Fanon speaks to the subaltern

Abstract

In recent years there has been a veritable explosion in Fanonian studies and this would be a welcome development given the scope and depth of Fanon's insights. Unfortunately, Fanon's work itself has been “post-alized” in recent years especially in the Western literary academy. This exploration of Fanon's work has, for the most part, been in the form of “textual” analyses which tend to obfuscate the radical humanistic underpinnings of Fanon's writings. Many postcolonial and postmodern discourses which have appropriated Fanon to buttress their valorization of “difference” and “identity politics” in an era hostile to universalism and humanism have, in effect, excised the critical, normative, and revolutionary humanist vision which informs Fanon's oeuvre. As such, these renderings have robbed Fanon's work of the critical insights and interpretive frameworks that it offers in confronting some of the pressing issues of our day: questions of identity politics, difference, class, agency, political struggle, etc. The intent of this paper is to argue that Fanon offers a dialetical framework for discerning relationships of identity as ideological constructions which mediate between structurally located hegemonic blocs and the conciousness of empirical subjects, and, which clearly situates identity and difference within broader networks of domination and exploitation by navigating a course between the Structure/ agency; humanism/anti-humanism binaries that have dominated contemporary social thought.

Citation

Scatamburlo-D'Annibale, V.L. and Langman, L. (2002), "Fanon speaks to the subaltern", Lehmann, J.M. (Ed.) Bringing Capitalism Back for Critique by Social Theory (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 253-284. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(02)80010-X