The Postcolonial Condition: Frantz Fanon

“A Civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization.” - Aimé Césaire

“Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.” - Frantz Fanon

What is colonialism? What are its psychic and somatic effects on the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed? And what does a true process of decolonization entail?

To approach these questions, in this seminar, we will read three crucial works from the great age of anti-colonial struggle that followed the end of World War II and the collapse of European imperial power – the great decade of revolt that Malcolm X referred to as “the tidal wave of color”: Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

At the core of these works is not only an account of what colonialism is and does, its psychic and social effects, but a critique of colonial ideology and the way in which the idea of the colony, and the violence requisite for its maintenance, distorts both the consciousness of the colonized and the colonizer. Anti-colonial struggle is, of course, a matter of political militancy. Césaire was a committed communist, and Fanon actively participated in the political struggle of FLN to liberate Algeria from French rule. Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, as we shall see, is one of great works of political thought of the 20th century. Yet, Césaire’s politics is inseparable from his practice as a poet and Fanon's from his practice  as a psychiatrist, remaining committed to clinical practice up until his untimely death from leukemia at the age of 37. In other words, they approach decolonization as a political revolution that required not only a social transformation but  a reinvention of the subject – as Fanon puts it, “the veritable creation” of a new human being.