Fanon’s Idealism: Hopeful Resignation, Violence, and Healing

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-251
Author(s):  
Carolyn Ureña
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
New Man ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Point Of Departure

The Spirit of Bandung is marked by its idealism, a state of mind few associate with the revolutionary Martinican physician and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who is perhaps best known for Les damnés de la terre, in particular its opening chapter on violence. And yet, Fanon’s work, too, is marked by a keen sense of hope as he urges himself and his readers, “[to] make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” As a clinician and philosopher who combined phenomenology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in his work, Fanon draws our attention to the importance of healing the physical, affective, and epistemological wounds of anti-black racism by attending to the social relations that produce them. This paper takes as a point of departure Fanon’s “Letter to the Resident Minister (1956),” in which he resigns from his post as Médecin-Chef de service at the Psychiatric Hospital of Blida-Joineville in war-torn Algeria. More than a gesture, I argue that Fanon’s active withdrawal as a representative of French colonialism enabled Fanon to write Wretched of the Earth and raises the question of what role hopeful resignation can have in achieving decolonial healing.

Functional Approaches

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-200
Author(s):  
J. Lachlan Mackenzie
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Grammatical Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Spatio Temporal

All functional approaches share the conviction that the structure of languages and their historical development are strongly impacted by the cognitive properties of language users, the social relations between them, and the spatio-temporal and socio-cultural contexts in which they operate. This chapter describes how functionalism has impinged on the study of English grammar and covers the interrelations of discourse and grammar, various corpus- and usage-based approaches, the influence of processing considerations, the hierarchical organization of the clause, information structure, the noun phrase, and the contributions of language typology. The grammatical analysis of English has been enriched by the insight that its structures are bound up with our ability to participate in dialogues, to construct written texts, to surmize the state of mind of our conversational partner, to modulate our formulations to maximize politeness, and to use different registers or dialects in different social contexts.

scholarly journals Financialization and its discontents

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Mehrling
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Financial Globalization ◽  
Market Making ◽  
The Real ◽  
Constitutive Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Financial Relationships

Finance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure nor a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of modern social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe. Financial relationships are not about mediating something else on the ‘real’ side of the economy; they are the constitutive relationships of the whole system. Financial globalization and global financialization have produced a global Financial Society, hierarchical and inherently unstable. The problem confronting social analysts is not so much to find the social in the money grid – the money grid is already social – but rather to understand the dynamical operations of that grid on its own terms. This essay sketches the fundamental processes that produce and reproduce Financial Society – settlement and market-making – as an attempt to provide a realistic point of departure for any feasible project of reform.

Precarious Homes: Encounters with the Benefit System

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-109
Author(s):  
Insa Lee Koch
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
The Public ◽  
System P ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Family Home ◽  
Popular Language ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Benefit System

Chapter 3 looks at how so-called ‘single mothers’ engage the benefit system in their daily attempts to build and maintain family homes. In both policy terms and popular language, the ‘single mother’ is typically portrayed as a woman who corrupts both the immaculate trust of a mother to her child and the civic trust of a citizen to the public by bearing children in order to access public resources. By contrast, this chapter takes as its point of departure women’s own daily pursuits of family homes and the social relations that matter within them. It argues that the rules and logic of the benefit system come into conflict with women’s own expectations of what makes a good family home. By portraying women as needy individuals defined by their lack, means-tested benefits not only expose women to bureaucratic complexity but more substantively, penalize their reliance on fluid household arrangements that encompass friends, partners, grown-up children, and extended kin. While some women learn to ‘play the system’, their attempts to personalize the state also place them in an awkward and sometimes altogether illegal relationship with the law.

Inhabiting Cultures as a Way to Other Worlds

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (04) ◽  
pp. 982-990
Author(s):  
GEORGE LIPSITZ
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
New World ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Form

In a powerful but frequently overlooked passage in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes expressive culture as a register of incipient social relations. He maintains that long before liberation struggles assume organized political form, perceptive observers will detect the emergence of unusual kinds of expression popping up to summon the people to view the status quo as both unreal and unacceptable.1 The essays in this special issue dedicated to the theme of Inhabiting Cultures display precisely this evidence of incipient critique and transformation. They demonstrate that tomorrow is today; that the reigning cultural forms authored and authorized by domination, exclusion and oppression have become exhausted and obsolete; and that the stirrings of a new world in the making are already here.

Looking Well to See Well: Lessons from Oxford Street, Accra

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 524-527
Author(s):  
Alissa Trotz
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Relational Analysis ◽  
Global Flows ◽  
The Social ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
And Gender ◽  
High Road

Two decades ago the late doreen massey, a feminist geographer, made a clear, rich, and generative argument about what she referred to as a progressive, or global, sense of place, one that emphasized process, that admitted of multiplicity and heterogeneity while recognizing the power geometries that produced hierarchical difference, and that rejected an insular and bounded sense of place in favor of a relational analysis. In Space, Place, and Gender, Massey based her analysis on a brief example, no more than a few paragraphs long, in which she read her own “pretty ordinary” street, Kilburn High Road, in northwest London (152-54). Her critical vocabulary offered a way of thinking about place that was not self-enclosing but outward-looking: what gives each place its fingerprint, she asserted, is the constellation of global flows, the social relations that overlap in one space—patterns that are always changing.

The SRM Approach to Family Assessment

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 216-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Cook
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Risk Behaviors ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Dynamics ◽  
Family Assessment ◽  
High Risk Behaviors ◽  
Analysis Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
Direction Of Effects

Abstract. In family systems, it is possible for one to put oneself at risk by eliciting aversive, high-risk behaviors from others ( Cook, Kenny, & Goldstein, 1991 ). Consequently, it is desirable that family assessments should clarify the direction of effects when evaluating family dynamics. In this paper a new method of family assessment will be presented that identifies bidirectional influence processes in family relationships. Based on the Social Relations Model (SRM: Kenny & La Voie, 1984 ), the SRM Family Assessment provides information about the give and take of family dynamics at three levels of analysis: group, individual, and dyad. The method will be briefly illustrated by the assessment of a family from the PIER Program, a randomized clinical trial of an intervention to prevent the onset of psychosis in high-risk young people.

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