Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age [Hardcover]

Lewis R. Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0847684474 | ISBN-13: 978-0847684472

In this exploration of race and racism, noted scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a critique of recent scholarship in postcolonial Africana philosophy and critical race theory, and suggests alternative models that respond to what he calls our contemporary neocolonial age_an age in which cultural, intellectual, and economic forms of colonial domination persist. Through essays that address popular culture, the academy, literature, and politics, Gordon unsettles the notion of race and exposes the complexity of antiblack racism. An important book for philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, cultural critics, and anyone concerned with the overt and subtle ways of injustice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Lewis Gordon is one of the most thoughtful critics of contemporary black life and society. Gordon's latest work, Her Majesty's Other Children, brings philosophical illumination to the contours of black social thought . . . his critics will be deeply impressed with the scholarly and passionate commentary he brings to the debate about the black intelligentsia. (Marable, Manning )

A brilliant blend of philosophy, memoir, and cultural analysis, Her Majesty's Other Children reflects Lewis Gordon's ongoing commitment to pursue critical scholarship that cuts across academic disciplines and geographic borders, straight to the heart of the urgent questions we face on the cusp of the new millennium. Without doubt, Gordon is one of the most important young intellectuals examining issues of race and gender today, and his ability to situate his reflections in an international context--at both the scholarly and personal levels, as he does here--makes his observations indispensable as we confront our collective future. (Angela Y. Davis )

Writing as a Fanon scholar and jazz musician, Lewis Gordon incisively restores the Fanon for whom one emancipatory goal was uppermost—"to set man free." It is in its reenactment of this goal that Gordon's Her Majesty's Other Children is distinguished not only from the works that it critiques . . . but also from the recent spate of books that have set out to academicize the issue of race. In Gordon's work, the emancipatory goal of Fanon's work, its Copernican insight, is dynamically renewed in the terms called for by the approaching end of our millennium. (Sylvia Wynter )

Her Majesty's Other Children is the winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

A collection of essays which challenge the reader to theorize about the essential lived-experience of anti-Black racism. (Feminist Bookstore News )

About the Author

Lewis R. Gordon is professor of Afro-American studies, contemporary religious thought, and modern culture and the media at Brown University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (August 29, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0847684474
• ISBN-13: 978-0847684472
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lewis Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker,and musician. He is the founder and co-director, with his wife Jane Anna Gordon, of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, a research center dedicated to developing reliable sources of information on Afro-Jews and Jewish diversity. He is also a research affiliate of the Institute for Jewish Research and Community in San Francisco and the Be'chol Lashon ("In Every Tongue") think tank. His formal academic appointments are as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, with affiliations in African American Studies and Religion at Temple University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He has also taught at Brown University (where he was the founding chair of the Department of Africana Studies and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Contemporary Religious Thought), Yale University (in African American Studies and in Philosophy), and Purdue University (in Philosophy, African American Studies, and the Doctoral Program in English and Philosophy). Gordon achieved his PhD in Philosophy with distinction from Yale University and his B.A., with multiple honors, through the Lehman Scholars Program at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York. He had taught as a Social Studies teacher in the Bronx, where he was also founder of the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School. He has received many accolades for his writings and teaching, including the Gustavus Myer's award for outstanding work on human rights in North America, for Her Majesty's Other Children, the netLibrary's eBook of the month in February 2007 for his co-edited A Companion to African-American Studies, the Purdue African American Studies Book Award for Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, and, more recently, the James and Helen Merritt Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to the Philosophy of Education. He has organized conferences worldwide on such themes as antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, and he lectures regularly across the globe. He is a board member of the Institute for Caribbean Thought in Jamaica, the same for the Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery in Amsterdam, and he has worked in a variety of public media, including as one of the first news analysts for the National Public Radio Program On Point. He was executive editor of the first five volumes of the journal Radical Philosophy Review, and he was president of he Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2003 till 2008. Gordon still plays drums and piano. He could be viewed discussing philosophy of music and playing drums for the Philosophical Installations series--"Lewis R. Gordon--Philosophy at home": http://philinstall.uoregon.edu/#independent-videos.