While early theory and research on cosmopolitanism have been criticized for their European focus, a number of works have incorporated non-Eurocentric perspectives. This article contributes to this literature by examining the colonial production of cosmopolitan orientations as evidenced in the writings of Frantz Fanon. Colonialism has been treated as a deviation in the historical sociology of cosmopolitanism, but Fanon helps disclose how colonialism has also contributed to a particular form of cosmopolitanism that has been overlooked in existing theory and research: (...) postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This form of cosmopolitanism, forged from the spaces of colonialism’s contradictions, emphasizes global citizenship and humanism but strives to remember rather than repress the history of modern empire. It seeks to negate colonialism’s contradictions and thus realize the ideals which Europe had initially pronounced but which it failed to institute. (shrink)

This article puts Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon into dialogue in order to explore the relationships between the constitution of subjects and the production of truth in modern Western societies as well as in colonial spaces. Firstly, it takes into account Foucault’s analysis of confessional practices and the effects of subjection, objectivation, and subjectivation generated by the injunction for the subject to tell the truth about him or herself. Secondly, it focuses on the question of interpellation that emerges in the (...) colonial context and on the colonized who, as Fanon illustrates, is always seen as a deceitful subject. Finally, it shows that, despite the difference in the relationships between the constitution of subjectivity and the production of true discourses described by Foucault and Fanon, the transformative dimension enacted by the processes of subjectivation and by the practices of resistance constitutes a shared conceptual and political ground between the two authors. (shrink)

This paper revisits Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood – primarily as mobilized by the ‘Look, a Negro!’ scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man’s sense of alienation from his own body and his inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child (...) to reconsider Fanon’s ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan and some aspects of Lacanian theory opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon’s writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful. (shrink)

El presente artículo plantea un análisis del sujeto revolucionario en Los condenados de la tierra de Frantz Fanon bajo la lente de las posteriores contribuciones teóricas de Antonio Negri y Ernesto Laclau a los modos y determinaciones de construcción de los sujetos políticos en general y a través de sus valoraciones de las tesis fanonianas en particular. En concreto, se argumentará que en Fanon se encuentran matizada y entrecruzadamente algunas de las consideraciones que permiten interpretar el sujeto político que se (...) alza en la lucha de liberación nacional, primero como un sujeto múltiple y espontáneo de características tangentes a la multitud negriana, y segundo como un sujeto articulado unificadamente en relación con el pueblo laclausiano que, eventualmente, acabará recalando en nuevas correspondencias exegéticas con Negri. Este cuerpo analítico será complementado con referencias a la postura divergente de Vladímir Lenin y de Rosa Luxemburgo en torno a la cuestión del espontaneísmo y la organización del sujeto revolucionario. (shrink)