An Introduction to the Thought of Frantz Fanon

'We Must Work Out New Concepts'

An Introduction to the Thought of Frantz Fanon

A post-graduate course in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Rhodes University, to be taught by Richard Pithouse during the second semester, 2012.

Frantz Fanon died in 1961. In the years that have passed since his death he has become a canonical thinker in a number of academic fields including postcolonial studies, critical race theory and Africana studies. In South Africa his ideas continue to animate some of the most compelling theoretical innovation that is being produced in the academy and to inspire and shape the thinking of political militants.

This course will give students an opportunity to engage with Fanon’s key writings as well as the most important secondary literature developed in response to his work. Any student that completes this course will have a solid foundation on which to develop an ongoing engagement with both Fanon's work and the key debates in the best secondary literature on Fanon.

Seminars will be held in the Politics Departments on Wednesdays between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.

Each student will be required to:

1.      attend all twelve seminars

2.      do the reading for each seminar in advance of the seminar, prepare a short written response to each reading and contribute to the discussions in the seminar

3.      write a thousand word book review

4.      write an eight to ten thousand word journal article

The programme for the course is as follows:

• Seminar One: C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (1938)

                            

• Seminar Two: Jean-Paul Sartre Anti-Semite & Jew (1943)                 

• Seminar Three: Aimé Césaire Discourse on Colonialism (1955)

• Seminar Four: Alice Cherki Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (2000)     

• Seminar Five: Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks (1951) 

• Seminar Six: Frantz Fanon A Dying Colonialism (1959)

• Seminar Seven: Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

• Seminar Eight: Lewis Gordon Fanon & the Crisis of European Man (1995)

• Seminar Nine: T.  Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1999)

• Seminar Ten: Ato Sekyi-Otu Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (1996)

• Seminar Eleven: From "Foreign Natives" to "Native Foreigners"
  Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa (2010)

• Seminar Twelve: Nigel Gibson: Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2011)

Compulsory Reading

• Alice Cherki Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (2000)


• Aimé Césaire Discourse on Colonialism (1955)


• Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks (1952)


• Frantz Fanon A Dying Colonialism (1959)


• Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1961)


• Nigel Gibson Fanonian Practices in South Africa (2011)


• Lewis Gordon Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995)


• C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins (1936)


• Michael Neocosmos From "Foreign Natives" to "Native Foreigners"
Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa (2010)


• Jean-Paul Sartre Anti-Semite & Jew (1943)


• T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1999)


• Ato Sekyi-Otu Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996)




Recommended Reading 


• James Baldwin Giovanni's Room (1956)


• Steve Biko I Write What I Like (1978)


• Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949)


• Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan Frantz Fanon and the Psychology Of Oppression (1985)


• Amilcar Cabral Return to the Source (1974)


• Aimé Césaire Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939)


• Patrick Chamoiseau Texaco (1992)


• Angela Davis Women, Race & Class (1983)


• Patrick Ehlen Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (2000)


• Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)


• Frantz Fanon Towards the African Revolution (1969)


• Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)


• Irène Gendzier Frantz Fanon (1973)


• Nigel Gibson (ed). Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Legacy (1999)


• Nigel Gibson Frantz Fanon: The Post-Colonial Imagination (2003)


• Nigel Gibson (ed.) Living Fanon (2011)


• Lewis Gordon Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995)


• Lewis Gordon (ed. with T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White) Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996) 


• Lewis Gordon (ed.) Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (1997) 


• Lewis Gordon Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (2000) 


• Antonio Gramsci The Prison Notebooks (1929-1935)


• Ernest ‘Che’ Guevara The Che Guevara Reader (2003)


• G.W.F. Hegel 'The Master Slave Dialectic' from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)


• Paget Henry Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (2000)


• Peter Hallward Absolutely Postcolonial (2001)


• Peter Hallward Damming the Flood (2007)


• George Jackson Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970)


• Karl Marx The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)


• Karl Marx The Civil War in France (1871)


• Neil Lazarus The Postcolonial Unconsciousness (2010)


• Rosa Luxemburg The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004)


• Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony (2001)


• Moeletsi Mbeki Architects of Poverty (2009)


• Bloke Modisane Blame Me on History (1963)


• Cedric Robinson Black Marxism (1983)


• Kristin Ross Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995)


• Kristin Ross May ’68 and its Afterlives (2002)


• James Yaki Sales Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (2010)


• Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness (1943)


• Jean-Paul Sartre Anti-Semite and Jew (1943)


• Jean-Paul Sartre Colonialism & Neocolonialism (1964)


• Jean-Paul Sartre Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)


• Michel-Rolf Trioullot Silencing the Past (1995)