Frantz Fanon’s Decolonial Love: A New Humanism in Historical Struggle

Abstract

This chapter reads Frantz Fanon as a dialectical thinker who concretizes his orientation of decolonial love into a historical and intellective praxis. Fanon breaks open the ways ideology is contained and hypostasized within the modern world-system, situates the human person in relation to a reality that transcends the confines of Western modernity, and catalyses a praxis of opening up ruptures in history. This historical praxis of love is perceived as violent from the side of Western modernity. The chapter begins by locating Fanon’s understanding of a new humanism within a dialectical perspective shaped by his Caribbean context, in which race functions as a medium of the universal. It then shifts to exploring how the movement of Fanon’s dialectics was shaped by his involvement in a nationalist movement while working and living in Algeria. In this context violence and national consciousness catalyse dialectical movement against ways relationships get frozen within colonial categories and structures.