An irrepressible openness to the universal:

I am speaking of the irrepressible presence in Fanon’s critical vision of an openness to the universal: its demand for the resumption by the colonized subject of the “universality inherent in the human condition”; its insistence that “there will be an authentic disalienation only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their proper places; and, consequently, its proleptic narration of the story of the “colonial world” from the standpoint of a vision of “human things”.

-Ato Skeyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 1996

Fanon's Dialectic of Experience

Fanon's Dialectic of Experience by Ato Sekyi-Otu

Fanon's Dialectic of Experience by Ato Sekyi-Otu

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon Reading Group Text Eight: Ato Sekyi-Otu - 'Fanon & the Possibility of Post-Colonial Critical Imagination'

The reading for this week is from Ato Sekyi-Otu, author of the classic text in Fanon studies, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (1996, Harvard University Press). It is titled Fanon & the Possibility of Post-Colonial Critical Imagination and it is online at the Codesria site here. In this article Sekyi-Otu engages with Achille Mbembe's famous article African Modes of Self-Writing which is online here.