“The issue of reading Fanon today, then, is perhaps not about finding the moment of relevance in Fanon’s text that corresponds with the world, but in searching for the moments where Fanon’s text and the world do not correspond, and asking how Fanon, the revolutionary, would think and act in the period of retrogression.”
A complete study of 1968 and its legacies in Europe can not solely deal with events that occurred on the continent. 1968 was, in fact, a “global phenomenon”; with ideas perpetrated in Europe reaching as far as Mexico, China, and India, but to name a few . The beginning of this mutualistic relationship between “New Left” groups on different continents (which spawned the revolutionary feeling which would result in the events of 1968), can be seen in Frantz Fanon’s text The Wretched of the Earth; most importantly with regards to the growth of Third Worldism and its inevitable impact on the West. The first chapter of his book Concerning Violence, on display here in the “Third World” section of the exhibition, became a sort of revolutionary handbook for the people of post-colonial Africa (particularly the countries of Algeria and Kenya) and across the world.
In 1961 Fanon, in the last stages of leukaemia, decided to dictate a book which was to become his last offering of post-colonial theory to the world. It would, however, somewhat regrettably, make him the founding father on the subject and the transcribed text, The Wretched of the Earth, an inspiration to many. Fanon obviously believed his work to be of great significance to those at the time; otherwise he would not have been so keen to see it completed before his untimely death. So why did The Wretched of the Earth become such a powerful and emotive piece? If we ...
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Protest poster,
Secondary Sources
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“evil” shows how unfairly these black Africans were treated (93). The author further justifies the
Nothing good ever comes out of violence.Two wrongs never make it right, but cause harm. Contemporary society has not responded enough legacies of historical globalization. This essay will cover the following arguments such as residential schools, slavery and the Sierra Leone civil war.
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Freud defined civilization as the “whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes-namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (Freud, Sigmund 42). Knowing the history of a civilization is crucial to understanding its effects on its own people. Frantz Fanon wrote in his book, Black Skin, White Masks that the black man “has no culture, no civilization, and no ‘long historical past’” (Fanon 17). The black man’s lack of civilization can be attributed to their enslavement. Once black men were taken from their home country and forced into slavery, they lost their own civilization. They were thrust into the New World,
After a journey into the dark history of Europe and Africa with Sven Lindqvist, I found myself shocked. It’s earth shattering. Ideas and historical events are presented through a journal/proposal of his unique view on racism. Lindqvist raises questions as to where racism was spurred and why what happened in late 1800’s and early 1900’s lead to the holocaust. Including religion, personal human values, advanced warfare and even societies’ impact as a whole. His travels through the Sahara and Africa in the early chapters show a more current day view of society over seas. The description of the desolate continent and harsh conditions paints a picture of what previous civilization lived through. He explains that part of the reason he has traveled to the desert is to feel the space all around him, a definite emptiness if you will. As his travels progress he introduces his own family life that pertains to the human emotion, which is also a big focus point in this book. Childhood beatings over taking the lord’s name in vain, dropped calls from his daughter that leave him torn and sad. He does an excellent job on taking the reader on a personal journey with him through his current day traveling and even his early life. Linking these personal experiences and tying in histories misconceptions of “right and wrong” is what makes this book so valuable. Lindqvist gives a relevant and educated answer to the question of how racism became such a terrible tribulation in all parts of the world.
After exploring the backgrounds of Joseph Conrad and Alan Paton, we realize the differences in their upbringings and how that may have had an effect on their outlooks of Africa. These authors grew up in completely different settings in completely different time periods; Joseph Conrad in a predominantly white area amongst those who would be the colonists of Africa in the future, and Alan Paton in the Africa itself amongst those who the colonization affected most greatly. These factors contribute to the different viewpoints that are apparent in their respective works. From analyzing the content of their writings, it is apparent that, although, both authors have the same overall opinion of colonialism, these opinions are due to two very different reasons.
In the French film entitled Lumumba, director Raoul Peck recreates the revolutionary struggle of Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected Prime Minister of The Congolese Republic. In the movie, we do not see much of the independence struggle against the Belgian government, but we begin to see the reconstruction of the African state in African hands. While no one ever claimed that decolonization was easy, maybe this particular example can best be explained by Fanon’s simplified little quip “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. ” In this paper, I will seek to locate where this post-colonial violence is located in discourses regarding race, class and gender. Particularly, I will look at the representations of race and class, and the lack of the representation of gender, in order to draw conclusions about the nature of representation and the effects this has on anti-colonial film.
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In his analysis of French colonization in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon relates
Frantz Fanon argues the decolonization must always be a violent phenomenon because resisting a colonizing power using only politics will not work. Europeans justified colonization by treating it as gods work. They believed that god wanted then to occupy all lands and spread the word of god to savages of darker skin color. Fanon joined the Algerian Nationalist Movement when the Algeria was being colonized be the French. Many examples of violence written of in The Wretched of the Earth were taken from the struggle for independence in Algeria. Also the writing is sympathetic towards colonized natives. Fanon claims decolonization causes violent actions from both settlers and natives and creates intolerant views toward the opposite party.
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Fanon start off his argument with describing how colonialism and decolonization are violent affairs. He describes the colonized and colonizer as old adversaries whose first meeting was rooted in violence and continued relationship was sustained at the point of a gun (Fanon, p. 2). He goes on to state that the colonized person is a fabricated person created by the colonizer and that the colonizer validates themselves, via wealth, through the colonial relationship. Decolonization, therefore, is the destruction of these fabrications and the liberation of ...