Fanonian Ideas for Transformation:

On Postcolonies, Art, and Political Imagination

Continuing the reflections from his 2015 lectures ("Decolonizing the City") at Studio X Johannesburg in Soweto, South Africa, Afro-Jewish philosopher and musician Lewis Gordon, building on themes from the thought of the revolutionary philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, will offer a critique of moralism and conceptions of political action premised on determining outcomes before performance. Such views are antipathetic to the aesthetic dimensions of political life, wherein is the imaginative potential for building livable worlds. A sad feature of many postcolonies is the malediction of imitating colonial institutions and their infrastructure, and efforts at social transformation are often steeped in moralistic purges instead of affirmations of life and building institutions of human flourishing, which include their aesthetic dimensions. This talk will thus explore these themes through reflections on what could be called the art of power and empowerment as a creative feature of genuinely political commitments to the transformation of social life.

Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, musician, and political thinker. He is Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs and Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. He is also the drummer for the rock band ThreeGenerations. His most recent books are What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). His website is: lewisrgordon.com and he is on twitter at: twitter.com/lewgord.

Reviews for What Fanon Said:
"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 

"Gordon is interested in understanding and correcting the systematic delegitimization of black intellectuals, both in philosophy and within the broader scope of theory…This is how Gordon pertinently introduces considerations of race and racism within the epistemological field, engaging his readers to be more perceptive with regard to what could be called a ‘colour line in theory’."—Lucy Kim-Chi Mercier, Radical Philosophy