By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 14, 2025

This evening Lewis Gordon, a world-renowned scholar on Frantz Fanon and a major international philosopher, will deliver a lecture, “Frantz Fanon and the Caribbean”, the inaugural event of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series. It will be held at the UTT Theatre1, NAPA, at 5 p.m. This lecture will be carried online. No one should miss it.

When I met Gordon in the late 1980s, I was impressed with his work on Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. As I became more immersed in Africana studies, there was no escaping Aime Cesaire and his philosophy of Negritude that emphasised our emotional understanding of the world—which he suggested was the essence of our being—as opposed to the cold rationality of the Western mind.

No one is likely to forget Cesaire’s proclamation in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939): “Because we hate you and your reason,/ we claim kinship with dementia praecox [or schizophrenia] with the flaming madness of persistent cannibalism.”

In 1964, my late friend Abiola Irele wrote “A Defence of Negritude: A Propos of Black Orpheus”, in which he asserted: “Jean-Paul Sartre was the first to give Negritude an extended critical exposition.” He also claimed Sartre easily understood “the revolutionary character” of Negritude because “it fitted in perfectly with his most important literary concept, that of ‘literature engagee’”.

In 1995 in what must have been his first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Gordon declared: “I take a highly critical stand at the onset toward ‘Black Orpheus’, despite some of its rather keener insights. First, the notion of negritude is problematic from the standpoint of freedom, for it is based on the presumption of necessity, intrinsic features of black people—the notion that black people are essentially black.”

In 2022 Lewis published his magisterial Fear of Black Consciousness, one of his most accessible books in which he offers three important insights:

First. He says: “To have a perspective is to be conscious, to look onto others and, beyond them, to the world. That is what people do: people are embodied consciousnesses, ‘consciousness in the flesh’, the ‘lived body’, at least while we remain connected to reality? And more, with the addition of thought, consciousness in this sense is embodied mind.”

Second. Although Gordon differentiates between black consciousness with a lowercase “b” and Black consciousness with an uppercase “B”, he says: “Black Consciousness is mostly affected and sometimes immobile; Black consciousness is effective and always active. Both are feared in antiblack societies, although the second is more so than the first. This fear ultimately leads to disrespect for truth, and antipathy to the ethical and political implications of admitting that truth, which is the realisation of what is actually revealed about claims of white supremacy and black inferiority when seen through the eyes of Blacks.”

Third. He contrasts “black consciousness” with “white consciousness”, which he describes as “Pleonexia—wanting everything—requires the absence of limits”. He explains: “White pleonexia transforms land, living things, including other human beings, and even thoughts into property; the covetous mentality is applied to the skies, to outer space, and even to time. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it, mistaking it as a human aspiration, it is the desire to be God…Narcissism plus radical access is indicative of a white consciousness.”

In 2019 Danielle Davis edited a series of Gordon’s essays in a collection she called Black Existentialism. She writes: “Lewis R Gordon is one of the most radical and important intellectuals of the past thirty years. Along with his intellectual forbearers Sri Aurobindo, Simone de Beauvoir, Anna Julia Cooper, WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Antenor Firmin, Antonio Gramsci, CLR James, Karl Marx, Keiji Nishitani, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), among an extraordinary array of thinkers, he has not only given to us new theory and scholarship but also, importantly like them, he has made the role of public intellectual one that any scholar involved with issues concerning the human condition must set as a commitment.”

Last year I retired from Wellesley College. Lewis was one of the major speakers at my retirement function. I introduced him to my Wellesley audience with the following remarks:

“In 1971, when I taught in the Black Studies Department at Fordham University, I introduced Madam Shirley Graham Du Bois, the wife of WEB Du Bois, to a New York audience.

“Today, I am honoured that my retirement should culminate with a lecture from one of our most distinguished scholars whom Antonio Gramsci would have described as an organic intellectual. I am pleased to call him my friend and rejoice that he has joined us today.”

Whatever else you do on Father’s Day, you should listen to this brilliant Caribbean thinker. He’s worth it a thousand times over.