Fanon as Example and Figure: A Conversation Between Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Let me say from the outset that it would be a mistake to make Fanon into a clay model for revolution,” says Gayatri Spivak. I’ve asked her about Göran Olson’s 2014 celebrated documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, which she prefaced. Herself the author of an influential body work that includes A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and more recently a translation of Aimé Césaire’s play A Season in the Congo, she engaged Olson’s film in signature critical mode. As a counterpoint to the documentary, her preface avoids the often repeated story of Fanon as a champion of counter-violence.  “Instead,” she says, “one must understand that in the initial chapters of The Wretched of the Earth, which a lot of people read as an apology of violence, Fanon is actually claiming complicity with what was surrounding him. That is, the violence of colonization.” “I will be as violent as they are, when they hold my life as worth less than theirs,” says Frantz Fanon, the healer. 

Race in the Birth of the Human Science

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents

Race in the Birth of the Human Science

Professor Lewis Gordon (Temple): Race in the Birth of the Human Sciences

Modern thought developed a dissociative relationship to the study of race, and contemporary thought has largely taken that neurosis to the point of systemic denial, where many intellectuals could paradoxically only talk about race through, in effect, refusing to do so.  The speaker will offer a portrait of how race and human science are two sides of the same coin and outline the varieties of challenges they pose to contemporary thought, especially of the scientific and political kinds.

Speech at the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center Harlem, NYC

by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Fondation Frantz Fanon
2 October 2011

Yesterday I imagined our friend and comrade Drucilla Cornell addressing the crowd gathered outside Wall Street: “Do not be afraid to speak of revolution!” she said.

Since no microphones and no speakers were allowed in the area, the people assembled passed on the message by word of mouth, from one to another, quietly, almost silently.