Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge collects key philosophical writings of Lewis R. Gordon, a globally renowned scholar whose writings cover liberation struggles across the globe and make field-defining contributions to the philosophy of existence, philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, philosophy of human sciences, aesthetics, and decolonization. Gordon’s expansive output ranges across phenomenology, anti-Blackness, activist thinkers, sexuality, Fanon, Jimi Hendrix, Black Jewish struggles, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and Ubuntu philosophy. Edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey, two decolonial thinkers from South Africa and India, this reader shifts attention away from colonial centres of power, encouraging global dialogue across students, scholars, and activists. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated novelist and postcolonial thinker, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this reader includes a mixture of research articles, short critical essays, reflections, interviews, poems, and photographs in the creative pursuit of liberation.

Table of Contents:
Preface by Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut, USA) Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (University of California, Irvine, USA) Introduction by Sayan Dey (Royal University of Bhutan, Bhutan) and Rozena Maart (University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa) Black Existentialism and Africana Philosophy 1. Africana Philosophy 2. Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason 3. Race in the Dialectics of Culture 4. Racism as a Form of Bad Faith 5. Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness 6. Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness 7. Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture 8. Sex, Race and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-Black World 9. Racialization and Human Reality 10. Letter to a Grieving Student 11. Rockin’ It in Blue: A Black Existential Essay on Jimi Hendrix Decolonizing Knowledge 12. Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge 13. Disciplining as a Human Science 14. The Problem of History in African American Theology 15. Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America 16. Jews Against Liberation: An Afro-Jewish Critique 17. Lewis Gordon’s Statement for Jacqueline Walker’s Dossier 2019 18. Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence 19. Decolonizing Philosophy 20. A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives 21. Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu 22. Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life 23. Labor, Migration and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship Interviews 1. Are Reparations Possible? Lessons to the United States from South Africa 2. Thinking Art in a Decolonial Way 3. Gordon and Da Silva on Brazil and Africana Philosophy 4. Dougla: Intersections between Dalitness and Afro-Blackness 5. Freedom, Oppression, and Black Consciousness in ‘Get Out’ Bibliography of Gordon’s writings from 1993–2023 Index

About the Author :
Rozena Maart is Professor at the School of Social Sciences in the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Mercator Fellow and Research Ambassador at the University of Bremen, Germany. Sayan Dey is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and Faculty Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, USA, Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa

Review :
Profound and authoritative essays by one of the leading contemporary Black philosophers of existence. As a towering figure in Black Existentialism Lewis Gordon weaves through a variety of contemporary issues such as antiblack racism, decolonization, bad faith, jazz, and the human sciences, from an Africana existential philosophical perspective. A must-read collection of essays. Lewis R. Gordon’s written words—along with his music, love, compassion, and interconnected humanity— teaches us to end “cruelty” and dehumanizing of the Damned of the Earth by “open[ing] our hearts to the freedom and possibility of life” and thereby making the world more livable for all humans and more-than-humans. A dive into these selected writings by Lewis R. Gordon is a dive into an alternative conceptual scheme. That scheme is informed by existentialism and an epistemology that faces reality – especially the reality of those that Gordon calls the Damned. This is not an epistemology paraded as pure knowledge void of human agency. It hears victims and the rising tide of new voices. It shifts, in effect, the geography of reason, and thereby, what ‘reason’ itself means. The reader of Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge is in for a swim within new knowledge for a new world.