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.
