Frantz Fanon and Education

Abstract

As forged through the moral codes of colonization, Black life has endured social realities historically embedded within anti-Black racism. Over time, decolonial thought as a perspective of Black life has materialized and has been concomitantly harnessed, with limiting epistemological credibility, within particular educational institutions. With such preconditions, Black living has had to question daily events to come to know how to interpolate the self in particular moments to strategically organize the being and doing of Black life. Frantz Fanon notes that Black living entails a refusal of colonial reductions, which are seeking Black reciprocity of a totalizing embodiment that writes Black life into an abyss of its unintelligibility. If, as Fanon states, the problem of the human is temporal and must be considered from the historical presence of time, how then might one begin to make sense of Black life? Fanon’s oeuvre suggests that Black life offers ways of knowing that allow for an underwriting to interpret how sensibilities of being human come to affirm and refute negotiations with colonial modernity through an embodied politics of the colonial archetype of the abject Black human.