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The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.
List of contents
Preface, with Acknowledgments
- On Philosophy, in Africana Philosophy
- Re-Imagining Liberations
- Toward the Decolonization of Normative Life
- Teleological Suspensions for Political Life
- Thoughts on Afropessimism
- Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness
- Irreplaceability
- Disaster, Ruin, and Permanent Catastrophe
Epilogue: Conversation with Decolonial Philosopher Madina Tlostanova on Shifting the Geography of Reason
About the author
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut at Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; Chairperson of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy; and Chairperson of the Awards Committee and Global Collaborations for the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of which he was the organization’s first president. His books published by Routledge include Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, Existence in Black, Existentia Africana, Disciplinary Decadence, and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Not Only the Master’s Tools and Of Divine Warning.
Summary
Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization, asking what there is to be understood and done when the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution?
