Lewis Gordon: Avatar of Post-colonial Humanism

by Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, 7th Annual Phenomenology Round-table Meeting, Temple, 2007

Is humanism possible today? This question motivates another: Is humanism
desirable today?

Given the view prevalent in contemporary philosophy and cultural studies that colonialism was and is an outcome of European humanism, anti-humanists, e.g., adherents of Foucault, Althusser, Lyotard, Lacan, and others will likely construe the notion of a postcolonial humanism to be oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms, and a step in the wrong direction. One wonders, however, whether such anti-humanists have attended to the voices of the victims of colonialism. For, more often than not, those voices of the oppressed, and the voices of those who listen to and hear them, express their
anguish as an experience of dehumanization.