Organised by the RSA Fellows’ Media, Creative Industries, Culture and Heritage Network, Professor Lewis Gordon discusses his book ‘Fear of Black Consciousness’, published (2022) by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books). Lewis is a leading scholar of Black Existentialism and has spent decades putting philosophical thought at the heart of activism for racial justice around the world. “Fear of Black Consciousness” traces the ways in which the lived experience of Black people has been rendered invisible in the western world.

He offers a stunning philosophical and social critique while highlighting the fundamental role of Black people as agents of history and of the social change required to build a humane world of dignity, freedom and respect.

Lewis is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs in the USA, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, and Honorary President of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. He previously taught at Brown University, where he founded the Department of Africana Studies, and Temple University, where he was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and founder of the Centre for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought.

Panel Members:

RSA Fellow Professor Oscar Guardiola Rivera is Assistant Dean of the School of Law, Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of two acclaimed books. He has been an adviser to the Colombian Congress and to the UN in South America. He is also a respected speaker at the annual “Beyond Borders Festival” in Scotland.

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a British poet, playwright and novelist of Irish-Nigerian descent, currently resident in London. His novel “Vauxhall” won the 2011 Tabor Jones page-turner prize and best international novel at the Sharjah Book Fair 2013.

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