Duke FHI’s From Slavery to Freedom Lab held their Distinguished Lecture Series with Lewis R. Gordon, “On Enslavement, Decolonization, and Freedom.”

Drawing upon ideas in his two recent books, “Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization” (2021) and “Fear of Black Consciousness” (2022), Dr. Gordon discusses how the project of dehumanization entailed misrepresentation in the study of racialized enslaved people, particularly through conceptions of them in antilock societies as “brute” labor. In effect offering a decolonization of the study of enslavement, he examines, through Africana existential philosophical critical analysis, what it means to be human, liberated, and free.