What Mandela means to intellectuals: with Lesley Dikeni and Nomboniso Gasa

In Conversation with Mahmood Mamdani

by Bhakti Shringarpure, Warscapes

It is in his bittersweet and touching book on the Asian expulsion from Uganda that one can trace the beginnings of author and intellectual Mahmood Mamdani’s world-view. He captures the terrifying experience of families being uprooted from ancestral homes and businesses, their scramble to leave amidst looting and violence and, most poignantly, the racism and hostility experienced during their resettlement period in Britain. As his flight takes off for London, he remembers seeing the places of childhood fade from view, and confesses that the tragedy taught him a simple, political lesson: “Unless you belong to the class that rules, a good argument will never be enough to safeguard your interests.”

Achebe The Native Intellectual

by Jeremy  Weate, Chimurenga Chronic

There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, has raised a dust storm of reaction in Nigeria and exposed the unprepossessing tectonics of ethnicity. Opinions have been largely divided by differing allegiances either side of the river Niger. What is an outsider to make of it all?

In the celebrated text The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon outlines three phases in the development of the “native intellectual”. In the first phase, Fanon writes that

the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power […] His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation.

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

50 Years Later: Fanon's Legacy

by Nigel C Gibson

Keynote address at the Critical Caribbean Symposium Series “50 Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas,” Friday December 2^nd, The College of the Bahamas

Fanon, coloniality and emancipation

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Intellectuals

Reimagining the Revolutionary Vanguard: Frantz Fanon and the Task of the Intellectual

by Adaner Usmani

At a time when dreams of radical social transformation wither in the corporate air of the modern university, it might seem presumptuous to wonder from within its halls whether the intellectual can find a home in projects striving for social upheaval. Often, one runs the risk of being declared an anachronism—an intransigent dilettante who has yet to heed Fukuyama's call to disarm. At the very least, it will be argued that the aspiring ―revolutionary intellectual purposefully forgets the privilege that makes him possible. To the Right, this makes him a hypocrite; to the Left, this signs a lack of self-awareness. Wary of the insufficiencies of such objections, I suggest here that the possibility of rehabilitating the enterprise of the radical intellectual depends on our willingness to jettison the binaries that ground these caricatures.

Representations of the Intellectual

by Edward Said

The First Lecture, Representations of the Intellectual (30 mins), is here as an MP3: Representations of the Intellectual

A Review by Grant Farred

There is an old tradition in English cricket, one that should have been rendered anachronistic decades ago but was still observed as recently as the 1970's. It is the annual game between the Players and the Gentlemen, a cricket match in which the best Professionals opposed the finest Amateurs at Lords, the sport's international headquarters. The amateurs were cricketers who hailed from the English ruling classes and, after collecting their Oxbridge degrees and their cricket colors, played the game purely for enjoyment.

Between Existentialism and Marxism

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre’s interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism.

To Dream of Fanon: Reconstructing a Method for Thought by a Revolutionary Intellectual

by Anjali Prabhu, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XIX, No 1 (2011) pp 57-70

The half-century, which is the time that has elapsed since the publication of Wretched of the Earth, seems such a short period when one imagines its author in all his intellectual magnificence, his anguish, and the many details we all know of his short-lived reality. Dare one say, after the concept has long been declared “dead” that we imagine him as having been a live “author”? As I write this, the idea of various notable intellectuals and revolutionary movements could come to mind in order for them to serve as interesting comparisons as we discuss and remember Fanon, his analyses of the colonial aftermath, and his many predictions, both explicit and implicit.