Frantz Fanon and the Challenge of Political Theory

2019 ◽

pp. 653-676

Author(s):

Jimmy Casas Klausen

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Frantz Fanon ◽

The Political ◽

Political Practice ◽

Comparative Political Theory ◽

Subject Positions ◽

The Subject

This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.

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Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.54 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Keally McBride

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Interpersonal Violence ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

Central Force ◽

Frantz Fanon ◽

The Political ◽

Individual Freedom ◽

Economic Exploitation ◽

The Earth ◽

Racialized Violence

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a handbook for developing anticolonial revolutionary consciousness. It offers an analysis of the structures created by colonialism that need to be overcome, and predicts the political distortions that might occur in postcolonial regimes. All three of these themes involve a discussion of structural and interpersonal violence as a central force in politics. Fanon’s political theory traces the interconnected nature of economic, institutional, and psychological racialized violence that undergirds modern global relations. This chapter explores Fanon’s historical analysis of decolonization, emphasizing the difficulty of achieving individual freedom and the pitfalls of collective and violent struggle. Furthermore, Fanon’s volume predicts the growth of new forms of imperialism, and the continued economic exploitation of former colonies.

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The Creolization of Political Theory and the Dialectic of Emancipatory Thought: A Plea for Synthesis

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy ◽

10.5195/jffp.2017.821 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 6-25

Author(s):

Michael Neocosmos

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Frantz Fanon ◽

The Real ◽

Important Idea ◽

Dialectical Thought

The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorporate the theoretical inventions of popular actions.

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Political Theory and Clerical Radicalism

Worldview ◽

10.1017/s008425590001319x ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 10-12

Author(s):

Robert A. Monson

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Third World ◽

American Foreign Policy ◽

The United States ◽

The Other ◽

Frantz Fanon ◽

The Third ◽

Current Events ◽

The One ◽

The Third World

When viewed within the perspective of a possibly new American foreign policy, two sets of dramatic and apparently unrelated current events display a clear relationship. On the one hand are particular influences upon the thought of the radical left in America and elsewhere, notably the neo-Marxist ideas of men like Herbert Mareuse'and the Third World revolution ideas of men like Frantz Fanon. On the other hand there are recurring references to differences in the way clerical defections are taking place in the United States and Europe. An interesting framework for unifying these apparently unrelated phenomena suggests itself from the broader perspective of traditional Western political theory.

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Frantz Fanon and the decolonial turn in psychology: from modern/colonial methods to the decolonial attitude

South African Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1177/0081246317737918 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 47 (4) ◽

pp. 432-441 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Social Theory ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Frantz Fanon ◽

Human Sciences ◽

Black Skin ◽

The World ◽

The Face

Frantz Fanon, one of the foremost theoreticians of racism, colonization, and decolonization was a psychiatrist by training who wrote about psychology, social theory, and philosophy, among other areas. In his “work in psychology” Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon declares that he will “leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians.” In the face of colonial methods and attitudes, he searches for a decolonial attitude that seeks to “build the world of you.” With the search for this attitude at its core, Fanon’s corpus makes the case for a decolonial turn in psychology that poses the primacy of attitude over method in knowledge production. In such a form, psychology becomes a decolonial transdisciplinary practice that is close to decolonized versions of other fields in the human sciences, such as philosophy, sociology, history, literature, and political theory, as well as to decolonial activism and praxis.

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