Introduction: Lewis R Gordon: Intellectual Transformations of Black Existentialism

Abstract

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, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Anténor Firmin, Antonio Gramsci, C. L. R. 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.