'We Must Work Out New Concepts': 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, 2013.

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. After completing this course students 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 Mondays 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 and contribute to the discussions in the seminar

3.     write a thousand word book review for each seminar

4.     write an seven to eight thousand word journal article to be handed in on the last day of the fourth term

The programme for the course is as follows:

Term 3

·        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)

Term 4

·        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 Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1999)

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

·        Seminar Eleven: Michael Neocosmos 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 (1938)

·        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

·        Kevin Anderson Marx at the Margins (2010)

·        Paige Arthur Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (2010)

·        James Baldwin Giovanni's Room (1956)

·        Jean-François Bayart The Politics of the Belly (1989)

·        Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949)

·        Steve Biko I Write What I Like (1978)

·        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)

·        George Ciccariello-Maher We Created Chávez (2013)

·        Angela Davis Women, Race & Class (1983)

·        Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1881)

·        Patrick Ehlen Frantz Fanon a Spiritual Biography (2000)

·        Stephen Ellis External Mission:  The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 (2012)

·        Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)

·        Frantz Fanon Towards the African Revolution (1969)

·        Grant Farred (ed.) ‘Imperative of the Now’, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Fanon (2012)

·        James Ferguson Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006)

·        Sujatha Fernandes Who Can Stop the Drums? (2010)

·        Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)

·        Nomboniso Gasa (ed.) Women in South African History (2004)

·        Irène Gendzier Frantz Fanon (1973)

·        Mark Gevisser Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2008)

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

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

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

·        David Goldberg Racist Culture (1993)

·        Lewis Gordon Bad Faith and Anti-Black 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)

·        Pumla Gqola What is Slavery to Me? (2010)

·        Antonio Gramsci The Prison Notebooks (1929-1935)

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

·        Peter Hallward Absolutely Postcolonial (2001)

·        Peter Hallward Damming the Flood (2007)

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

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

·        bell hooks Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (1984)

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

·        Jomo Kenyatta Facing Mount Kenya (1938)

·        Neil Lazarus The Postcolonial Unconsciousness (2010)

·        Rosa Luxemburg The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004)

·        Mahmood Mamdani Citizen & Subject (1996)

·        Nelson Mandela No Easy Walk to Freedom (1965)

·        Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom (1994)

·        Xolela Mangcu Biko: A Biography (2012)

·        N. Chabani Manganyi Being Black in the World (1973)

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

·        Karl Marx The Civil War in France (1871)

·        Manning Marable Malcom X: A Life of Reinvention (2011)

·        Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony (2001)

·        Ben Maclennan A Proper Degree of Terror (1986)

·        Bloke Modisane Blame Me on History (1963)

·        Moeletsi Mbeki Architects of Poverty (2009)

·        Noel Mostert Frontiers (1992)

·        Nick Nesbitt Universal Emancipation (2008)

·        Nick Nesbitt Caribbean Critique (2013)

·        Julius Nyerere Freedom & Unity (1967)

·        George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)

·        Reiland Rabaka Forms of Fanonism (2010)

·        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 Colonialism & Neo-colonialism (1964)

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

·        Léopold Senghor On African Socialism (1964)

·        Stathis Kouvelakis Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (2003)

·        Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Wizard of the Crow (2006)

·        Michel-Rolf Trouillot Silencing the Past (1995)

·        Sojourner Truth Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave (1850)

·        Jeffery Webber Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (2012)

·        Raúl Zibechi Dispersing Power (2010)

·        Raúl Zibechi Territories in Resistance (2012)

·        Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)