![]() The result reads comically peculiar: at one point, he refers to the black peasant as “the great male of the earth, the world’s sperm,” whose purpose is “to till, to plant, to eat… to make love with nature.” At another instance, he asserts full-on African essentialism when he describes the “essence of blackness in the well of heart.” Several currents of Négritude existed, and in this essay, Sartre engages with Léopold Senghor, who praised African existence and epistemology as essentially more in line with the rhythms of nature. ![]() ![]() Sartre imagines Négritude as an empowering force for the colonized African, a necessary vehicle to “ himself erect and proudly himself a black man, face to face with white men,” in preparation for a coming universal revolution. We begin in 1948: Sartre authors “Black Orpheus,” an essay on the Négritude movement and its role in the global struggle for decolonization and freedom. Négritude was a Francophone cultural movement aimed at reconciling, redefining, and reclaiming black identity in a colonial world. It originated in Paris, and primarily featured writers and artists from West Africa and the Caribbean. A short overview of their relationship is worth examining, both to humanize these intellectuals and demonstrate the ubiquity and timelessness of the “Misguided Ally.” Despite Sartre’s fervent support for the anticolonial cause, there are moments captured in interactions with Fanon that illuminate an amusing disconnect: to me, they’re reminiscent of the archetypal, all-too-enthusiastic white supporter who can never quite get it right. I’ve long been fascinated by his relationship with psychiatrist and FLN revolutionary Frantz Fanon. After Algeria’s victory in 1962, Sartre remained steadfast in his anticolonial activism: he would write on topics such as the Cuban Revolution, US intervention in Vietnam and unjust French immigration policies. Sartre famously condemned the French military’s widespread, systemic use of torture on FLN members and Algerian civilians, and backed unconditional independence for the colony. Several years after the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, he became a vocal proponent of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the Algerian nationalist group that waged armed struggle for liberation. Jean-Paul Sartre was perhaps the most influential member of this latter group and began writing on anticolonial resistance in the late 1940s. In this course we will read widely across Fanon’s writings, while also considering relevant or related work by his contemporaries such as Aimé Césaire and Richard Wright.Few European intellectuals concerned themselves with the dissolution of the imperial projects across the Global South in the mid-20th century even fewer advocated outright for the independence of European-held African and Asian colonies. A recent new collection of his psychiatric writings, together with two previously unpublished plays, allows us to understand how probing were his analyses of the colonial situation in all its dimensions, and how extensively he thought about the means for decolonization of the mind as well as the state. As he pointed out, the concept of race was central to colonialism, imperialism and their cultures Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) was one of the first books to analyze the experience of race in a racialized society from the subjective point of view of the Black person. Fanon himself was a psychiatrist, brought up in the tradition of French psychiatry which draws widely not only on medicalised psychiatry but also psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics and literature. More recently, “decolonization” has come to take on a related meaning, that is critical appraisal of Western culture and its institutions in order to remove the legacies of hierarchical, racialized thinking towards minorities and other cultures. Fanon himself was centrally engaged from the first with this decolonizing process and the question of how to achieve it. Very quickly, however, Fanon’s work also became a central text for the Black Panthers in the US. His best known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was characterized by Stuart Hall as the “Bible of decolonization”: at that time, the word decolonization referred to the literal process of a colonial country gaining political independence, and Fanon was certainly central to that in colonial Algeria. In recent years, Frantz Fanon has increasingly become recognized as one of the most important and formative philosophers or theorists of the mid-twentieth century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |