Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge collects key philosophical writings of Lewis R. Gordon, a globally renowned scholar whose writings cover liberation struggles across the globe and make field-defining contributions to the philosophy of existence, philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, philosophy of human sciences, aesthetics, and decolonization.

Gordon’s expansive output ranges across phenomenology, anti-Blackness, activist thinkers, sexuality, Fanon, Jimi Hendrix, Black Jewish struggles, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and Ubuntu philosophy. Edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey, two decolonial thinkers from South Africa and India, this reader shifts attention away from colonial centres of power, encouraging global dialogue across students, scholars, and activists. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated novelist and postcolonial thinker, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this reader includes a mixture of research articles, short critical essays, reflections, interviews, poems, and photographs in the creative pursuit of liberation.

Profound and authoritative essays by one of the leading contemporary Black philosophers of existence. As a towering figure in Black Existentialism Lewis Gordon weaves through a variety of contemporary issues such as antiblack racism, decolonization, bad faith, jazz, and the human sciences, from an Africana existential philosophical perspective. A must-read collection of essays. * Mabogo P. More, Research Associate, University of Limpopo, South Africa *
Lewis R. Gordon’s written words—along with his music, love, compassion, and interconnected humanity— teaches us to end “cruelty” and dehumanizing of the Damned of the Earth by “open[ing] our hearts to the freedom and possibility of life” and thereby making the world more livable for all humans and more-than-humans. * Jaspal Kaur Singh, Professor of English Literature, Northern Michigan University, USA *
A dive into these selected writings by Lewis R. Gordon is a dive into an alternative conceptual scheme. That scheme is informed by existentialism and an epistemology that faces reality – especially the reality of those that Gordon calls the Damned. This is not an epistemology paraded as pure knowledge void of human agency. It hears victims and the rising tide of new voices. It shifts, in effect, the geography of reason, and thereby, what ‘reason’ itself means. The reader of Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge is in for a swim within new knowledge for a new world. * Leonard Harris, Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University, USA *

Rozena Maart is Professor at the School of Social Sciences in the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Mercator Fellow and Research Ambassador at the University of Bremen, Germany.

Sayan Dey is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and Faculty Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada.

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, USA, Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa