Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

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 Africa

Profound 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.

• Preface by Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut, USA)Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (University of California, Irvine, USA)Introduction by Sayan Dey (Royal University of Bhutan, Bhutan) and Rozena Maart (University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa)Black Existentialism and Africana Philosophy1. Africana Philosophy 2. Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason3. Race in the Dialectics of Culture4. Racism as a Form of Bad Faith5. Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness6. Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness7. Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture8. Sex, Race and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-Black World9. Racialization and Human Reality 10. Letter to a Grieving Student 11. Rockin’ It in Blue: A Black Existential Essay on Jimi HendrixDecolonizing Knowledge12. Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge13. Disciplining as a Human Science 14. The Problem of History in African American Theology15. Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America16. Jews Against Liberation: An Afro-Jewish Critique 17. Lewis Gordon’s Statement for Jacqueline Walker’s Dossier 201918. Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence19. Decolonizing Philosophy20. A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives21. Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu22. Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life23. Labor, Migration and Race: Toward a Secular Model of CitizenshipInterviews1. Are Reparations Possible? Lessons to the United States from South Africa2. Thinking Art in a Decolonial Way 3. Gordon and Da Silva on Brazil and Africana Philosophy 4. Dougla: Intersections between Dalitness and Afro-Blackness 5. Freedom, Oppression, and Black Consciousness in ‘Get Out’ Bibliography of Gordon’s writings from 1993–2023Index