Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology

Jina Fast is the SHIFT assistant professor of applied ethics and the common good at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dr. Fast has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, & Social Justice, and Hypatia. As a feminist epistemologist, queer theorist, and critical philosopher of race, her work centers theories produced by and through the experiences and work of marginalized folks across disciplines.

• Introduction: Decolonizing Existentialism and PhenomenologyChapter 1: Roots of a Decolonial Feminist Philosophy: Beauvoir’s Feminist Phenomenology and ExistentialismChapter 2: Fanon’s Phenomenological Decolonial Psychology and the Negation of Black SubjectivityChapter 3: Decolonizing the Paradox of Hyper-Visible Bodies, Un-visible Humanity in Wright’s Native Son and Black BoyChapter 4: Lewis Gordon’s Phenomenology of Racist Bad Faith Chapter 5: Audre Lorde’s Decolonial, Queer, Black Feminist Phenomenology Chapter 6: Sylvia Wynter and Jamaica Kincaid: Post-Colonial Feminist Approaches to Lived ExperienceConclusion: Where do Existentialism and Phenomenology Go from Here?BibliographyIndexAbout the Author

An interesting exposition of the multiple aspects of marginalization connected to colonization using existential/phenomenological (Sartre/ Hussert) interrogation and interpretation derived from the critics Beauvoir, Wright, Wynter, Kincaid, Lewis, Lorde, and others. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of the structures of meaning, identity, and consciousness that avoid bracketing or bad faith. Fast's personal, informed, authentic stories enlighten multifaceted personal, institutional, social, and political relationships embedded in lived experiences. This approach has potentially powerful transformative appeal to a colonized audience, which recognizes its own false consciousness and bad faith fixed by its lived experiences in colonized consciousness embedded in the pre-existing place where they initially find themselves in the white world. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.