New Texts Out Now: Anthony Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics

Anthony C. Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Jadaliyya

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Anthony Alessandrini (AA): This book started as a way to bring together and expand on a lot of pre-existing work I had been doing on the life and work of Frantz Fanon. As I worked on the book, though, I came to realize that the larger topic I was dealing with was the question of how to address the work of a political thinker like Fanon, who was so intricately involved in the struggles of his time, within the context of our own, different struggles. The fact that Fanon died so young and lived so intensely has made him a figure ripe for hagiography. So one danger is that he will be referred to (or gestured toward) rather than read carefully. On the other hand, he has sometimes been dismissed as a figure “of his time” through the same gesture, with a simplified version of his ideas—for example, his complex and agonized writings about violence in the colonial context—ventriloquized and then easily dismissed.

Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions

By Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya

My theoretical ethic is…“antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. – Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”[1]

Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives

Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives

Veneration and Struggle: Commemorating Frantz Fanon

A Special Issue of the Journal of Pan African Studies

As tradition has it, golden jubilees usually provide perfect occasions to reflect back on historical accomplishments that are recent enough to reminisce and important enough to still matter. The second decade of the 21st century marks such a reflective moment across the African world for those who find value in the lessons of the past, their contemporaneous applications and the implications of both for the visions of progress, prosperity and peace. The importance of this decade has already been determined by historical forces that are at least five decades old and the constant need to never forget them. Wherever in the African Diaspora one might exist, the significance of the decade of the 1960s reverberates in both the collective memories and the objective realities. As such, our effort in 2011 to eagerly and unapologetically reflect on the legacy of Frantz Fanon is motivated in one sense by the need to appreciate the iconic figures of the past.
- Kurt B. Young, from the Introduction

The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects

by Anthony C. Alessandrini, Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 64-80, September 2009

This article addresses a tendency within postcolonial studies to place the work of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in opposition. This has obscured the real, and potentially very productive, similarities between them. The most important of these links has to do with their shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism: for Fanon and Foucault, this critique of the traditional humanist subject provides a way of opposing what they both see as the dangerous nostalgia for a lost moment of origin. Furthermore, Fanon and Foucault both end in a moment of ethics, but it is an ethics without the sort of stable subjects assumed by humanism. I offer a consideration of some of the links that can be found in several texts by Fanon and Foucault. I then attempt to define the term I will be using to describe their shared strategy of an ethics without subjects: the ‚humanism effect.‛ I conclude by trying to suggest some of the strategic possibilities of an ethics without subjects in the postcolonial context.

Special Issue of the 'Journal of French & Francophone Philosophy' on 'The Wretched of the Earth'

This special issue of the Journal of French & Francophone Philosophy is titled 'Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Fifty Years Later' and includes articles by Thinking Africa fellows Nigel Gibson, Jane Gordon and Lewis Gordon. It is online (free) here.