The Unit for the
Humanities at Rhodes University invites you to the launch of Lewis Gordon’s new
book “What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought”.
Speakers: Lewis Gordon
will be in conversation with Abdul R. JanMohamed & Richard Pithouse
Date: 30 September 2015
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Venue: Humanities Seminar
Room
Copies of the book will
be on sale at the discounted price of R200 (cash only).
What Fanon Said
Antiblack racism avows
reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black.
Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a
portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and
philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of “living thought” against forms of
reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of
the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from
dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology,
phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Gordon takes into account
scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon’s
writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social
underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist
geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as
interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon
argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human
relationships beyond colonial paradigms.
“Gordon allows us to read
Fanon in new and different ways, contextualizing his thought in a wide arc of
knowledge—from St. Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy to contemporaries
such as De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Senghor, to more recent continental
philosophers. Along the way, Gordon incorporates relevant debates from
contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon
Said is a provocative and illuminating study.”
—Abdul R. JanMohamed,
University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley
"In the hands of
Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said, becomes what Frantz Fanon says to us today. The
book brings alive the revolutionary thought and practice of Fanon into the
continuing struggles for structural economic, political, social, and psychic
transformations of our world. The struggle against anti-black racism is an
integral part of it, and Gordon's Fanon is the many-sided thinker who saw it
all and give it words of fire in his works, particularly Black Skin, White
Masks and The Damned of the Earth."
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
author of Wizard of the Crow
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Asian and
Asian American Studies, Caribbean and Latino/a Studies, and Judaic Studies, at
the University of Connecticut at Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in
Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; Nelson Mandela Visiting
Professor of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes University, South
Africa; and Chairman of the Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, Nicolás Guillén,
and Claudia Jones awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical
Association. A graduate of Yale
University and the Lehman Scholars Program of the City University of New York,
he is the author of several influential monographs such as Bad Faith and
Antiblack Racism (Humanities Press, 1995; Humanity Books, 1999), Fanon and the
Crisis of European Man (Routledge, 1995), Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman
& Littelfield, 1997), which won the Gustavus Meyer Award for Human Rights
in North America, Existentia Africana (Routledge, 2000), Disciplinary Decadence
(Paradigm Publishers, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge
UP, 2008), and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in
the Modern Age (Paradigm), anthologies such as Fanon: A Critical Reader
(Blackwell’s), Existence in Black (Routledge), A Companion to African-American
Studies (Blackwell’s), and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm), more than
200 articles, many of which have been translated into several languages, and
interviews and essays for a variety of public forums, including Truthout.org on
which he now serves on the Board of Directors.
His most recent book is What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to
His Life and Thought (Fordham UP, 2015), and he is completing a series of
monographs in such languages as Romanian, Spanish, and French. His work is the subject of articles, essays,
dissertations, anthologies, and monographs across the globe.
