Description
Book SynopsisHer Majesty's Children reveals not only a deeply personal account of the experience of racism but is also a revolutionary work that asks us to reconsider our ordinary practices and lives to recognize and resist the traces of a colonial age of racism that so many claim is only part of our past.
Trade ReviewLewis 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. -- Manning Marable, M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies, Columbia University
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, University of California, Santa Cruz; author of Blues Legend and Black Feminism
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, Stanford University
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 *
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction: Her Majesty's Other Children Part 3 Philosophy, Race, and Racism in a Neocolonial World Chapter 4 Context: Ruminations on Violence and Anonymity Chapter 5 Fanon, Philosophy, and Racism Chapter 6 Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory Chapter 7 Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World Chapter 8 Uses and Abuses of Blackness: Postmodernism, Conservatism, Ideology Chapter 9 In a Black Antiblack Philosophy Chapter 10 African Philosophy's Search for Identity: Existential Considerations of a Recent Effort Part 11 The Intellectuals Chapter 12 Lorraine Hansberry's Tragic Search for Postcoloniality: Les Blancs Chapter 13 Tragic Intellectuals on the Neocolonial—Postcolonial Divide Chapter 14 Exilic "Amateur" Speaking Truth to Power: Edward Said Chapter 15 Black Intellectuals and Academic Activism: Cornel West's "Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual." Right-Wing Celebration, Left-Wing Nightmare: Thoughts on the Centennial of Plessy v. Ferguson Part 16 Aisthesis Demokrate Chapter 17 Sketches of Jazz Chapter 18 Aesthetico-Political Reflections on the AMTRAK: Rap, Hip-Hop, and Isaac Julien's Fanon along the Northeast Line Chapter 19 Epilogue: The Lion and the Spider (An Anticolonial Tale)
