Lewis R. Gordon

One recurring theme in philosophical work from and on the Americas has to do with the relationship between European Modernity and Colonialism. Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s penetrating analysis of this relationship offers a description of what she refers to as “European Man,” in which particular European (patriarchal, bourgeois, and white) accounts of “the human”, and especially of the human as rational, posit themselves as universal. What is significant about her critique of this view, is that she does not simply abandon notions of universality, or even humanism, but rather directs her work toward a call to theoretical action in the form of “the Human project,” in which the failures of the European Enlightenment project are avoided in favor of a more genuinely universal and liberatory account of the human. This chapter stands as an effort to take up the challenge posed by Wynter’s analysis, focusing in particular on the ways in which a particular understanding of reason informed European Man as an ideal, and suggesting what understanding of reason would be most appropriate to Wynter’s liberatory humanism.

The paper “The meaning of Frantz Fanon's idea 'the lived experience of the black man'”  discusses the meaning of the idea “the lived experience of the black man” of the great Martinique philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon that is articulated in chapter 5 of his first book Black Skin, White Masks. The purpose of the discourse is to understand how Fanon's discussion of the racial issues transcends itself giving the opportunity to understand the lived experience of all colonized subjects, such as women, people of color, non-western cultures. It shows this by comparing Fanon's ideas to the ideas of woman's oppression by Simone de Beauvoir and intersectional ideas of the mestiza consciousness, borderland identity by Gloria Anzaldúa. This means that it will try to persuade the audience that Fanon's discussion of the Black experience has high symbolic meaning, because by Black person we can understand any oppressed subject not just attached to her race specificity.

The Aotearoa New Zealand prison structure, like many other Western institutions, is fundamentally an oppressive state enterprise that serves to marginalise Indigenous peoples both as a symptom and as a mechanism of colonisation. There are currently 10,260 prisoners in New Zealand jails, and just over half of all prisoners are Māori, with the second majority (32%) being European, and the third majority (11%) being Pasifika peoples.  When we compare these numbers to the New Zealand demographics – 14.9% Māori, 7.4% Pasifika, and around three-quarters being of NZ European descent – it is clear that racial inequalities, and attendant histories of colonialism and dispossession, play an important and often unacknowledged part in shaping the New Zealand carceral justice system.  While some prisons have Māori Focus Units and Māori Therapeutic Programmes, the prison structure as a totality remains a fundamental part of a settler colonial project. This article argues that the carceral system is an extension of wider practices, wherein the New Zealand government forces upon Māori a Pākehā worldview and perpetuates Māori alienation from people and place through forced assimilation.  As Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri argue, settler colonialism is ‘actively created and maintained through processes of dispossession, and policies of disenfranchisement and social and economic exclusion,’  and for my purposes in this article, the focus will be the logics of dispossession that shape patterns of Māori incarceration.

Lewis Gordon's interpretation of racism from a Sartrean perspective is phenomenologically unconvincing. The reason is that Gordon has not taken the transformative nature of racism sufficiently into account. The perception of the other as a disturbing lack of being, as "absence", is characteristic of the motivation for racism rather than of the racist attitude itself. I will describe two alternative variations of racism as bad faith. Both include 'other reification' as a key feature. In the first variant, however, the self is reified as well, while the second variant is characterized by a self-understanding as transcendence.

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but 'blank' backgrounds or 'neutral' meaning spaces. We analyse how skin 'appears' to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices.

Operative intentionality is a practical directedness that gives meaning to objects in the world prior to conscious reflection. This chapter first traces the development of the concept from its roots in Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl to its most detailed articulation in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The chapter then argues that this notion has opened phenomenology to fields such as gender, critical race, queer, and disability studies because it raises the question of whether mental structure is universal across bodies. Theoretical contributions by Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, S. Kay Toombs, Lewis Gordon, and others are considered in light of this claim.

Can humanism be post-colonial? What is Africana Philosophy? Who is Lewis Gordon? This paper presents some typical elements of the Jamaican philosopher Lewis Gordon's thought and relates it to the field of Africana Philosophy. For this purpose, it seeks to delineate its theoretical influences and the usage of concepts, such as theodicy, bad faith and reason to understand anti-black racism. In this sense, the following argument pivots on Lewis Gordon's singular contribution to different areas of study, especially political philosophy, social sciences and the humanities.

The importance of a radicalized dialectics, as part of a broader project of epistemic decolonization, asserts itself in the face of global political stagnancy of combative struggle and conflict at levels of class, race and nation. These ‘frozen dialectics’ come at a time where the logic of democratic capitalism imbues the polis with convictions in formalized liberal emancipation. In response to this crisis, this paper reflects on an imagined dialogue between Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin through the radicalized dialectical thread that runs through the work of each. Their union in conceptualizing historical consciousness points to a moment in both: Fanon’s allusion that racism is the suspension of history, and Benjamin’s idea of dialectics at a standstill. Fanon’s diagnosis of the Manichaean colonial reality is transcended only by his allusion to an arguably Messianic desire as conceived by Benjamin. What this contributes to the reclamation of dialectical struggle is a reassessment of the temporality that dictates dialectical reason, and serves to emphasise the Messianic nature of Fanon’s decolonial vision. To support this imagined dialogue I draw on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and George Ciccariello-Maher. I argue that the challenges posed to a singular, teleological and determinist dialectic will serve as the foundation for reclaiming a dialectical methodology that considers the complexity, multiplicity and open-ended creative potential of dialectic ruptures.

The philosopher Peter Hallward has explained that Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis of colonialism is “first and foremost an immense project to break the will of the colonised people” (2011, p.109). In other words, colonialism according to Fanon, was and attempt to dehumanise anyone who was outside the preview of ‘the European’ – as defined both culturally and racially. This being a physical and mental process of subjugation that can be understood as “daily death...a death in life” (Fanon 1967, p.13). From this perspective, political theorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon believed that the only way out of such an all-encompassing world of racism and dehumanisation, is to confront and overthrow this order. Confrontation (and this implies a certain type of violence) is a
necessary prerequisite for decolonisation.

This encounter can take place in one’s personal relationships such as Fanon’s stormy confrontation with his future editor Francis Jeanson. Commenting on this, Lewis Gordon remarks, “There is no reciprocal respect without confrontation...Fanon forced a situation in which the values of the two men came face to face, and through that encounter respect enabled the production of great work”
(2015, p.91). Beyond personal relationships, this confrontation is also necessary with regards to society as a whole – it is only through this process which the colonised is able to emancipate themselves both physically and mentally (Fanon 2004, pp.1–62).

Discurso pronunciado en la Universidad Icesi de Cali, en el Tercer Congreso Colombiano de Filosofía, Cali, 21 de octubre de 2010 por Lewis R. Gordon, director del instituto para el Estudio de la Raza y el Pensamiento Social y director del Centro de Estudios Afro-Judios. Profesor de filosofía en la Universidad de Temple y Presidente de la Asociación Filosófica del Caribe.

Resumo: Pode o humanismo ser pós-colonial? O que é Africana Philosophy? E, quem é esse tal de Lewis Gordon? Este paper apresenta alguns elementos próprios ao pensamento do filósofo jamaicano Lewis Gordon e o relaciona com a vertente filosófica intitulada Africana Philosophy e, para tal, procura delimitar as suas bases teóricas e a sua aplicação dos conceitos de teodiceia (teodicy), má-fé (bad-faith) e razão à compreensão do racismo anti-negro. Argumenta-se, nesse sentido, em torno da contribuição singular deste autor para diferentes áreas, especialmente para a filosofia política e as ciências sociais e humanas. Palavras-chave: Lewis Gordon, filosofia Africana, humanismo pós-colonial, fenomenologia existencial

As 'decolonisation' gains traction as an increasingly hegemonic label for anti-racist programmes of social, cultural and intellectual transformation, there is growing urgency for clarification around what the term actually entails. Past struggles for decolonisation organised militantly around a clear objective-independence-using armed as well as non-violent resistance, and largely succeeded in abolishing formal political colonialism. In the present context, however, decolonial movements seek to address a complex and paradoxical situation: the endurance of colonial domination even after the abolition of official colonies. For Aníbal Quijano, this situation expressed the persistence of deep structures of 'coloniality' based on social discriminations such as race, ethnicity and culture, which as products of 'Eurocentered colonial domination' came to take on a pseudo-scientific objectivity as apparently natural (rather than constructed and imposed) distinctions. As Quijano and others have argued, for the past 500 years, these 'intersubjective constructions' have guided and legitimised a hierarchical distribution of work, resources and security across the planet to the benefit of a small group of Europeans and their descendants, with the elimination of formal colonialism having only gone part way to altering this exploitative arrangement. But how can a structure that apparently no longer exists and is officially disavowed by those that perpetuate it be identified and eliminated? How deep does 'coloniality' go? Does it infect identities, institutions, language, thinking even? And if so, what would constitute an adequate response? These questions have marked decolonisation's entry into the academic mainstream, with fierce debates around it currently proliferating both at the level of specific disciplines, methods and canons as well as at the more fundamental level of structures and practices of knowledge-that is, the domain of questions and problems to which philosophy has traditionally laid claim. Lewis Gordon is one of the most established proponents of a decolonial perspective in anglophone philosophy. His new book offers an expansive exploration of some of the central issues at stake in decolonisation. This involves both reflections on core concepts such as politics, freedom, power, justice and emancipation as well as an attempt to clarify the theoretical foundations and aims of decolonisation, in part achieved through engagement with a vast and highly diverse range of global literatures.