Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge Writings of Lewis R. Gordon
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Biographical note
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 AfricaProfound 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.
Mabogo P. More, Research Associate, University of Limpopo, South Africa
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.
Jaspal Kaur Singh, Professor of English Literature, Northern Michigan University, USA
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 <i>Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge </i>is in for a swim within new knowledge for a new world.
Leonard Harris, Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University, USA
This selection has succeeded in the challenge of perfectly representing the work of Lewis Gordon, one of the greatest pioneers of African philosophy. Because it has captured the very nature of his philosophy: to be a continuous rhythmic movement rather than a collection of texts.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, USA