Creole Citizens of France: The Trans-Atlantic Politics of Antillean Education and the Creole Movement since 1945.

My real interest in Fanon dates from a night in August 1967 when, together with a couple hundred West Indian students in London, we converged on our Students' Center to listen to a lecture delivered by Stokely Carmichael. One or two of us in the audience had even been at primary school with him in Trinidad, though he probably didn't suspect it. “Can't you remember him?” asked an old classmate of mine, trying to jolt my memory. “He was always fighting!” My recollections from that night are several--the white agent provocateur who entered the building and tried unsuccessfully to incite us to violence against him; the contingent of policemen who, transported in an assortment of vehicles, swooped down on the building from all directions as we stood talking to Stokely after the lecture; the haste with which Stokely was spirited away from the scene by his friends wishing to avoid an “incident”; the anguish with which I watched some of my friends come to within an inch of blowing their cool in the face of the police provocations--yet a riot was avoided, and though the British government still banned Stokely from the country shortly afterwards, their arguments would have looked much more plausible if we had succumbed to the provocations of that night.

Rescuing fanon from the critics

The failure to achieve meaningful development by African countries, especially those that inherited relatively advanced infrastructure at independence, has remained a conundrum. Utilizing Frantz Fanon’s major writings and ideas, and other commentaries on Fanon’s work, this paper aims to expose the problem of achieving genuine development outside the dominant neoliberal paradigm. According to the government of Zimbabwe, the aim of their indigenization program is to achieve authentic national development and decolonization from British and European imperial control. By unmasking the contradictory nature of elite nationalism and the decolonization process in Zimbabwe, the paper unmasks the complexity of development outside the dominant Euro-America (corporate capitalist) paradigm. I consider the Zimbabwe case as an example of elite nationalists domesticating the neoliberal market system to achieve selfish economic aggrandizement while the rest of the population experience immizerating poverty. The em...

Frantz Fanon and the problematic of decolonization: perspectives on Zimbabwe

ed from the lived experience. He lambasts intellectuals whose theoretical work has become an end in-itself. He rails against intellectual narcissism stating that A permanent dialogue with oneself...where intellectual work has become suffering and the reality was not at all that of living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, but different combinations of words (Fanon 1967:257). For Fanon, it is evident that if the race-based system of colonialism has led to a dehumanisation of the indigenous people and had reduced them to an existence less than that of human beings, then the intellectual’s engagement with the people must have as his/her bounden duty the full restoration of that humanity. Although blackness had, through the Afro-American and Caribbean scholars particularly among the members of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). In fact, there is now an annual conference in the United States of America that has as its theme ‘Philosophy Born of Struggle’ (or PBOS). 109 | P a g e colonial project acquired negative connotations, the humanity of the colonised is something that is always assumed in Fanon’s thought. The basic problem as observed by Fanon “is that of restoring man back to his proper place” (1967b: 88). He is, thus, always guided by that political imperative: the reversal of depersonalization suffered through the colonial encounter and to put ordinary people at the centre of political processes and of the universe. Secondary literature on Fanon corroborates the view of intellectuals as combining both theory and praxis in the conception of freedom. This is particularly so in the works of Gibson and Hansen, for example. In “Frantz Fanon: Portrait of a Revolutionary Intellectual", Hansen views Fanon’s activism as a ‘model’ for the way in which an African intellectual should conduct him/herself. He notes that for Fanon, knowledge of the world is not enough but what matters is to change it. This means that the intellectual must not only introduce a programme of action to change the undesirable situation, as Hansen notes, but must as well “actually embark on activities which lead to change” (1974: 25, own italics added). Thus, his reading of Fanon’s intellectualism is not that of a privileged individual who merely reflects upon the contradictions of society and exposes the problems immanent in it. As important as reflection is, the intellectual must also use her knowledge to guide her into action, that is, she must live her ideas. Gibson in Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, locates the intellectual’s role within the context of the organization, particularly as a dialectical relation between the party militants and the rural masses. Accordingly, the organization is understood in epistemic terms as intellectual exchanges which the intellectual and the people have with regards to their revolutionary struggles. As such, the organization becomes the framework for “intellectual communication and exchange...[and] as responses people draw on as they reflect on their

The concept of alienation in the work of Frantz Fanon.

This paper explores the contemporary status and role of the collective human right of self-determination, with particular reference to the case studies of nationalists in (the North of) Ireland and Indigenous peoples in Australia. I argue that international law does not offer sufficient protection for the right of self-determination, and consequently powerful states frequently ignore or marginalise claims to the right. By demonstrating that contemporary claimant peoples continue to experience forms of colonialism in the present, I advocate a renewed focus on the decolonising mission of self-determination. This focus requires that international law itself be decolonised. Key means of achieving this goal include enabling the variety of legitimate manifestations of the right of self-determination, breaking down the artificial opposition between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ self-determination, and empowering peoples through the development of an inclusive international legal system. If the law of self-determination is to adequately protect rights, the interests of all peoples affected by a self-determination claim must be addressed. I promote Robert McCorquodale’s ‘human rights’ approach to self-determination as a means of moving beyond the stifling question of ‘Who is the self?’ towards twenty-first century self-determination solutions. This approach requires self-determination claims to be evaluated on their merits, and promotes a process of negotiating the right which is better adapted to achieving rights-based solutions for all interested parties.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2395928_code1688434.pdf?abstractid=2395928&mirid=1

Law Protecting Rights: Restoring the Law of Self-Determination in the Neo-Colonial World

The theory of the African revolution, which is still in many respects only in its initial stage, found a most powerful inspiration in the West Indian psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. His writings were at first confined to the French-speaking public, and even after their initial translation into English (published by Presence africaine) they remained almost unknown. But the growing race tensions in Africa and the United States are drawing more and more attention to this original thinker.

Frantz Fanon and the African Revolution

For a long time ‘emancipation’ in Africa meant solely liberation from European rule. But when 17 African states became independent in 1960 and when from 1956 to 1966 32 countries finally attained national sovereignty, the continent, in part, emancipated itself from this type of colonial rule. Only in Southern Africa is it impossible to speak of emancipation in international legal terms. This state of affairs has engendered a strong sense of solidarity among independent African nations vis-a-vis the ‘unresolved’ area of the continent, as reflected in every conference of the Organisation of African Unity, as well as in many United Nations resolutions. However, it soon became clear to those who equated emancipation with legal sovereignty, with governments run by Africans with national flags and national anthems, that true emancipation must mean something else.

Gerhard K. Grohs

Papers

Frantz Fanon and the African Revolution

Difficulties of Cultural Emancipation in Africa