Lewis Gordon Quotes on Freedom

Lewis Gordon’s Existence in Black (1997), Existentia Africana (2000), and the more recent What Fanon Said (2015) give contemporary Africana philosophy one of its principal sustained engagements with the existential tradition through the lens of the philosophy of race. The central project is the development of an Africana existential phenomenology — the analysis of the specific structures of bad faith, anti-Black racism, and the lived experience of the Black through which the universalizing existential categories of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon must be reconceived under conditions in which the human itself is racially differentiated. The framework, integrating phenomenology with W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the veil and Frantz Fanon’s psycho-political clinical work, has shaped the contemporary philosophy of race through Kathryn Sophia Belle, Charles Mills, and the broader Caribbean-philosophy renaissance.