Fanonian Art Practices: Toward A Decolonial Grammar of Being

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s thought has been key to the understanding of the lived experiences of black colonized subjects in the modern contemporary world including in the discipline of visual art. The modern world is constructed on systems of coloniality that border on the appropriation of African knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems, misrepresentation of their artifacts, and distortion of their languages. Decolonial epistemic perspective is a theory that is instrumental in this article to situate Fanon’s thought to foreground a conceptual language of analysis and critique of black lived experiences in contemporary visual art. History of art is one of westernized disciplines in which the language of representing and interpreting African art and black art is absent. The colonial gramma of art history reduces African art to the language of an unknown artist and primitive art which led to the misrepresentation of the African and black narratives. This article deploys Fanon’s thought from a decolonial perspective to formulate a decolonial grammar of being that will be applied to the interpretation of African and black art.