Frantz Fanon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Alessandrini
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
To Come

Frantz Fanon (b. 1925–d. 1961)—psychiatrist, political theorist, poet, polemicist, diplomat, journalist, soldier, doctor, playwright, revolutionary—is one of the foremost writers of the 20th century on the topics of racism, colonialism, and decolonization. In his short lifetime, he produced two enduring books: Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), still regarded as the preeminent study of the lived experience of racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre), regarded at the time of its publication as “the handbook of decolonization,” and presenting itself to us today as both a clear-eyed prediction of the lasting legacy of neocolonialism, and as a visionary account of a truly postcolonial condition yet to come. These two books encapsulate the major themes not only of Fanon’s writing but also of his extraordinary life. Black Skin, White Masks captures Fanon’s experience as a native of Martinique and thus as the product of a colonial education who came to experience metropolitan racism upon his arrival in France (Fanon, having fought in Europe during the Second World War, returned to France to study medicine). The book draws upon Fanon’s training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis but also upon Marxism, existentialism, the work of the négritude movement, and a number of literary texts in order to analyze the lived experience of racism. Having completed his medical studies, Fanon took up a position at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in November 1953. While working in Algeria, Fanon introduced a number of innovative programs and also authored and coauthored many articles on the practice and theory of psychiatry (many of these texts are available in English, thanks to the publication of Fanon’s previously uncollected writings in Alienation and Freedom, published in 2018). However, as he recounts in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon was responsible for treating both Algerians fighting for independence and also French police and army officers—both the tortured and the torturers. This experience was to shape his remarkable theorization of colonial and anticolonial violence, one of the key themes of The Wretched of the Earth, which has inspired ongoing critical debate. In 1956 Fanon resigned his position and joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Tunis, where he served as an editor of the movement’s newspaper, El Moudjahid. It was during this time that Fanon wrote L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Year V of the Algerian Revolution, translated as A dying colonialism), his sociological study of the Algerian liberation struggle. Shortly after its publication, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. While undergoing treatment, Fanon worked to produce in a period of ten weeks his last (and what would come to be his most famous) book, The Wretched of the Earth. Published only weeks before his death in December 1961, The Wretched of the Earth remains a key text for postcolonial studies. Fanon’s unsparing analysis of the movement for decolonization and the struggle toward what he called the “African Revolution”—as well as his call for a new form of humanism not overdetermined by the crimes of racism, slavery, and colonialism—continues to resonate with readers.

scholarly journals On Frantz Fanon: Key Concepts

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Farhan
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Global South ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
The Common

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, theorist, philosopher, playwright, and a leading political actor and figure in the struggle for decolonization. Between the publication of his two best-known works, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs), in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) in 1961, Fanon defended his medical thesis in Paris, was a resident psychiatrist at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, and published several more books and numerous clinical and critical articles advancing counter-narratives on colonialism and colonial psychiatry in various medical and radical journals. In the following decades, his work would become canonical in postcolonial studies, and has shaped the common parlance of scholarship on the Global South. This vignette showcases Fanon’s contribution through an examination of his most prevalent scholarship and theories, and a brief summary of his influence on decolonization studies.

Frantz Fanon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Essays ◽  
Selection Of

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital outside Washington, DC. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a philosopher of anti-colonial revolution. He published two seminal books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), respectively. He also wrote a third book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), as well as numerous medical journal articles and political essays, a selection of which appear in the posthumous collections Toward the African Revolution (1964) and Alienation and Freedom (2015). Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and decolonization has remained vital, influencing a range of academic fields such that the term Fanonism has become shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. Fanon is a political martyr who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.

scholarly journals The Culture of Exile and Narratives of Resistance: A Study of Munif’s Cities of Salt and Naipaul’s the Middle Passage

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Fatma Taher
Keyword(s):  
Chaotic Dynamics ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
To Come ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
National Borders

<p>Fictional texts still remain a forceful medium in understanding the turbulent global culture at the end of the millennium. The language of literature is greatly affected by the struggle between two mutually opposed forces: the oppressor and the resisting power of the oppressed. The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty, through resistance. The biggest weapon against this defiance is to annihilate their belief in their past, roots, culture, or even their names and ultimately in themselves. It makes them want to identify with that which is remote; for example other people’s language. Ideas are implanted that any possibility of success or triumph is a remote ridiculous dream. This in turn creates a collective despair and a wasteland where the oppressor presents himself as the cure.</p><p>Remembering, looking back in anger or even imagining are all acts of resistance and of lending coherence and integrity to a history and a homeland interrupted, divided or compromised by instances of loss. Redressing forcibly forgotten experiences, allows the silences of history to come into word, and makes us imagine alternative scripts of the past, hence invariably changes our understanding of the present.</p><p>The present paper aims at investigating narratives that recuperate losses incurred in migration, exile and dislocation. Forced or voluntary immigration is discussed as part and parcel in the narratives that originate at border crossings and that cannot be bound by national borders, languages or traditions through Naipaul’s <em>The Middle Passage</em>, and Munif’s <em>Cities of Salt</em>, where the chaotic dynamics of a world constantly on the move creates resistance and possibly confrontations, mirroring the fragmented consciousness of postmodern culture elucidated by HomiBhabha and Frantz Fanon.</p>

Reconsidering American Power

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Power ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
To Come

Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. Since these fields owe so much to American state sponsorship, is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure the pervasive American influence? Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana and the influence of Pax Americana on the social sciences. With the thematic image for this enterprise as the ‘fiery hunt’ for Ahab’s whale, the contributors pursue realities behind the theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye on what will deter or repurpose the ‘fiery hunts’ to come, by offering a critical insider’s view.

A Real-time Forest Monitoring System for Environmental Engineering Data Applications

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 03-04
Author(s):  
Raven Boxman
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Monitoring System ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Environmental Engineering ◽  
Forest Monitoring ◽  
Safe Haven ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Engineering Data ◽  
To Come ◽  
Two Stages

The woods environment is basic for providing common assets to the greenery. The woods is an indispensable safe-haven, albeit at present it is presented to illicit logging by insatiable individuals, and this has altogether influenced the woodland. Because of this criminal behavior, unfortunate wonder has surfaced. Consequently, the system of this exploration is worried about building up a far off observing gadget that could catch basic ongoing information, for example, temperature, moistness, vaporous substance, and bonfire and downpour location, which could show the recent and the safeguarded characteristic state and environment in the woods. The model was actualized at chosen areas to screen and assemble information at two stages. The results from this exploration will be utilized in the advancement of a progression of games as instructing helps that can make mindful our group of people yet to come about the consumption and its effect upon the earth.

scholarly journals Cosmogonies and mythopoesis in the Balkans and beyond

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 87-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florentina Badalanova Geller
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Different Types ◽  
To Come ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Devil

Cosmogonies and mythopoesis in the Balkans and beyondCompared and contrasted in this article are three different types of accounts dealing with the cosmogonic and eschatological themes employed in Slavonic and Balkan oral tradition, para-Biblical literature and modern poetry. The focus of analysis is the cluster of motifs attested in the creation narrative of the apocryphal Legend of the Sea of Tiberias. Two versions are examined: the South-Slavonic one discovered in 1845 by V. Grigorovich in the Monastery of Slepche, and the 18th century Russian account from MS № 21.11.3 (fols. 3a–5b) from the Archaeographic Department of the Library of the Academy of Sciences [Библиотека Академии наук, Рукописный отдел] in St. Petersburg, composed most probably by an Old Believer; this manuscript is published here for the first time. Folklore counterparts of the apocryphal Legend of the Sea of Tiberias are treated, with special emphasis on the oral narratives from the Bulgarian diaspora in Bessarabia (God and the Devil Create the World Amicably but then Fall Out). Finally, a poem of the 20th century Bulgarian intellectual Pencho Slaveykov [Пенчо Славейков] from his anthology “On the Island of the Blessed” is discussed; the poem, entitled How God willed the Earth to come to be and what did Satanail do after that? was designated by Slaveykov himself as “a legend of the Bogomils”, and blended within his lyrics are dualistic themes and motifs attested in vernacular Christianity, with the hallmark of Haeresis Bulgarica. Kosmogonie i mitopoetyki na Bałkanach i nie tylkoW artykule zostały porównane trzy typy narracji zawierających wątki kosmogoniczne i eschatologiczne, które funkcjonują w słowiańskiej i bałkańskiej tradycji ustnej, literaturze parabiblijnej oraz poezji doby modernizmu. Przedmiotem uwagi stała się grupa motywów poświadczonych w narracji o stworzeniu, znanej z Legendy o Morzu Tyberiadzkim. Analizom poddane zostały dwie wersje: południowosłowiańska, odkryta w 1845 roku przez W. Grigorowicza w Monastyrze w Slepče, oraz ruska – z XVIII wieku, znajdująca się w kodeksie MS № 21.11.3 (fols. 3a–5b), przechowywanym w Oddziale Rękopisów Biblioteki Akademii Nauk w Sankt Petersburgu – skomponowana najprawdopodobniej w środowisku staroobrzędowców (rękopis ten jest tu publikowany po raz pierwszy). Następnie przeprowadzona została analiza odpowiedników folklorystycznych apokryficznej Legendy o Morzu Tyberiadzkim, ze szczegól­nym uwzględnieniem narracji ustnych funkcjonujących w bułgarskiej diasporze w Besarabii (Bóg i Diabeł tworzą świat w przyjaźni ale potem stają się wrogami). Na końcu został poddany interpretacji poemat z XX wieku autorstwa bułgarskiego modernisty Penczo Sławejkowa [Пенчо Славейков] z antologii Na wyspie błogosławionych [На острова на блажените]; poemat ten, zatytułowany Jak Bóg zezwolił, aby powstała ziemia i co potem uczynił Satanael?, został nazwany przez samego autora „legendą Bogomiłów”, i skompilowany w jego tekstach z dualistycznymi motywami występującymi w chrześcijaństwie tego regionu, a rozpoznawa­nymi jako haeresis bulgarica.

scholarly journals The Unavoidable Suffering in Selected Literary Texts: Poems and Novels

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal Nasser Frag
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Allen Ginsberg ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Modern Psychology ◽  
Main Reflection ◽  
To Come ◽  
Almost All

The unavoidable suffering is an outstanding theme which has its impact to almost all literary texts. Typically, unavoidable suffering is the supreme touchstone in life and literature. Poets used its presence incessantly. They are always conscious of its inevitability. Investigation of this theme gives the reader a panoramic view of vital issues that are unusually linked to some extent with suffering; such as religion, God, nature, love and immortality. In the poems discussed in this study, unavoidable suffering reflects the effect of modern psychology has had upon both literature and literary criticism. The main reflection of suffering which is implied in the characters presented reveal the very contradictions, absurdities and complexities of our life. The poets and novelists chosen in this paper portray suffering, as “an abstract force, in an attempt to come to terms with it as well as to fathom it.” (Gurra, 2019, p.5) In the inexorable quest to comprehend it, poets do not offer a final view of suffering because it remains for them the great unknown mystery. This paper, however, is an attempt to meticulously examine and critically analyze the images of suffering in minor characters presented in selected poems. The selected poems are of Robinson Jeffers, Allen Ginsberg, and Maya Angelou. The characters selected from different novels are minor ones. Characters like: Roger Chiilingworth from The Scarlet Letter (1850), Walter Morel from Sons and Lovers (1913), Zeena Frome from Ethan Frome (1911), and Rezia Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Different kinds of suffering are disscussed in order to gain a better understanding of the writers’ perception of unavoidable suffering as well as to understand the western philosophy of it.

scholarly journals Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

scholarly journals “Man-as-Environment”: Spatialising Racial and Natural Otherness in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow // “Man-as-Environment”: Espacializar la alteridad racial y natural en dos novelas de Caryl Phillips

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Jessica Maufort
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Caryl Phillips ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
British Novels ◽  
De Man ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Way

Examining Caryl Phillips’s later fiction (A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow) through the characters’ lived experience of their environment, this article seeks to pave the way toward a mutually enriching dialogue between postcolonial studies and urban ecocriticism. Phillips’s British novels show how Western racist/colonial underpinnings that persist in a postcolonial context are manifest in the phenomenon of spatialisation of race. The latter devises separate spaces of Otherness, imbued with savage connotations, where the undesirable Other is ostracised. The enriching concept of “man-in-environment” is thus reconfigured so that the postcolonial subject’s identity is defined by such bias-constructed dwelling-places. Consequently, the Other’s sense of place is a highly alienated one. The decayed suburban nature and the frightening/impersonal city of London are also “othered” entities with which the protagonists cannot interrelate. My “man-as-environment” concept envisions man and place as two subjected Others plagued by spatialisation of Otherness. The latter actually debunks the illusion of a postcolonial British Arcadia, as the immigrants’ plight is that of an antipastoral disenchantment with England. The impossibility of being a “man-in-place” in a postcolonial context precisely calls for a truly reconciling postpastoral relationship between humans and place, a relationship thus informed by the absolute need for environmental and social justice combined. Resumen Analizando las últimas novelas de Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore y In the Falling Snow) a través de la experiencia del (medio)ambiente que viven los personajes, este artículo persigue enriquecer el diálogo entre los estudios postcoloniales y la ecocrítica urbana. Las ficciones británicas de Phillips desvelan cómo las bases racistas/coloniales occidentales que persisten en un contexto poscolonial se hacen evidentes en el fenómeno de la espacialización racial. Éste elabora espacios aparte de alteridad, impregnados de salvajes connotaciones, donde el indeseable “Otro” es excluido. El enriquecedor concepto de “man-in-environment” es reconfigurado de manera que la identidad del sujeto poscolonial acaba definiéndose por tan sesgados lugares de residencia. En consecuencia, el sentido del espacio del “Otro” está muy alienado. La decadente naturaleza suburbana y la aterradora e impersonal ciudad de Londres son también entidades ajenas con las cuales los protagonistas no pueden interactuar. Mi concepto de “man-as-environment” concibe al hombre y al lugar como dos “Otros” sometidos, acosados por la espacialización de la alteridad. Esto último desacredita la ilusión de una Arcadia poscolonial británica, en tanto que los aprietos de los emigrantes es tal que se crea un desencanto antipastoril con Inglaterra. La imposibilidad de ser un “man-in-place” en un contexto poscolonial demanda precisamente una auténtica y reconciliadora relación postpastoril entre hombres y lugares, es decir, una relación caracterizada por la absoluta necesidad de aunar justicia social y medioambiental. 

Why literature students should practise life writing

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie Cardell ◽  
Kate Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
Writing Practice

This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.” We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss in this article, life writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we want to show how life writing, with its particular focus on actual lives and lived experience, creates a particularly conducive ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing.

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