Lewis R. Gordon

Works

• 1995Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

  Book grown out of his Yale dissertation: drawing on Sartre’s analysis of bad faith, Gordon describes antiblack racism as a flight from the ambiguity of human existence that treats some people as mere bodies and denies them the standing of persons.

• 2000Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought

  Introduction to the existential questions of Africana thought – what and who one is, freedom and liberation – in readings of Douglass, Du Bois, Fanon and others: Africana philosophy as a philosophy of human existence in the face of slavery, colonialism and racism.

Position

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).

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• 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)