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 gave it words of fire.
— Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Author of Wizard of the Crow

Gordon allows us to read Fanon in new and different ways, contextualizing his thought in a wide arc of knowledge—from St. Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy to contemporaries such as De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Senghor, to more recent continental philosophers. Along the way, Gordon incorporates relevant debates from contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon Said is a provocative and illuminating study.
— Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley

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.
Fanon was a political radical concerned with the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. He is best known for his books The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. 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.

Preface, with Acknowledgments
Foreword by Sonia Dayan-Hezbrun
Introduction On What a Great Thinker Said
Chapter 1 “I Am from Martinique”
Chapter 2 Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing
Chapter 3 Living Experience
Chapter 4 Revolutionary Therapy
Chapter 5 Counseling the Damned
Conclusion Requiem for the Messenger
Afterword by Drucilla Cornell

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.

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 gave it words of fire.
— Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Author of Wizard of the Crow

Gordon allows us to read Fanon in new and different ways, contextualizing his thought in a wide arc of knowledge—from St. Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy to contemporaries such as De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Senghor, to more recent continental philosophers. Along the way, Gordon incorporates relevant debates from contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon Said is a provocative and illuminating study.
— Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley

At the root of Gordon’s finely grained book is the “sexed, coloured, and colonized suffering body”. So while the book is a profound philosophical probe it never loses sight of its terra incognita — the black body.

•  Ashraf Jamal in the Financial Mail – http://www.financialmail.co.za/life/books/2015/12/17/book-of-the-week-frantz-fanon-lasting-ideas

1.Lewis Gordon, professor of Africana studies at the University of Connecticut, talks about the life and philosophy of Frantz Fanon, author of “The Wretched of the Earth” and other works. He discussed his book with a panel of experts at Book Culture Bookstore in New York City. It  took place at Book Culture on 20 April 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okBYvdVoK18

2.  Radio interview with Lewis Gordon, on the Marc Steiner Show, which was recorded in Baltimore at Morgan State University (a historically black college) before my talk at Redd Emma’s on June 10th:

http://www.steinershow.org/podcasts/racism/what-fanon-said-a-philosophical-introduction-to-his-life-and-thought/

3.  Excerpt from an MSNBC show recommends What Fanon Said.

http://www.msnbc.com/nerding-out/watch/occupy-the-faculty-lounge-441504835706

4. A  Swedish discussion ofWhat Fanon Said

http://www.svd.se/rasismen-har-rotter-aven-i-humanismen

5. Interview with Lewis R Gordon in Boston on 11 August 2015

6.OppiTV, Editor in Chief, Welcome Lishiva talks to The Black Student Movement and Professor Lewis Gordon (WHAT FANON SAID – 2015 – Wits University Press)) about transformation at the University, currently known as Rhodes.

7.  Ashraf Jamal in the Financial Mail:

http://www.financialmail.co.za/life/books/2015/12/17/book-of-the-week-frantz-fanon-lasting-ideas

8.   On Frantz Fanon: An Interview With Lewis R. Gordon for the The African American Intellectual History Society

http://www.aaihs.org/on-frantz-fanon/#

9.  “If we look at people across time, we begin to realise that, ultimately, alot of the issues of the 20th & 21st Century are actually linked to          problems in the Centuries which preceded them”.

Lewis R Gordon participated in the Disposable Life project. Find his interview here;

http://www.historiesofviolence.com/#!special-series/c95v

10.  Story on Writer-in-Residence at Birkbeck 2016 –  http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/news/lewis-gordon-visits-the-school-of-law-as-writer-in-residence

11. Lewis Gordon’s keynote lecture: “Fanonian Psychoanalysis,” at the Institute for Clinical Social Work’s conference: Race and Resistance in a Psychoanalytical Key: The Power of Frantz Fanon, which was held in Chicago, IL. April 2017.