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| Lewis Gordon |
Kirchgassner:
Describe the time in your life when you first read Frantz Fanon. What were your
initial impressions of his writings and why is Fanon still important for your
own work today?
Gordon:
I first attempted to read Fanon when I was about thirteen years of age. My
uncle, Shaleem Solomon, is a Rastafarian. He had a collection of books on Black
Liberation, which included writings by Almicar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Kwame
Nkrumah. I found Fanon’s prose gripping, but I didn’t yet know about the
thinkers to whom he was referring and the contexts of his discussion beyond the
clear ones of colonialism and racism. Those ideas stayed in the back of my
mind, however, as I soon after at fourteen read works by Malcolm X, James
Baldwin, and Angela Davis, with additions of G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. When I
read Jean-Jacques Rousseau during my years at Lehman College, I kept hearing
the voice of Fanon. I was delighted to see Les Damnés de la terre (“The Damned
of the Earth,” more popularly known as “The Wretched of the Earth”) in M. Shawn
Copeland’s graduate seminar on Political Theology when I was a doctoral student
at Yale, and the supervisor of my dissertation, the late Professor Maurice
Natanson, was very enthusiastic about his inclusion in the thesis. Fanon became
a constant presence in my work because he addressed human affairs, particularly
those pertaining to Black people, with a heavy dose of something often
unfashionable in the academy: reality.
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