Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of ...Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.
Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the ...plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call "home." Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.
Frantz Fanon may be most known for his more obviously political writings, but in the first instance, he was a clinician, a black Caribbean psychiatrist who had the improbable task of treating ...disturbed and traumatized North African patients during the wars of decolonization. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated. For the first time, Fanon's therapeutic innovations are considered along with his more overtly political and cultural writings to ask how the crises of war affected his practice, informed his politics, and shaped his subsequent ideas. As David Marriott suggests, this combination of the clinical and political involves a psychopolitics that is, by definition, complex, difficult, and perpetually challenging. He details this psychopolitics from two points of view, focusing first on Fanon's sociotherapy, its diagnostic methods and concepts, and second, on Fanon's cultural theory more generally. In our present climate of fear and terror over black presence and the violence to which it gives rise, Whither Fanon? reminds us of Fanon's scandalous actuality and of the continued urgency of his message.
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference offers a new reading of Fanon's work challenging many of the reconstructions of Fanon in critical and postcolonial theory and in cultural studies, ...probing a host of crucial issues: the intersectionality of gender and colonial politics; the biopolitics of colonialism; Marxism and decolonisation; tradition, translation and humanism. It will be of particular value to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academics interested in Fanon and postcolonial studies generally.Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference underscores the ethical dimension of Fanon's work by focusing on the interplay of language, gender and colonial politics, by discussing the implication of the medical and psychiatric establishment in the institution of colonialism and by assessing the importance of existential phenomenology in Fanon's project of decolonisation.
Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory: A View from the Wretched, is a collection of essays engaged in a future-oriented remembrance of the emancipatory work of one of the most influential ...revolutionary social theorists: Frantz Fanon.
This essay argues that a more accurate reading of Fanon should reveal that he did not appropriate, but rejected Hegelian dialectics as a dialectics of oppression. Especially noteworthy is Fanon's ...observation that Hegel's dialectics consists of a form of oppression that perpetuates racialized violence against Black people through the ontological theorizing of exclusion-the exclusion from the zone of being. Hence, the essay concludes by defending the view that Fanon's discussion of violence is an inevitable mechanism for rupturing the ontological violence in Hegelian dialectics, which generates the crisis for recognition, and puts Fanon in opposition to Hegel.
Institutional processes of decolonisation themselves will always be constrained by the imaginations and willingness of global health leadership in high-income countries to bring about and finance ...sustainable and fundamental change. If institutional processes of decolonisation today are an attempt to complete the reversal of western political and economic dominance in politics, the economy, and health governance, we have to ask ourselves whether it is realistic to finish in working groups what began through insurgent action. For all of us to be able to start on a level playing field, processes of decolonisation need to cost global health institutions and their leaders something—financially and emotionally. What good is localisation, if those in leadership positions in global health institutions largely subscribe to systems that have advanced white supremacy. ...many global health leaders have predominantly studied at the same universities—schools that are themselves products of a colonial and often racist system.
The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon's writings. As a
philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply
committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its
facets. ...Change is the thread that ties together his critical
dialogue with Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and his
intellectual exchange with Césaire, Kojève, and Sartre. It informs
his analysis of racism and colonialism, négritude and the
veil, language and culture, disalienation and decolonization, and
it underpins his reflections on Martinique, Algeria, the Caribbean,
Africa, the Third World, and the world at large. Gavin Arnall
traces an internal division throughout Fanon's work between two
distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are
two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a
dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who
experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of
transformation. Arnall offers close readings of Fanon's entire
oeuvre, from canonical works like Black Skin, White Masks
and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers
and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel
Hands . Speaking both to scholars and to the continued vitality
of Fanon's ideas among today's social movements, this book offers a
rigorous and profoundly original engagement with Fanon that affirms
his importance in the effort to bring about radical change.
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