Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

by Lewis R. Gordon

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.

184 pages, ebook

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and life sciences, phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, Africana and black existentialism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon.

Reviews

[Azike Gerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!

Gordon’s book is indeed a great one. It challenges one’s prior view about the world and orients one towards shifting what Gordon calls “geography of reason”, which is imagining a new world that is not based on what has been but given the existing possibilities what will be better. I recommend the work to everyone who is dissatisfied with the present order of our world.

[Kb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very educational and genuinely opened my mind on how epistemic colonialism has been deeply ingrained in people’s thought processes and beliefs.