“Frantz Fanon: Postcoloniality and New Humanism”

Frantz Fanon’s ethical injunction to imagine a “new humanism” in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth has engendered intense debate in the last 40 years among postcolonial scholars over the character of Fanonian humanism. Some argue that it is “residual humanism” rehearsing pieties of the European form, while others exult in Fanon’s “emergent humanism” that radically breaks with Western humanism. This chapter argues that his humanism is neither residual nor emergent. It contends that Fanon conceptualizes decolonization as an antonymous process, a “humanism without humanism,” that ruptures with the Eurocentric humanist episteme, while also fashioning a liberatory project of Bildung for the postcolonial people, leading to the advancement of their consciousness to the nation-people, thereupon ushering in a new humanity, a decolonizing project ironically modeled on the narrative of self-development of bourgeois subjectivity. Fanon is a profoundly revolutionary thinker and a thoroughly Europeanist one at that.