Friday, 30 December 2011

Wageless Life

by Michael Denning, New Left Review, December 2010 (Click here to download this article in pdf)

Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. Since the beginnings of the wage-labour economy, wageless life has been a calamity for those dispossessed of land, tools and means of subsistence. Expelled from work, the wageless also became invisible to science: political economy, as Marx noted in the earliest formulations of his critique of the discipline, ‘does not recognize the unemployed worker’: ‘The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger, and bum-bailiff, etc; such figures are spectres outside its domain.’ [1] 

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Call for Participants: Is Fanon Finished?

30-31 March 2012

The American University of Paris invites proposals for a two-day
interdisciplinary conference that aims to gather critical and
experimental ‘translations’ of Fanon’s ideas into the present.

Fanon in recent African political thought

by Lewis Gordon, Penser aujourd'hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon Éditions en ligne, CSPRP - Université Paris 7, Février 2008

First, I would like to thank Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Valérie Lowit, and the other organizers for their hard work in putting this meeting together. A local meeting is difficult enough. To have taken on such a task on an international scale is Promethean. I would also like to thank Mireille Fanon-Mendes for her international work on human rights. Her father, in whose honor this meeting was organized, would be very proud to know how well she embodies his spirit. And finally, I would like to thank the audience. In the United States, there are scholars who are fond of saying that Fanon has no influence in France, that he is relatively unknown in French intellectual circles. The several hundred people who attended various sessions over the two days of this conference prove otherwise.

Frantz Fanon's reception in Brazil

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Penser aujourd'hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon, Éditions en ligne, CSPRP - Université Paris 7, Février 2008

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothersHowever, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

The Legacy of Frantz Fanon: culture, class & the psychology of oppression

by Shane William Hopkinson

This thesis discusses the work of the revolutionary social theorist and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon.  Recent appropriations of his work have been in the area of postcolonial discourse analysis while his earlier popularity rested on his contribution to debates about class and revolutionary social change.  This thesis seeks to rehistoricise Fanon by examining his work in the colonial context and the ways it has been appropriated since then.  Part One provides the reader with an overview of the complete range of Fanon’s work.  Part Two looks at a number of appropriations of Fanon’s work and finally Part Three begins the process of assessing Fanon’s contemporary relevance.

Beyond Formalization: An interview with Alain Badiou. Conduted by Peter Hallward & Bruno Bosteels, Paris, 2 July 2002

Peter Hallward: We’d like to start with some questions about the book you’ve just finished on the twentieth century, then talk about your current lecture series on aspects of the present historical moment, before finishing with a few points relating to your major work in progress, Logiques des mondes [forthcoming]. Starting then with The Century what is your basic thesis in this book? In particular, can you explain the relationship between the “passion for the real” [passion du réel] you describe as characteristic of the truly inventive or innovative sequences of the last century, and the various programmes of radical formalisation that this passion inspired?

Peter Linebaugh at Occupy Ypsi, December 10, 2011

An opportunity to abolish Africa’s false divide

by Naefa Khan-Crookes, Business Day

NORTH Africa has been portrayed as distinct from the rest of Africa, a clever divide-and-rule technique. Frantz Fanon, writing half a century ago, succinctly encapsulated this phenomenon when he wrote : "Africa is divided into Black and White and the names that are substituted — Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara — do not manage to hide this latent racism. It is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco- Latin civilisation. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilised — in a word, savage."

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

It's time to occupy, my friends

by Niren Tolsi, Mail & Guardian

The wind is blowing from downtown Manhattan towards the Brooklyn Bridge. From Thomas Paine Park, named after the author of Rights of Man, the clouds moving past the United States Courthouse across the road create the illusion that its 30-storey tower is falling, keeling over, as if deaf to the inscription on the New York County Supreme Court next door that reads: "The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good governance."

Layering Racial Oppression in South Africa

Africa Past and Present, Episode 59

Jacob Dlamini, South African author, journalist, and historian, on his best-selling book Native Nostalgia, a memoir that challenges conventional struggle narratives.  He also discusses the social and political history of Kruger National Park and a new research project on collaborators of the apartheid security forces.

Towards a Truly Democratic Left: An Anarchist Assessment of the DLF at COP17

by Jonathan Payn, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front

Failures of democracy have been a big part of the history of the DLF. We in the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) have had to raise such challenges several times (see “DLF structure: concerns and proposals” by ZACF). We have long been troubled by the lack of proper democratic structures, by a leadership that consists far more of middle-class intellectuals than of grassroots militants, and by a programme that seems to be determined in advance by the academic and NGO interests of these intellectuals instead of by the immediate needs of the workers and the poor.

Saturday, 24 December 2011

Being & Nothingness

Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

The ‘Arab Spring’ and the city

by Marcelo Lopes de Souza and Barbara Lipietz, December 2011

‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, das Gespenst des Kommunismus’ (‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism’): thus Marx and Engels captured the zeitgeist at the turn of the 20th century, beckoning in the process revolutionary changes and brighter tomorrows for Europe’s working class. Today, it is as if those very words were being revived—adapted by numerous observers to fit the current socio-political processes in the Arab world. This time around, it’s the Arab elite being haunted and the spectre is that of democracy. However, is such a depiction remotely accurate?

Friday, 23 December 2011

Only renewal will save ANC from devastation

NOMBONISO GASA
Nombonsio Gasa
by Nomboniso Gasa, The Daily Dispatch

UNGAYIQALI ngehle ikoyise (do not  start that, it might devastate you!).  My mother often cautioned me  whenever she felt I had not examined long-term implications and possible destructive  results of something I was planning.

Recent developments in our national  politics have reminded me of this warning. In December 2007, the nation watched  with bated breath as the ANC tore itself  apart in a succession battle in Polokwane.  If there were any political faults, these  were deeply submerged in the fight between personalities to snatch control from  then-President Thabo Mbeki.

Thursday, 22 December 2011

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Monthly Review Press

Among the major Marxist thinkers of the period of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as one who speaks to our own time. Her legacy grows in relevance as the global character of the capitalist market becomes more apparent and the critique of bureaucratic power more widely accepted within the movement for human liberation.

The Year of Frantz Fanon

by Achille Mbembe, Africa is a Country

Fifty years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away leaving us with his last testimony, The Wretched of the Earth.

Written in the crucible of the Algerian war of independence and the early years of Third World decolonization, this book achieved an almost biblical status. It became a living source of inspiration for those who opposed the Vietnam War, marched with the civil rights movement, supported revolutionary black struggles in America, the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and countless insurgent movements around the world.

Flirting with the Enemy Challenges Faced by NGOs in Development and Empowerment

by Farnak Miraftab, 1997

This article addresses the challenges faced by Mexican non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in attempting to perform their role as agents of development and empowerment among poor populations. Recently, NGOs have expanded and have gained a much greater capacity to respond to the problems of the poor populations. The issue at stake for many Mexican NGOs is that with their new-found capacities, they might reproduce a patron-client relationship with local communities. This article examines the redefiniton of NGOs goals and objectives and the changes in the relationship of NGOs with the state and the poor during the last three decades. It also discusses the effects of these changes on NGOs' methodology and approach in responding to the needs of disadvantaged communities.

Judith Speaking in Stellenbosch in 2011



Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Arundhati Roy on Maoist Violence

Frantz Fanon and Colonialism: A Psychology of Oppression

by Blake T. Hilton, Journal of Scientific Psychology, December 2011

The French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a prominent psychological analyst of oppression during the 20th century, focusing his work predominantly on the oppression of the black Antillean as well as the Arab of Algeria. This article asserts the congruence of the psychological effects of French and U.S. colonialism, thus providing a cogent route to the application of Fanon’s theories. This article provides a breviloquent biography of Fanon’s life to afford insight to the development of his theories, and furnishes a review of his relevant literature. In an attempt to unveil the guises of oppression endured by the Native American, an historical account of distinctive illustrations of Native American oppression is conjointly incorporated. Based on Fanon’s theories, the etiology of several mental illnesses present in the modern Native American population is suggested to be unresolved grief from oppression.

Guerrilla Warfare

by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 1961

Click here to download this book.

The fundamental characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility. This permits it in a few minutes to move far from a specific theatre and in a few hours far even from the region, if that becomes necessary; permits it constantly to change front and avoid any type of encirclement. As the circumstances of the war require, the guerrilla band can dedicate itself exclusively to fleeing from an encirclement which is the enemy's only way of forcing the band into a decisive fight that could be unfavorable; it can also change the battle into a counter- encirclement (small bands of men are presumably surrounded by the enemy when suddenly the enemy is surrounded by stronger contingents; or men located in a safe place serve as a lure, leading to the encirclement and annihilation of the entire troops and supply of an attacking force).

The Nature of Mass Demonstrations

John Berger (1968)

Seventy years ago (on 6 May 1898) there was a massive demonstration of workers, men and women, in the centre of Milan. The events which led up to it involve too long a history to treat with here. The demonstration was attacked and broken up by the army under the command of General Beccaris. At noon the cavalry charged the crowd: the unarmed workers tried to make barricades: martial law was declared and for three days the army fought against the unarmed.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Alien-Nation" Zombies, Immigrants & Millennial Capitalism

by Jean & John Comaroff, 1999

What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with post-colonial, post-revolutionary nationalism? With labour history? With the "crisis" of the modernist nation-state? Why are these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic, epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why have immigrants-those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper place is always elsewhere-become pariah citizens of 'a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere to be dissolving? What, indeed, do any of these things, which bear the distinct taint of exoticism, tell us about the hard-edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times? Indeed, why pose such apparently perverse questions at all when our social world abounds with practical problems of immediate, unremitting gravitas?

Monday, 19 December 2011

Walter Rodney, The Dar es Salaam School and the Current Situation

by Dani Wadada Nabudere, 2006

Walter Rodney made a significant contribution to the African academy, the Pan-African revolution, and human emancipation. This was fully demonstrated in his activist commitment to the cause of the liberation of the people of Africa and those of African descent in the Diaspora and it is this achievement that has brought us here together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his cowardly assassination in 1980. It is also this commitment that gives us an opportunity to revisit these important historical events on our continent, the African Diaspora and the world at large.

Friday, 16 December 2011

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

by Nigel C Gibson


Keynote address at the Critical Caribbean Symposium Series “50 Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas,” Friday December 2nd, The College of the Bahamas

Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, 2011

Rather than seeing the prevalence of systemic political violence in Africa as resulting from a purportedly difficult “transition to democracy”, this article insists that accounts of such violence must be sought within the modes of rule of the democratic state itself. In particular, the manifestation of a contradiction between democracy and nationalism in a neo-colonial context, takes many different forms which cannot be resolved consensually given
existing modes of rule and the enrichment of the oligarchy at the expense of the nation. Xenophobic violence in South Africa is used to illustrate the argument. It is shown that a distinction between domains of politics (including modes of rule) must be drawn. In particular, this means distinguishing between a domain of “civil society” and one of “uncivil society”. It is within the latter that most people relate and respond to state power. Within that domain, the state does not rule people as citizens with legally enforceable rights, but simply as a population with various entitlements. In this domain, violent political practices by the state tend to be the norm rather than the exception, so that violence acquires a certain amount of legitimacy for resolving contradictions among people. The overcoming of systemic violence (itself a political choice) can only begin to be conceived via a different thought of politics as subjective practice.

Frantz Fanon en Afrique et en Asie

Samir Amin, Pambazuka

FANON, LES ANTILLES ET L'ESCLAVAGE

Fanon est né Antillais. L’histoire de son peuple, de l’esclavage, de sa relation à la métropole française, a donc été par la force des choses le point de départ de sa réflexion critique. La première et seule révolution sociale que le continent américain ait connu jusqu’aux temps récents est celle des esclaves de Saint Domingue (Haiti) ayant conquis par eux-mêmes leur liberté. La révolution de Saint Domingue coïncidait avec celle du peuple français. L’aile radicale de la révolution française sympathisait donc naturellement avec celle des esclaves ayant conquis leur liberté par eux-mêmes, devenus de ce fait d’authentiques citoyens. Mais bien entendu les colons de la place ne l’entendaient pas ainsi. Le recul de la révolution française s’est traduit dans les Antilles par le rétablissement de l’esclavage, à nouveau aboli par la Seconde République en 1848, sans que pour autant soit aboli leur statut colonial jusqu’en 1945, date à partir de laquelle s’ouvre un chapitre nouveau de leur histoire.

The climate change revolution will not be funded

by Jared Sacks, Pambazuka

‘Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories!’ - Amilcar Cabral

Over the past few weeks, world leaders, technocrats, and NGOs descended upon Durban for the 17th Conference of Parties (dubbed the Conference of Polluters by its critics). After 17 years of meetings to address climate change, the lack of action from world leaders clearly shows that the biggest polluting nations not only lack the political will to address the issue, but also seem to be actively carrying out the anti-environmental agenda of the largest corporations on this planet.

Thursday, 15 December 2011

Reconstruction or Transformation

by Ari Sitas, The 1995 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, Republished in Theoria

Click here to download this file in pdf.

Monday, 12 December 2011

Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: A Critical Review of Slovo’s “Has Socialism Failed?”

Pallo Jordan. Lusaka, February 1990.

“Has Socialism Failed?” is the intriguing title Comrade Joe Slovo has given to a discussion pamphlet published under the imprint of ‘Umsebenzi’, the quarterly newspaper of the SACP. The reader is advised at the outset that these are Slovo’s individual views, and not those of the SACP. While this is helpful it introduces a note of uncertainty regarding the pamphlet’s authority. The pamphlet itself is divided into six parts, the first five being an examination of the experience of the ‘socialist countries’, and the last, a look at the SACP itself.

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Frantz Fanon, la colère vive

Paperblog

"Sur le colonialisme, sur les conséquences humaines de la colonisation et du racisme, le livre essentiel est un livre de Fanon : Peau noire, masques blancs. Sur la décolonisation, ses aspects et ses problèmes, le livre essentiel est un livre de Fanon : Les Damnés de la terre. Toujours, partout, la même lucidité, la même force, la même intrépidité dans l'analyse, le même esprit de "scandale démystificateur"." Cet hommage d'Aimé Césaire dit assez la place qu'occupe Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) dans la conscience universelle. Dans le panthéon révolutionnaire qui s'élabore dès le milieu des années 1950, Fanon se situe clairement aux côtés d'Ho Chi Minh, de Che Guevara et des autres grandes figures du monde nouveau. Les Damnés de la terre (Maspero, 1961) ont été, et sont encore, la Bible des mouvements tiers-mondistes.

Chris Abani on the stories of Africa

 

Frantz Fanon: Third world revolutionary

by Martin Evans, OUP Blog

Frantz Fanon died of leukaemia on 6 December 1961 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA where he had sought treatment for his cancer.  At Fanon’s request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with full military honours by the Algerian National Army of Liberation, shortly after the publication of his most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth.

Solar Powered Cappucino

by Benjamin Fogel, Mahala

COP 17 drags on. Everybody would rather be somewhere else. When last Saturday’s protest march of around 10,000 people reached Durban’s ICC, the venue of the UN environmental conference, suits rushed out with iphones and blackberries. They seemed desperate to escape the boredom inside for a little local singing and dancing. Some delegates even pushed past mounted police to join the protest. The media was out en masse too. There were bored German, Russian and US TV crews alongside indie media like Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman in the flesh.

Friday, 9 December 2011

Fanon, Guevara, Mandela and Malema

Stef Terblanche, Black Business Quarterly

As the year draws to a close we enter a period of celebration, peace and goodwill. Across Africa millions will be commemorating the birth of Christ this month. A short while later the New Year will be welcomed with much celebration. And across the Atlantic in faraway America, many of the children of the African Diaspora will also be celebrating Kwanzaa. But last week, on December 6, many Africans – and others around the world - were commemorating the life of one of Africa’s true heroes, Frantz Fanon.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Pour se souvenir de Fanon Aujourd'hui, Décembre 6, 2011

Lewis R. Gordon

Souffrant d'une leucémie et la pneumonie, Frantz Omar Fanon a vécu sa dernière journée dans ce qu'il appelle «une nation de lyncheurs». Bethesda, Maryland, Etats-Unis, était à peine la place qu'il devrait prendre son dernier souffle. Mais tel était le cours de l'histoire. Un homme mourant de seulement trente-six ans, il vécut une vie d'au moins 100.

“A failed man”: Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS — a must read

Zackie Achmat, Writing Rights

Mark Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa provides the most rigorous analysis of the HIV epidemic that I have read. Revolutionary in its approach, Hunter’s account of the HIV epidemic interrogates the practices and impact of intimacy, sex and marriage over time through political economy and anthropology. He shows an inextricable link between the collapse of apartheid and the male-led household in Mandeni industrial township and Hlabisa’s rural villages in KwaZulu-Natal where adult HIV prevalence approached 40%.

The Political Economy of NGOs

The Political Economy of NGOs
by Feyzi Ismail, CounterFire

The Political Economy of NGOs is an invaluable contribution to the theorisation of NGOs. Despite the appearance of being agents of social transformation, Fernando explains how NGOs are co-opted by and reproduce the neoliberal state.

NGOs have been a source of controversy almost ever since they experienced a resurgence from about the mid-1980s. On the surface of it, the argument is simple: if NGOs get money and ideas largely from Western governments – the same ones imposing neoliberal development models to guarantee economic supremacy, whilst invading foreign countries to secure military supremacy – how can they also be working in the interests of the poor and oppressed?

Frantz Fanon: Fifty Years On

Hicham Yezza, Ceasefire Magazine

Fifty years ago today, on December  6, 1961, Frantz Fanon – Martinique-born and “Algerien par choix”, medical doctor and psychiatrist, celebrated author and rebel journalist, WW2 veteran and war hero, diplomat and revolutionary – died of Leukaemia in a New York hospital. He was 35 years old.

Fanon’s enduring relevance

by Ama Biney, Pambazuka

Fifty years since the untimely death on 6 December 1961 of Frantz Fanon, he continues to have immense relevance in our times. His writings were focused on the dialectics of the colonised and the coloniser during the era of the 1960s. Whilst that era has passed, new forms of colonialism between Africa and the former colonial powers, or Africa and the developed world, now manifest in the 21st century.

Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Remembering Fanon: Setting afoot a new humanity

by Lewis Gordon, Pambazuka

Suffering from leukemia and pneumonia, Frantz Omar Fanon lived his last day in what he called ‘a nation of lynchers.’ Bethesda, Maryland, USA, was hardly the place he expected to take his last breath. But such was the course of history. Although a dying man of only 36 years of age, he lived a life of at least 100.

Universalism in action

by Richard Pithouse, Pambazuka

In his first book, written as a student in Lyon, Frantz Fanon recounts that as a young black man filled with a desire to attain to the source of the world the white world slashed at his joy demanding that he return to his place. He found that in a racist world when he was present, reason was absent and when reason was present, he was absent. He abandoned the futile attempt to accommodate himself to a world that didn't recognise his humanity and committed himself to risk annihilation in the vortex of struggle to end that world in the hope that two or three truths wrought from that struggle would cast some light on the way being forged by others.

Living Fanon: The rationality of revolt

by Nigel Gibson, Pambazuka

What better way to celebrate, commemorate and critically reflect on the fiftieth year of Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’[1] than with a new North African syndrome: revolution - or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order - often against the odds - willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968:35). In a period of radical chance such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of January 25th: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[2]

Frantz Fanon and the global African worker

by Bill Fletcher, Pambazuka

It has been more than 30 years since I last read Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Pitfalls’) contained in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. It had been so long, in fact, that when I opened my paperback copy of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, the pages started to come out. That said, the essay read as if from just yesterday with warnings that it turned out were very prescient, including and ironically, with regard to his beloved Algeria.

Frantz Fanon: Prophet of African liberation

by Cameron Duodu, Pambazuka

The late 1950s, the era in which Ghana achieved its independence and took its place as the first British territory south of the Sahara to attain the nationhood that the visionaries of Pan-Africanism had demanded for Africa decades earlier, were heady days. Signs of the impending surrender of power to the African populations of the British and French colonies were in the air, and the atmosphere in our part of Africa was quite intoxicating. Of course, few of us knew very much about what was happening elsewhere in Africa.

‘Toward the African Revolution’: In the wake of Frantz Fanon

Aziz Salmone Fall, Pambazuka

On my way by plane to the pan-African Congress being held in Munich [1], I re-read ‘Toward the African Revolution’ to fire myself up and reassure myself that this was still the right path. ‘Toward the African Revolution’ will be the theme of our round table on 6 December this year as we mark the 50th anniversary of Fanon’s death. This round table will follow the film we are showing in his honour.

Frantz Fanon in Africa and Asia

Samir Amin, Pambazuka

Fanon was a person with a wide-ranging mind, a bright man with great qualities be it through the rationality of his ideas or for his courage to tell the truth. Specialised in psychiatry, he possessed all what was needed to be a very good psychiatrist. His publications, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ among others, dealing with the mental trauma of the colonised patients of Algeria testify to the pertinence of his great ideas. His book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ makes explicit his vision of the revolution that need to take place to pull the human race out of the barbarism of the capitalist system. And it is by virtue of this great vision that he has won over the hearts and minds of all Africans and Asian freedom lovers.

Fanon and ‘The Fact of Blackness’

Chambi Chachage, Pambazuka


‘What does a black man want?’- Frantz Fanon’
‘Look not upon me, because I am black’- The Song of Solomon 1:6
‘The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself’- Steve Biko
‘I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of colour from himself’ - Frantz Fanon

Fanon, coloniality and emancipation

by Eunice N. Sahle, Pambazuka

 

At a recent conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my colleague Professor Joseph Jordan brought together a group of scholars whose papers and commentaries reminded us of the centrality and continuing relevance of Frantz Fanon for people who have historically and in the contemporary world been subjected to colonial and neocolonial political, cultural, and economic practices. The conference also greatly benefitted from the presence and insights from Fanon’s daughter. Why is it, some might ask, does Fanon matter? After all, we live in a post imperial world, where by the only thing each of us need to do is to work hard, and then the markers of the good life – leading among them absolute individual freedom and personal wealth – will follow, regardless of ones’ historical experiences and the power dynamics that characterise political, cultural and economic landscapes at various national and world spatial scales.

“Africa is Under-Polluted”

by Benjamin Fogel, Mahala

The International Conference Center (ICC) in Durban where the COP 17 talks are taking place is located between a Nedbank office block and a mall. A location that effectively symbolizes what ultimately stands in the way of genuine environmental action: state-protected big business and the gratifying wonders of consumerism.

Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later

by Richard Pithouse, South African Civil Society Information Service & CounterPunch

Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters. 
- Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution

Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both Fanon and the first major attempt to think through the limits of newly independent Africa.

Armoured Cities

by Chris McMichael, Mahlala

The last few weeks have shown how quickly a global police state can be mobilized when people stop listening to rulers and attempt to reclaim public space. Hundreds of protesters In Tahir Square demanding an end to the military generals’ highjacking of the Egyptian revolution were shot dead with US-manufactured weapons and dosed with chemical agents. Meanwhile, in a clampdown co-ordinated through the Department of Homeland Security, police departments in 18 US cities attempted to shut down the Occupations with pepper spray and sonic weapons. In the UK, the government announced a blanket ban on protests during the Olympics next year and have proposed a massive increase in their power of ‘pre-emptive arrest’; an attempt to institute legal clampdowns on dissent under the guise of securing the sporting spectacle.

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Jean-Paul Sartre on Frantz Fanon (1961-2011)

Anti-colonialist thinker, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon died fifty years ago today, on December 6, 1961

To mark the anniversary, here's an extract from Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth, published in Fanon's final year:
Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!' and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!' It was the golden age.

Monday, 5 December 2011

Frantz Fanon and C.L.R James on Intellectualism and Enlightened Rationality

by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2. 2005

This essay explores critical accounts of modern rationality and efforts to articulate a conception of reason that is tied to the idea of decolonization as project. It focuses on the work of two of the most widely known and influential Caribbean theorists: the Martiniquean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.

Nina Simone: To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Sunday, 4 December 2011

Frantz Fanon: My Hope and Hero

by Orlando Patterson, New World Quarterly, Volume 2, Nos. 3 & 4, 1966 (Guyana Independence Issue) Edited by George Lamming.

It is impossible to do justice to this remarkable work in the short space I have at my disposal. Fanon’s The Damned is one of those rare books which stands out not only through the brilliance of its penetrating social and psychological insights, or through the sheer vigour and originality of its style, but derives its greatest importance from the fact of being the key work which embodies the zeitgeist of a revolutionary social movement. That same relationship which the works of Voltaire and Rousseau bore to the French Revolution, which the Communist Manifesto to the revolutionary labour movements of the 19th century, is to be found in the relationship between The Damned and the movement of the colonised peoples of the world in overthrowing their oppressors.