Lewis R. Gordon

Africana Thought and African Diasporic Studies

much intellectual work with regard to black people. They are: 1) the appeal to reductionistic experience and 2) the retreat to disciplinary decadence. 1) Reductionistic experience undergirds the study of black people with the credo that black people offer experience whereas white people offer theory. The impetus for the turn to experience is not in itself insidious. After all, for a long time there was the denial of black inner life, of black subjectivity; the notion of a black persons point of view suggested consciousness of the world, which would call for dynamics of reciprocal recognition. Thus, it made sense to point out blacks experience of the world, and ethnography in the study of black folk prevailed. When the question of philosophy emerged in the study of black experience, the result was the well-known appeal to ethnophilosophy, the unanimistic notion of black collective philosophical worldviews. There are, however, obvious problems with such an approach to the study of black folk as the primary approach. The obvious problem is the nature of experience itself. We have all had the experience, for instance, of trying to figure out our experience. In such cases, we seek the interpretive support of others: Something just happened and I cant quite figure out what it was... It is not enough to have an experience; it is also important to interpret it. If black experience relies on white thought, then the relationship would be one of dependency. Beyond the obvious

Thoughts on two recent decades of studying race and racism

In 1995, my article ‘“Critical” Mixed-Race Theory?’ was published in Social Identities. That was also the year in which my monographs Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism and Fanon and the Crisis of Euro...

Africana Philosophy and Philosophy in Black

8 lack intellectuals face a neurotic situation. On one hand, many critics want to know if there are black thinkers on a par (or beyond) those in the Western canon ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx and on to recent times such as Sartre and Foucault, and they would like to see black philosophers who aspire to such standards. On the other hand, when black intellectuals take on such a task, one that requires devoting a considerable amount of energy to the proverbial life of the mind, they receive criticism for being too bookish and for failing to be in the streets, where the struggle is being waged. This double bind is posed not only by black people but also by white critics who expect black intellectuals to be primarily agents of praxis. It is understandable for familiar reasons: the assault on black humanity makes devoting ones energy to intellectual pursuits seem much like proverbially playing violins while Rome burns. The unfairness of this situation when posed to black intellectuals, however, is that it fails to account for the importance of intellectual work on its own terms and as a vital part of liberation praxis. To abrogate responsibility for thinking has the consequence of others thinking for one, and where else would that lead but to dependence on others for that which is to be thought-that is, knowledge or epistemic dependency, or, to make it plain, the colonization of the mind?

Frantz Fanon’s Psychology of Black Consciousness

This chapter provides a theoretical analysis of Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric, philosophical, and revolutionary thought as a clinical practitioner, polemicist, and soldier dedicated to nurturing, individual and collective self-emancipatory praxis among the colonized peoples of the Global South. Fanon’s, Black Skin, White Masks refutes Euromodern psychiatric formulations of the Black as innately diseased and, instead, reveals the socially generated phenomenon of anti-black racism as the root of the Black’s perceived mental illness. This sociogenic analysis and decolonial method provides a critical foundation for Fanon’s clinical and theoretical innovations. For Fanon, Black consciousness is the psychological manifestation of liberatory self-actualization; the psychic movement away from the reductive, racial designation of ‘the black,’ to the self-affirming identification of ‘the Black,’ an actional agent catalyzing revolutionary socio-political change.

When Monsters No Longer Speak

The authors summarize their theory of disaster as a sign continuum through which monsters—mythic agents of divine warning—raise questions of the meaning of political speech in the wake of colonialism. Unlike prior ages, where monsters had the social function of specialized speech, their warnings are ignored in the age of modern colonialism. Thus, instead of focusing on whether subalterns can speak, the authors ask, Can they be heard? This question is examined through explorations of the challenges racism poses for distinctions between moral and political speech.