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1Shifting the Geography of Reason, with Respects to SpinozaKrisis 44 (1): 84-105. 2024.This essay is based on a portion of the author’s Spinoza Lecture, which was presented in Amsterdam on 24 May 2022. Although Spinoza is not the main subject of the lecture, his anxieties and fears about his Sephardic Jewishness and its links to Africa and by extension racialized blackness offer an opportunity to outline Euromodern hegemonic geography of reason as a misrepresentation from which a shift in point of view can offer a set of important challenges to the portrait of philosophy it promot…Read more
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1Thinking Through The Americas TodayIn George Yancy (ed.), Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, State University of New York Press. pp. 271-291. 2012.
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Sartre and Black ExistentialismIn Jonathan Judaken (ed.), Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, State University of New York Press. pp. 157-171. 2008.
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11Fanon's approach to phenomenology and psychoanalysisSouthern Journal of Philosophy 62 (1): 97-109. 2024.This article distinguishes thought on phenomenology and psychoanalysis versus doing phenomenology and psychoanalysis and argues that while Fanon was primarily concerned with the latter, his thought also offers contributions to the former. They include methodological critique and an interrogation into the human sciences that includes a psychoanalytical decolonial critical reflection on science linked to open possibilities of human conditions.
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11A Girl in Black, a Woman in the African DiasporaPhilosophy and Global Affairs 3 (2): 359-372. 2023.This memoriam essay begins with a reflection on the author’s relationship to Drucilla Cornell, the famed activist, revolutionary legal theorist, social and political philosopher, playwright, and biographer. It then proceeds to examine her contributions to Africana existential revolutionary thought and the Caribbean-inspired project of shifting the geography of reason.
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Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color
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1Philosophy in Multiple VoicesRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2007.The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valori…Read more
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60Fanon and the Decolonization of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.The essays in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy all trace different aspects of the mutually supporting histories of philosophical thought and colonial politics in order to suggest ways that we might decolonize our thinking. From psychology to education, to economic and legal structures, the contributors interrogate the interrelation of colonization and philosophy in order to articulate a Fanon-inspired vision of social justice. This project is endorsed by his daughter, Mireille Fanon-Me…Read more
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18Jesus’s Uses of Language and Their Contemporary SignificancePhilosophia Christi 8 (2): 401-419. 2006.
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9Remembering George Lamming (1927–2022), with Thoughts on In the Castle of My SkinPhilosophy and Global Affairs 3 (1): 46-59. 2023.The first part of this memoriam essay focuses on the author’s relationship with the famed Bajan intellectual George Lamming during his years at Brown University. The second part explores Lamming’s most famous work, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), which offers important tropes in Black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through Lamming’s portrait of the phenomen…Read more
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7Obligations Across Generations: A Consideration in the Understanding of Community FormationIn Philip Alperson (ed.), Diversity and Community, Blackwell. 2004-01-01.
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92Bad Faith and Antiblack RacismHumanity Books. 1995.Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. G…Read more
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90Afterword: Living FanonJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19 (1): 83-89. 2011.Commentary on essays in Forum: Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Fifty Years Later
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84Pan‐Africanism and African‐American Liberation in a Postmodern World: A Review Essay (review)Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (2): 333-358. 1999.This review essay explores Josiah Young's project of developing a liberatory Pan-Africanism that is attuned to cultural diversity and Victor Anderson's advocacy of postmodern cultural criticism in African-American religious thought. After situating African-American religious thought as a branch of Africana thought, the author examines these two religious thinkers' work as an effort to forge a position on African-American religious thought--including its relation to theology--in an age where even…Read more
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121Falguni A. Sheth: Toward a political philosophy of race: SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2009, 270 pp, hardcover, US$74.50, ISBN 978-0-7914-9397-7 (review)Continental Philosophy Review 44 (1): 119-130. 2011.
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58Cynthia Willet, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (review)Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1): 107-116. 1998.
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31What Does It Mean to Colonise and Decolonise Philosophy?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 93 117-135. 2023.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 as colonised: (1) Eurocentrism and its asserted racial and ethnic origins/misrepresentations of philosophy's history, (2) coloniality of its norms, (3…Read more
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Justice otherwise: thoughts on UbuntuIn Leonhard Praeg & Siphokazi Magadla (eds.), Ubuntu: curating the archive, University of Kwazulu-natal Press. 2014.
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32Fanon on cadavers, madness, and the damnedEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 1577-1582. 2022.European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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11Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism From a Neocolonial AgeRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.Her Majesty's Children reveals not only a deeply personal account of the experience of racism but is also a revolutionary work that asks us to reconsider our ordinary practices and lives to recognize and resist the traces of a colonial age of racism that so many claim is only part of our past
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30Freedom, Justice, and DecolonizationRoutledge. 2020.The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical cha…Read more
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9L'existence noire dans la philosophie de la cultureDiogène 236 (3): 130-144. 2012.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. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case…Read more
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University of ConnecticutDepartment of PhilosophyHead and Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs
Areas of Specialization
Philosophical Traditions |
Value Theory |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Philosophical Traditions |
Value Theory |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |