That great revolutionary would, however, be grateful for those among the Damned of the earth who engage his thought without fetishizing it. This is no doubt due, among other things, to one of Euromodern societies’ ultimate fears: their eventual irrelevance. Ironically, in turning his back on dominant cultural forms of recognition in what could be called the Euromodern Age, Fanon’s legacy overflows with it. He wrote to and sought out those among the not wretched but Damned, and, as history has shown, many have and continue to listen. Calls for actions other than revolution continue, but, in the end, they come down to concerns that frustrated Fanon’s contemporary, Martin Luther King, Jr., which compelled him to write Why We Can’t Wait (1964).įanon was not concerned with recognition from hegemons, from dominators, from those whose hardened hearts failed to address the cruelty, degradation, and lies on which much of Euromodern society is built. The vestiges of colonialism, fascism, and racism that continue into the twentieth century reveal the weaknesses of liberal democracies and, indeed, the inadequacies of liberalism. It is ironic because he had hoped the prophetic aspects of his thought were wrong. The impact of Fanon’s thought over the past half century is monumental and ironic. As that work turns seventy in 2022, anniversary reflections on Fanon’s life and thought will continue into another year. Indeed, all of Fanon’s writings are now canonical since their author is now a field of study. As Fanon was also a poet and playwright, his life never fell short of allegory.įanon’s first published book was Peau noir, masques blancs (1952)-that is, Black Skin, White Masks. This year thus marks the sixtieth anniversary of a passing and a birth. His classic work of revolutionary political thought, Les Damnés de la Terre, unfortunately known in the Anglophone world as The Wretched of the Earth, was published little more than a month earlier. Frantz Marguerite Victor Fanon, whose adopted middle name was “Omar” during his participation in the struggle for national liberation in Algeria, died on December 6 th, 1961.
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