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Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

30th Anniversary Edition

Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism cover

Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

30th Anniversary Edition

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Pre-order. Available Oct 30 2025
$117.00 RRP $130.00 Website price saving $13.00 (10%)

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Description

In this contemporary classic, Lewis Gordon presents his iconic, detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.

A foundational text in black existentialism, this 30th anniversary edition includes a substantial introduction by Mabogo Moreto address the ongoing importance of Gordon's thought in critiquing and resisting racist bad faith in our contemporary moment.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Mabogo P. More
Original Preface and Acknowledgments
New Preface with Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Bad Faith?
PART I: BAD FAITH
1 A “Determined” Attitude That Involves Lying to Ourselves
2 The Irony of Belief
3 Anguish
4 The Elusiveness of Transcendence and the Comfort of Facticity
5 What Am I to Me?
6 Taking Ourselves Too Seriously
7 The Body in Bad Faith
8 “Strong” and “Weak” Bad Faith
9 Some Critical Remarks
10 How Is Bad Faith Possible?
11 The Question of Authenticity
PART II: LOGIC OF RACISM, RACIST LOGIC
A Recent Theory
12 Racialism, Racism, Racialists, and Racists
13 Affective Dimensions of Racism and Race
PART III: ANTIBLACK RACISM
Racism and Antiblack Racism
14 White and Black Bodies in Bad Faith
15 Black Antiblackness in an Antiblack World
16 Exoticism: Antiblackness Under the Guise of Love
17 Effeminacy: The Quality of Black Beings
18 Antiblack Racism and Ontology
PART IV: “GOD” IN AN ANTIBLACK WORLD
An Antiblack Cosmogony
19 “Is God a White Racist?”
20 The White God and the Black Sufferer
21 Ultimate Desire and Authenticity in an Antiblack World
22 To Be Black, Faithful, and Suffering
PART V: CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS
23 “I-Thou”
24 Ethical Concerns
25 Deconstruction
26 Marxism
27 The Living Dead
Afterword by Jacqueline M. Martinez
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism: A Communicological Reading
Afterword by Paget Henry
Lewis Gordon's Black Existential Humanism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Oct 30 2025
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 432
ISBN 9781538143667
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Lewis R. Gordon

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Afr…

Introduction

Mabogo Percy More

Mabogo Percy More is a former professor of philoso…

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