لويس غوردون

الأعمال

• 1995سوء النية والعنصرية المعادية للسود (Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism)

  كتاب نشأ من أطروحته في ييل: باعتماد تحليل سارتر لسوء النية، يصف غوردون العنصرية المعادية للسود هروبًا من غموض الوجود الإنساني يعامل بعض الناس أجسادًا فحسب وينكر عليهم منزلة الأشخاص.

• 2000الإكزستنتيا الأفريقانية: فهم الفكر الوجودي الأفريقاني (Existentia Africana)

  مدخل إلى الأسئلة الوجودية في الفكر الأفريقاني – ما المرء ومن هو، والحرية والتحرر – في قراءات لدوغلاس ودو بوا وفانون وغيرهم: الفلسفة الأفريقانية فلسفة للوجود الإنساني في مواجهة العبودية والاستعمار والعنصرية.

الموقف

Gordon is on the map as the leading representative of Africana existential philosophy. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995) he took up Sartre’s concept of bad faith – the attempt to flee one’s own freedom by treating oneself or others as things – and argued that antiblack racism is a form of it: it reduces Black people to their bodies, treats their presence as a problem, and lets the racist evade responsibility by appealing to a supposed nature. Fanon became his main interlocutor, from Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995) to What Fanon Said (2015): Gordon reads Fanon not only as a theorist of colonialism but as a philosopher of the human who asks what it means to be human when one is denied humanity. In Existentia Africana (2000) he described Africana philosophy as concerned with three themes – what it is to be human, freedom and liberation, and a critique of reason itself – in readings of Douglass, Du Bois, Fanon and others. In Disciplinary Decadence (2006) he criticised disciplines that treat their own methods as absolute and so lose sight of the reality they study. Paul C. Taylor’s SEP entry on contemporary Africana philosophy discusses his definition of the field at length, and with Paget Henry and others he built the Caribbean Philosophical Association into a forum for philosophy of the Global South. His later books include Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022).

الحياة والسياق

Lewis Ricardo Gordon was born in 1962 in Jamaica and moved as a child with his mother to the Bronx in New York. He studied political science and philosophy at Lehman College of the City University of New York, taught for some years at a high school in the Bronx, and took his doctorate in philosophy at Yale in 1993. He taught at Purdue University, at Brown University and at Temple University, where he founded the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, and from 2013 at the University of Connecticut. In 2003 he became the founding president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, which awards the Frantz Fanon Prize.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995)
• Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (2006)
• An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008)
• What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (2015)
• Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021)
• Fear of Black Consciousness (2022)