This paper examines Steve Biko’s distinction between black and non-white as a project in the “amelioration” of social concepts and categories. Biko himself—it has been persuasively argued by Mabogo More and Lewis Gordon—writes in the tradition of existential phenomenology. More and Gordon explore Biko’s continuity with Frantz Fanon, and in this paper I draw on their interpretations, attempting to complement and elaborate on these continuities. I also, however, attempt to show how Biko moves beyond Fanon in crucial ways, solving problems (...) that Fanon confronted. By examining Fanon’s and Biko’s categories in light of recent work in social metaphysics, I explore the ways Biko attempts to transform an existing set of oppressive social categories in the world into new social categories. (shrink)

On this 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, what can we learn from Fanon’s turn to Marx over 60 years ago? This paper reviews Fanon’s active engagements with Marx throughout his work from Black Skin...

Education has two distinct but interconnected layers. There is an outer layer concerned with knowledge transfer and skills and an inner layer concerned with the development of character and relationships with others, both individually and socially. This inner layer provides the individual with the capacity to influence and to change society. In that sense, such an inner layer is ‘political’. In this article we argue that the ‘political’ in education can take two distinct forms: either that of dialogue or of (...) defiance. We claim that the former is epitomised by the philosophy of Martin Buber and the latter by the philosophy of Frantz Fanon. Our analysis contrasting these two philosophies clarifies the implications for education, and thereby for the individual and for society. (shrink)

This article addresses relations between concepts of ‘self’, ‘other(s)’ and ‘othering’ through a reading of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s psychoaffective phenomenological and pedagogical narrative approach, reading his work as phenomenological and educational as well as critiquing phenomenology, psychology, education and (of course) psychiatry. While most—especially educational—commentators base their engagement with Fanon’s revolutionary materialist phenomenology of racialised embodiment and consciousness on his first book, Black Skin White Masks and attend to his final book, Wretched of the Earth as expressing his (...) core political and philosophical analyses, this article focuses in particular on Fanon’s second and middle book, A Dying Colonialism, evaluating the political possibilities of the specific narrative temporalities elaborated there. Notwithstanding its rather dismissive reception, it is argued that this, middle, book—written during, and as a document of, the Algerian liberation struggle—expresses and develops Fanon’s psychopolitical and performative philosophy of subjective and objective transformation from alienation to emancipation. This philosophy works pedagogically, in imagining the transformation of relations between others, as well as between self and others, including relations between coloniser and colonized, as also between and within selves. (shrink)