Lewis Gordon b. 1962

Lewis Gordon is a Jamaican-American philosopher, professor at the University of Connecticut, and one of the most important figures in contemporary Africana philosophy, black existentialism, and phenomenology. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism reread Sartrean bad faith through the experience of antiblack racism, while Existentia Africana and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy have provided the most systematic introduction available to the philosophical traditions emerging from the African diaspora. His more recent Disciplinary Decadence and Fear of Black Consciousness have extended his concerns to the methodology of philosophy and the politics of race in the present moment.

Lewis Ricardo Gordon was born in Jamaica in May 1962 and emigrated as a child with his family to the Bronx in New York. He took his bachelor's at Lehman College of the City University of New York in 1984 and his master's, master of philosophy, and doctorate at Yale in 1993. He has taught at Brown, where he founded the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, and at Temple, and since 2014 has held a distinguished professorship of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, with a series of visiting chairs at Toulouse, Rhodes, and elsewhere.

His books include Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995), Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (2000), Disciplinary Decadence (2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (2015), Geopolitics and Decolonization (2019), and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022).

Gordon has built a phenomenology of antiblack racism drawing on Sartre and Fanon, in which whiteness and blackness function as positions in a structure of bad faith and 'disciplinary decadence' is the failure of a discipline to question its own colonial limits. His long-running project of 'shifting the geography of reason' treats Africana philosophy as a global tradition of thought rather than a regional supplement to Western philosophy.