Lewis Gordon

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Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born May 12, 1962) is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.^[1]

Gordon graduated in 1984 from Lehman College, CUNY, through the Lehman Scholars Program, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in philosophy in 1991 at Yale University, and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree with distinction from the same university in 1993. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, Gordon taught at Brown University, Yale, Purdue University, and Temple University, where he was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy in the department of philosophy with affiliations in religious and Judaic studies. He is currently^[when?] professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic Studies and the Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He also is Visiting Euro philosophy Professor at Toulouse University, France, and Nelson Mandela Visiting professor in Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa (2014–2016).

At Temple, Gordon was director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought (ISRST), which is devoted to research on the complexity and social dimensions of race and racism. The ISRST's many projects include developing a consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies, a Philadelphia Blues People Project, semiological studies of indigeneity, a Black Civil Society project, symposia on race, sexuality, and sexual health, and ongoing work in Africana philosophy. Gordon was Executive Editor of volumes I-V of Radical Philosophy Review: Journal of the Radical Philosophy Association and co-editor of the Routledge book series on Africana philosophy. Additionally, he is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Gordon is the founder of the center for Afro-Jewish Studies, the only such research center, which focuses on developing and providing reliable sources of information on African and African Diasporic Jewish or Hebrew-descended populations. Gordon states: "In actuality, there is no such thing as pure Jewish blood. Jews are a creolized [mixed-race] people. It's been that way since at least the time we left Egypt as a [culturally] mixed Egyptian and African [i.e., from other parts of Africa] people."^{[full citation needed]}

Gordon founded the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School in the Bronx, New York. He is married to Jane Anna Gordon.^{[citation needed]}

Gordon is considered among the leading scholars in black existentialism.^[2] He first came to prominence in this subject because of his first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), which was an existential phenomenological study of anti-black racism, and his anthology Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (1997). The book is written in four parts, with a series of short chapters that at times take the form of phenomenological vignettes. Bad faith, as Gordon reads it, is a coextensive phenomenon reflective of the metastability of the human condition. It is a denial of human reality, an effort to evade freedom, a flight from responsibility, a choice against choice, an assertion of being the only point of view on the world, an assertion of being the world, an effort to deny having a point of view, a flight from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods, a form of misanthropy, an act of believing what one does not believe, a form of spirit of seriousness, sincerity, an effort to disarm evidence (a Gordon innovation), a form of sedimented or institutional version of all of these, and (another Gordon innovation) a flight from and war against social reality. Gordon rejects notions of disembodied consciousness (which he argues are forms of bad faith) and articulates a theory of the body-in-bad-faith. Gordon also rejects authenticity discourses. He sees them as trapped in expectations of sincerity, which also is a form of bad faith. He proposes, instead, critical good faith, which he argues requires respect for evidence and accountability in the social world, a world of intersubjective relations.^{[citation needed]}

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Gordon is also known^{[by whom?]} as the founder of postcolonial phenomenology and the leading proponent of Africana phenomenology which has enabled him to make a mark in Fanon Studies. Gordon was able to develop postcolonial phenomenology, which he sometimes refers to as Africana phenomenology or de-colonial phenomenology, through making a series of important innovations to Husserlian and Sartrian phenomenologies. The first, and perhaps most important, is his transformation of parenthesizing and bracketing of the natural attitude into what he calls "ontological suspension". Although Husserl called for a suspension of the natural attitude, his goal was primarily epistemological. Gordon's interest is, however, primarily concerned with errors that occur from inappropriate ontological assertions. He is also concerned with metaphysics, which he, unlike many contemporary thinkers, does not reject. Instead, he sees the continuation of Aristotelian metaphysics, which advances a notion of substance that is governed by the essence that leads to the definition in the form of essential being, as a problem. Gordon wants to talk about the social world and the meanings constructed by it without reducing it to a physicalist ontology. The notion of ontological suspension, which he claims is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology, advances this effort. He also advances phenomenology as a form of radically self-reflective thought, which means that it must question even its methodological assumptions. Because of this, it must resist epistemological colonization, and it is in this sense that phenomenology is itself postcolonial or decolonizing. Because of this, Gordon refused for some time in his career to refer to his work as "philosophy," for that would mean colonizing it with a disciplinary set of assumptions. He preferred to call his work "radical thought," which for him meant being willing to go to the roots of reality in a critical way. From these moves, Gordon was able to generate a set of theoretical concepts that have become useful to those who have adopted his theoretical lexicon: his unique formulation of crisis; his theory of epistemic closure; his theory of disciplinary decadence and teleological suspension of disciplinarity; and his analysis of maturation and tragedy.

Most of these ideas first emerged in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995). Gordon introduced a new stage in Fanon studies by announcing that he was not interested in writing on Fanon but instead working with Fanon on the advancement of his (Gordon's) own intellectual project. Gordon has also made an important contribution to the understanding around the work of Steve Biko by way of a new introduction to Biko's classic text I Write What I Like.^[3]

Gordon has produced approximately 400 articles, book chapters, and reviews. Books by Gordon currently in print are:

• Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Penguin Random House, 2022)
• Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge 2021)
• Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (ed. with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato) (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018)
• La sud prin nord-vest: Reflecţii existenţiale afrodiasporice, trans.  Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (Cluj, Romania: IDEA Design & Print, 2016)
• Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (ed. with Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts) (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016)
• What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015). Selected as Book of the Week in the Financial Mail (South Africa, December 17, 2015).
• La teoría política en la encrucijada descolonial, with Walter Mignolo, Alejandro de Oto, and Sylvia Wynter (Del Signo ediciones, 2009)  
• Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, with Jane Gordon (Paradigm Publishers, 2009)
• An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
• Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm Publishers, 2006)
• A Companion to African American Studies (ed. with Jane Anna Gordon) (Blackwell, 2006). NetLibrary's e-book of the month for February 2007.
• Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (ed. with Jane Anna Gordon) (Paradigm Publishers, 2005)
• Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (Routledge, 2000)
• Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Winner of Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
• Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, (ed.) (Routledge, 1997)
• Fanon: A Critical Reader (ed. with T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White) (Blackwell, 1996)
• Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Routledge, 1995)
• Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanity Books, 1995/1999)

• Africana philosophy § List of Africana philosophers

• Lewis Gordon interview on Counterpoint Radio with Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis.