Frantz Fanon Research Articles

Creation of a ‘New Species’: A Decolonial Reading of Frantz Fanon and B.R Ambedkar

This paper argues that Fanon’s critique of colonisation and Ambedkar’s evaluation of the caste system share similarities because they collectively present a psycho-social understanding of the oppressed human condition. Both Fanon and Ambedkar argue that colonial and caste oppression has introduced a loss of cultural legacy, identity and capacity for self-determination. This loss is imprinted so deeply in the minds of the colonised and stakeholders of the caste system that a new species with a different social, political and economic consciousness is needed to transform and facilitate the formation of radical new social beliefs. For such a decolonisation of the mind to occur, Fanon proposes that violence—the capacity to resist and question—is fundamental, which I argue is also the foundation of Ambedkar’s solution to annihilate caste. However, violence in terms of Fanon and Ambedkar does not translate to physical harm. It is the intellectual capacity and desire for self-reflection that ruptures existing hierarchical power structures and renews the meaning of being human in democratic civilisations.

The concept of unlivability: A reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952)

AbstractFrom a close reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952), this article draws out Fanon's understanding of “death in life” to suggest that a concept of unlivability in the present must account for the temporal duration of racialized and colonized experiences of pain and trauma. It is thus critical of Judith Butler's and Frédéric Worms's discussion of unlivability in The Livable and The Unlivable (2023) for not centering a phenomenological study of the testimonies of the oppressed. I argue for a greater engagement with Fanon on the longue durée of racial and colonial violence enacted on the bodies, psyches, and histories of racialized and colonized peoples. This article concludes by pointing to possibilities for a shared unlivability in a shared temporality, with potential to move beyond refusal and toward resistance to the colonial control over time.

On occupying the silent parenthetical: Thinking-feeling after the Ends/ings (Part 1/2)

ABSTRACT To speak of “the End” as a cataclysmic future event, as depicted in popular apocalyptic genres, oversimplifies the prolonged, multiplicitous character of the End Times as they unfold unevenly across different scales, speeds, populations, and intensities. As many rhetoricians and other critical scholars have noted, an interrelated series of Ends and Endings mark the contemporary conjuncture, disrupting disciplinary traditions and the prevailing epistemic terrain: the End of Speech, Debate, the University, Time, the Individual, Politics, The Greeks, Whiteness, the Canon, Capitalism, Colonialism, Patriarchy, Prisons, Discipline, Man—in short, and in the spirit of Frantz Fanon, The End of the World. In Part 1 of this two-part essay, I begin to speculate on what it might mean to think otherwise from these unfolding and overlapping Ends and Endings, call attention to the limits of criticism-as-usual, and raise a number of questions for rhetorical scholars committed to studying social change and enabling different possible futures and worlds. I consider the im/possibilities of realizing a transformative rhetorical studies rooted in pluriversality, the undercommonsense, experimental writing, and the “radical rhetorics” (Aswad) of communities born in struggle.

The Brazilian Contemporary Dance Scene of the Periferia

The aim of this article is to discuss the recent changes in scenic dance in Brazil. Until the beginning of the 2000s, scenic dance was primarily practiced by middle class white dancers, whereas more recently there is a greater representation of Afro-Brazilians and socially less privileged people who come from the outskirts of cities (periferia). The author argues that this change of paradigm is happening due to cultural policies implemented by local governments, as they attempted to provide entertaining and creative activities to help diminish violence in large urban centers, starting in the 1990s. Since these cultural policies have been developing and increasing during the last twenty years, and taking into consideration the issues of decolonialization present in the broader panorama of Latin America, this article’s goal is to discuss the growing presence of artists and dance collectives addressing ethnic and social issues in their work in an attempt to challenge established hegemonic values. In order to accomplish this task, the author refers to social theories related to decolonialization and marginalized communities of the periphery as established by various theoreticians, including Frantz Fanon, Milton Santos, Stuart Hall, Boaventura de Souza Santos, Walter Mignolo, and Anibal Quijano.

Bleeding Forms: Beyond the Intifada

Abstract This essay considers the war in Gaza from the perspective of resistance as an anti-concept. It draws inspiration from the notion of the informe (formless) as described by Georges Bataille to understand how resistance acts as a formless operation that deforms the colonial structure. It argues that resistance overflows the condition it seeks to dismantle and bring down in the world. The paper explores the difference between Bataille's account of the operation of the formless and Frantz Fanon's understanding of the "tabula rasa," highlighting how resistance can break down, deform, and distort following this capacity to deform historically. However, the Palestinian resistance did not achieve the radical break, or what Frantz Fanon describes as the minimum demand of the colonized, the clean slate from which a genuine decolonization can ensue. The essay explores how the Palestinian resistance initiated on October 7 a meticulously orchestrated offensive maneuver that surpassed the spontaneous uprisings of previous intifadas. It was a calculated decision to deform the existing order. The essay points to the novel development in Palestinian resistance where the decision to instigate this process of decomposition has become wedded to a decider and a locus, while highlighting some of the pitfalls of this development. It argues that the current moment is marked by a decomposition of the colonial order without decolonization.

Against Exceptionalism

In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western modernity, while standing outside and above the order they found. In an effort to avoid the urge to rank that follows almost effortlessly from such ontologization, I mobilize the appeal to the universal undergirding the works of Slavoj Žižek and that of Frantz Fanon. Both Fanon and Žižek read racial trauma and racist violence in light of the eviscerating ontological effects of an imperialist capitalism that divides the world and segregates its peoples. Rather than opting for identity politics, however, these thinkers argue against ontologizing and exceptionalizing victims, in favor of elaborating a politics based on their concrete universality.

Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau‐Ponty, Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

AbstractThis article reads Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.

The Rhetoric of Radicalism: The Anti-Colonial Inspiration Behind Osama bin Laden’s Ideology

ABSTRACT A current debate in the terrorism studies literature regards the continued value of Rapoport’s famous “wave theory” of modern terrorism and a new alternative known as “strain theory.” Wave theory assumes that international terrorism has occurred in distinct, temporal cycles while strain theory accounts for the learning behavior that occurs between waves by way of tactical adaption and therefore deemphasizes the distinctiveness of temporal waves. The present analysis contributes to the debate by analyzing Osama bin Laden’s ideology and justifications for violence, which are shown to owe a great debt to the anti-colonial rhetorical framework that inspired earlier forms of terrorism. By establishing a rhetorical connection between the works of Frantz Fanon, one of the most important figures of the anti-colonial period, and bin Laden’s written and spoken statements, the article challenges the historicization of modern terrorism as one that has unfolded in distinct waves, makes a cogent defense of strain theory, and contends that advocates of the new approach should extend their analysis beyond strategic and tactical choices to learned ideological and normative justifications for violence as well.

An Examination of Identity and Colonialism in Tayeb Saleh's Season of Migration to the North through the Lens of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks A Comparative Study

"In the exploration of post-colonial literature, Tayeb Saleh's 'Season of Migration to the North' and Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks' emerge as pivotal works that intricately dissect the complex interplay between identity and colonialism. Both authors delve into the psychological ramifications of colonial histories on individual identities, unraveling the multifaceted layers of the post-colonial experience. The themes of identity and colonialism in Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North" through the lens of Frantz Fanon's seminal work, "Black Skin, White Masks." By examining the experiences of the protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, who returns to Sudan after studying in England, the essay delves into the complex ways in which colonial encounters shape individual identity. Drawing on Fanon's theories, particularly the concepts of double consciousness and the psychological effects of colonization, the analysis sheds light on the psychological and cultural impact of the colonial experience on Sa'eed and other characters in the novel. This article investigates the idea of cultural hybridity and the ambivalence that arises from navigating multiple cultural influences. Moreover, it explores the gender dynamics present in both works, emphasizing the power imbalances and objectification of women within the colonial context. Through a comparative analysis, the article seeks to highlight the characters' struggles for authentic selfhood and the broader implications of their experiences in a post-colonial world. Ultimately, this exploration provides insights into the enduring relevance of these themes and the intricate interplay between identity and colonialism in literature. The present   article seeks to examine the nuanced ways in which Saleh's narrative and Fanon's psychoanalytic insights intersect, offering a profound understanding of the profound impact of colonialism on the construction and negotiation of identity in a post-colonial world."
 Tayeb Salih's novel, Season of Migration to the North, delves into the intricate relationships that exist between colonialism and identity in post-colonial Sudan. In close resemblance to Frantz Fanon's groundbreaking work Black Skin, White Masks, the article explores the novel's complex concerns of identity building, cultural hybridity, and the psychological effects of colonialism in African literature. By their audacious writings, Fanon and Salih both transformed the postcolonial African landscape. Using a postcolonial perspective, this study investigates how the story's characters navigate their cultural heritage and sense of self in the years after colonial domination.

Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James's Hegel

AbstractHegel's philosophy has been a fundamental reference point for a broad network of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thinkers and activists, a major inspiration for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, among others. James's Notes on Dialectics (1948) constitutes one of the most significant textual engagements with Hegel from within that internationalist tradition. Even though James considered Notes to be his most important work and one of his lasting contributions to Marxist theory, it remains the least read and studied of his books. In comparison to the abovementioned thinkers, all of whom drew inspiration from Hegel's social and political philosophy, in his monograph, James turns instead to Hegel's most difficult text, the Science of Logic, as the true locus of Hegel's critical theory. Situating James's study within the Marxist philosophical tradition, this essay explores how James interprets, appropriates and makes use of Hegel's dialectic.

Our Newspaper as Care: Narrative Approaches in Fanon's Psychiatry Clinic.

This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon's physician writing and editorial texts detailing the use of narrative approaches in the clinic. As an object of care, Notre Journal's promotion of psychic healing, social actions, and engaged professional practice shaped the interactions and experiences of patients and staff. Printed and distributed to the wider institution, the newspaper created community-during an oppressive French Occupation and at the outset of the War of Independence-in addition to nurturing creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and accountability. Still, Fanon would come to recognize the limits of narrative methods amidst cultural oral traditions, illiteracy, and divergent attitudes about narrating the self.

What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence

What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System ( CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru ( CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism.

Apartheid politics and ‘coloured’ identity in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990)

ABSTRACT This paper addresses apartheid political history and ‘coloured’ identity challenges in South African society. A textual analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (MSS, 1990) adheres to understanding ‘coloured’ identity struggle as an ‘Other’ and their racial marginality during apartheid. This research deeply studies race and identity theories with Frantz Fanon’s psychological notion of racism, decolonisation and the idea of cross-racial relations are important to analyse MSS. A textual study of MSS is significant for examining the impact of apartheid on ‘coloured’ characters. This research finds that ‘coloured’ community’s struggle and their racial consciousness of being other were political and psychological challenges during apartheid time. To put in a nutshell, apartheid stories are not individual representations but these are collectively representing the ‘coloured’ community's struggle in South Africa. Racial consciousness of being other was a form of racial exclusion so, a discussion on ‘coloured’ discourse becomes important to contextualise political history. The negligence of the ‘coloured’ issues during apartheid questioned the psychological development of ‘coloured’.

‘Speaking proper French’: citizen bids for state recognition in Chad and Côte d’Ivoire

Theories of international recognition posit that states’ identities are formed through dialogical relations with other states. However, they often overlook the ways in which weaker states’ struggles, constrained within the languages of the powerful, produce misrecognition and inhibit identity formation. This is the experience of many post-colonial francophone African states whose search for international recognition has been inhibited by their special relationship with France, their former coloniser. This article shows how such struggles for recognition can fail. It draws on two examples of francophone African countries, showing how their search for recognition sprung from the misrecognition of colonial experiences. Each has made explicit attempts to attract richer forms of state recognition through purposive acts but has continued to do so within post-colonial conditions. Using citizens’ understandings of these struggles, the article explores what drove them, how they manifested and how they unravelled. It draws on Frantz Fanon’s account of misrecognition, making a novel interpretation based on his concept of ‘speaking proper French’, or how experiences of ‘identity alienation’ can only produce further misrecognition.

“L’Européen Sait et ne sait pas”: Frantz Fanon and Epistemologies of Ignorance

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge.

Towards a decolonial political theory: Thinking from the zone of nonbeing

This article offers to outline a direction for a decolonial political theory based on Aimé Césaire’s and Frantz Fanon’s thoughts. In doing so, I will first discuss some work of comparative political theory that could be associated with an attempt to decolonize political theory. Rather than a systematic critique of these works, this article aims to outline some of their limits from a decolonial perspective, such as their embedment in a continental ontology/logic, and their over-emphasis on methodology that can lead to an instrumental account of politics. In contrast, I will argue for a decolonial existential political theory that grounds its investigation in what Frantz Fanon called ‘the zone of nonbeing’ and that takes politics as first philosophy. To make my point, I will discuss Aimé Césaire’s Letter to Maurice Thorez and Frantz Fanon’s Political Theory of the Damnés.

Judean Skin, Babylonian Masks: Reconsidering Ezekiel’s Anti-Imperial Stance

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders Ezekiel’s alleged anti-imperial attitude toward the Babylonian empire. It nuances the alleged attitude with Frantz Fanon’s theory of colonized subjects’ desire to be like their colonizer. Looking at Ezekiel’s privileged social location, I argue that the book exhibits a desire to be like the Babylonian empire. Ezekiel intertwines Babylonian’s “anti-Egyptian” propaganda with Yahweh’s interest in maintaining loyalty toward the empire. To support this argument, the paper first surveys the Babylonian and Egyptian conflict over the Levant. It then reconsiders the situation of Ezekiel and his community in exile. Further, it discusses Fanon’s theory of colonized subjects’ desires and how Ezekiel operates within it. It concludes by looking at what Ezekiel might gain through this maneuver.

BEING BLACK IN AMERICA: THE ANALYSIS OF RUDY FRANCISKO'S POETRY THROUGH THE PRISM OF RACE, DOUBLE IDENTITY AND POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

The poetry of contemporary American-Belizean poet Rudy Francisco carries one new and, we could say, quite personal view on the position of black people in America. The aim of this work is the analysis of Francisco’s poems, which talk about the identity of this minority in the USA and race politics, which greatly affect the status of black people. While referring to the work of the forerunners who paved the way for research in the area of postcolonial criticism and the studies of the identity of black people such as Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Du Bois and others, this work will display the connection between the selectively chosen Francisco’s poems and the ideas of postcolonialism. During the interpretation of the particular poems, the effect of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement, which continues to this day, will be felt significantly. We will also analyse the role of white police officers in the battle for the equality of black people. When all of the above-mentioned research subjects of this paper are taken into account, it is evident that the work of Rudy Francisco gives a certain freshness to the study of the identity of black people.

DECENTRING WESTERN FEMINISM AND MANLY NATIONALISM

Gender based segregations either in public and private spheres have been recurrent problem for women in Western world, however the cases of women in the “Third World” highlight the ways in which race and gender intersect, exemplifying a double form of oppression. This intersection also functions between colonialism (external) and local patriarchy (internal) mechanisms that control women as in the case of Algerian women. This article considers the ways in which Algerian women reformulated the ways of decolonising Western feminism and nationalism in the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). As such, this paper looks at the distinct perspective, created by Algerian women with an emphasis on their implicit contribution to Western feminist scholarship. By veiling and unveiling interchangeably for national liberation movement against France, Algerian women deviate from the very definitions of Western feminism and challenges patriarchal notions of nationalism. The strategic albeit voluntary act of unveiling earns them a space that is self-representative. This space also represents the backbone of national liberation movement where colonial gaze on women, and control on men in Algeria were contested. The paper concludes that Algerian women can successfully cross national and colonial borders, and hence create a space that is beyond the definitions of Western feminist scholarship, and beyond the demands of colonial authority. The theoretical background of this paper is mainly based on the ideas proposed by Chandra Mohanty, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to explore insights from transnational feminism and postcolonial theory regarding gender and nationalism.

Minding the Gap

Grounded in and influenced by the work of thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young, and Lewis Gordon, critical phenomenologists such as Lisa Guenther, Linda Martín Alcoff, George Yancy, and Sara Ahmed have recently provided accounts of whiteness through a phenomenological lens. In these analyses, whiteness is often figured as a "transcendental norm," a "background to experience," a "natural attitude," and a "sociogenic force," which remains invisible while structuring the world. In this article I suggest that such accounts ultimately collapse whiteness and the white subject, imagining the latter simply as an embodiment of the former. Consequently, these approaches to whiteness lack explanatory power. I argue that a critical phenomenological account of whiteness must examine more closely the relationship between white subjects and whiteness, and specifically point to the tensions, gaps, and contradictions between them, as these are not accidental but central to the very constitution of whiteness and to the power it wields over its subjects.