What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought

Lewis R. Gordon

ISBN 10: 184904550X / ISBN 13: 9781849045506

Published by C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd 2015-08-17, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-MAC-9781849045506

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought
• Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd 2015-08-17
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184904550X
• ISBN 13: 9781849045506
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; and Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. His books include Existentia Africana; Disciplinary Decadence; An Introduction to Africana Philosophy; and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age.