor, migration, and race converge in the portrait of exploitation occasioned by modern capitalism. Often overlooked, however, are the theological underpinnings and their relation to the wider, global models of human organization and politics at hand. These foundations also offer a grammar of recurring...

were included in both. I was immediately struck by the clarity of his thought, its passion, and the creativity with which he grappled with problems ranging from symbolism in biblical texts to the urgent call for liberation in a world governed by near overwhelming commitments to injustice. To my good fortune, Professor Cone visited Yale that semeste...

Cet article examine quelques-uns des développements théoriques récents qui jouent un rôle important dans la décolonisation du savoir. Le fait que le savoir a été colonisé oblige à se demander s'il a jamais été libre. Formuler le savoir au singulier situe déjà la question dans un cadre qui est étranger à l'époque précoloniale car les modes disparate...

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 me...

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) 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 culmi...

Mabogo Samuel More (also known as Percy Mabogo More) has pointed out the philosophical importance of Steve Biko’s thought in the areas of Africana existential philosophy, and social and political philosophy. In the latter, Biko’s thought is distinguished by his critique of liberalism and his discussions of the political and epistemic conditions for...