AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT IS DECOLONIZATION? FRANTZ FANON’STHE WRETCHED OF THE EARTHAND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’SCRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON*

Abstract

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of "dialectical reason", as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of "dialectical reason" allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the "praxis" of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach

“…More importantly, one can witness a different kind of dialectic running through two ground-breaking texts of a revolutionary decolonial thinker Frantz Omar Fanon, Black Skin and White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The latter is credited as the Bible of decolonisation by Stuart Hall (quoted by Bhabha, 2004), for it's one of the first critical and revolutionary reflections on colonial condition and its influence in the global South and many former colonies is deep and enduring (Etherington, 2016). As Fanon is critical of the dialectic of Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre, he reformulated that dialectic.…”

“…Fanon, like Sartre, believed that legitimate dialectics provided space and scope for critical engagement with denied or repressed representations of the colonised. Etherington (2016) observes that Fanon, building on the philosophical work of Sartre (and Hegel), created his conception of dialectic that he believed was crucial for social revolution and change by way of decolonisation. Along these lines, our argument is straightforward: substantive decolonisation is not possible unless we critically understand colonial conditions and create circumstances for genuine representations of the colonised, as there was profound colonial suppression of the colonial subjects both ontologically and epistemologically.…”