Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge collects key philosophical writings of Lewis R. Gordon, a globally renowned scholar whose writings cover liberation struggles across the globe and make field-defining contributions to the philosophy of existence, philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, philosophy of human sciences, aesthetics, and decolonization.

Gordon's expansive output ranges across phenomenology, anti-Blackness, activist thinkers, sexuality, Fanon, Jimi Hendrix, Black Jewish struggles, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and Ubuntu philosophy. Edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey, two decolonial thinkers from South Africa and India, this reader shifts attention away from colonial centres of power, encouraging global dialogue across students, scholars, and activists. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated novelist and postcolonial thinker, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this reader includes a mixture of research articles, short critical essays, reflections, interviews, poems, and photographs in the creative pursuit of liberation.

A dive into these selected writings by Lewis R. Gordon is a dive into an alternative conceptual scheme. That scheme is informed by existentialism and an epistemology that faces reality - especially the reality of those that Gordon calls the Damned. This is not an epistemology paraded as pure knowledge void of human agency. It hears victims and the rising tide of new voices. It shifts, in effect, the geography of reason, and thereby, what 'reason' itself means. The reader of Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge is in for a swim within new knowledge for a new world.