3 Jan 2025 | Fanon et moi

Why Fanon? A Puerto Rican Pluriversal Testimony  

Fanon has been an important influence in my life since my adolescence! As a young Puerto Rican radical, I was formed in the 1970s with Fanon’s arguments about the character of colonialism and his type of anticolonial politics. The political culture of the Puerto Rican movement against colonialism and for national liberation of the 1970s in which I was born as a radical intellectual-activist had Fanon and Marx as our main theoretical and political referents. From Marxism, we learned that the movement for “independence” from U.S. imperial rule should be framed within a socialist project against world capitalism. Fanon provided the principal arguments, the key theoretical and political framework for a posture and project we can now call radical decolonial politics. Three Fanonian pillars for Puerto Rican radicalism of the 1970s were: first, Fanon’s analysis of the colonial self in terms of alienation, due to the colonized identification with the colonizer, hence negating her-his own definition of being/self; second, his theory of colonialism as an utterly violent historical formation based on the daily exercise of physical, psychological, and epistemic violence against colonized peoples-subjects, which ethically and politically justifies the praxis of anticolonial violence as a path for liberation not only of the colonized but also for humanity as a whole; and third, a radicalization of the project of independence for imperial domination through a politics of national liberation.

   I am now a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, and a left-wing activist focused on Black movements in the Americas. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and psychology. Fanon has been a major influence on the way I do philosophy and psychoanalysis since I first read him in the 1970s. For me, Black Skin, White Mask was a foundational text to understand the racial-colonial unconscious as well as Fanon’s existential phenomenological method which is not derivative of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but an original mode of critical knowledge of the colonial self, stemming from an ontological self-reflection of a Black Caribbean activist-thinker. When I left Puerto Rico to pursue graduate studies in political economy at the New School for Social Research in New York, Fanon persisted as a key influence. I maintained an interest in the subjective dimension of racial-colonial capitalism, which led me to reaffirm the centrality of Fanon in the hermeneutics of the modern subject—both the colonized and the colonizer—and in the search for healing from the collective neurosis provoked by a world system in Fanonian key, by organizing for radical change as well as through the praxis of liberation social psychology.

   Studying political economy moved me to return to The Wretched of the Earth, where there is a critical analysis of uneven development and unequal exchange in the capitalist world-economy. In 2003, I wrote the Prologue to a new Cuban edition of the book, to explore Fanon’s ideas of global political economy and radical political theory and practice. In this inquiry, I realized meaningful convergences between Fanon and the most critical versions of Latin American dependency theories. Fanon framed his critique of neocolonial elites as unable to lead true national liberation in terms of their economic, political, and cultural subordinate location in the capitalist global system, namely of their dependency. His conception of decolonization advocates for building a radical democratic polity grounded on the agency and aspirations of the nation-people. On that key, the Black Panthers Party in the U.S., who recognized Fanon as a pillar of their politics, used the slogan “All the Power to the People.”

   In the last thirty years, I have been in two political-epistemic movements of world-historical influence where Fanon’s work is a main referent: first Cultural Studies, and then the Decolonial Turn. The strand of postcolonial critique which was a central element in the movement of cultural studies as conceived by figures such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Stuart Hall, highlighted their readings of Fanon as an important figure. But the movement that finally fully valorized Fanon was the Decolonial Turn which took off in the early 21st C. There are at least three entwined reasons why the Decolonial Turn offers the conditions of possibility for the recognition of Fanon as one of the principal intellectual and political figures of the 20th C: first, it marks the end of the Age of Europe (as observed by Cesaire and Fanon), which opens the possibility of globalizing critical theory and radical politics, for a more “wordly” epistemic and political agenda where Fanon shines; 2) it is symptomatic of a civilizational crisis of capitalism where all dimensions of collective existence—ecological, economic, ethical, epistemic, political– are jeopardized, a planetary condition where Fanon’s radical critique is increasingly relevant; 3) hence, it emerges a wave of antisystemic movements who fundamentally challenge a la Fanon, all dimensions of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system.

   Fanon is even more current and contemporary in the centenary of his birth than at the moment of his physical death when he became one of the main inspirations for antisystemic movements of the 1960s-1970s, including the rise of movements of decolonization achieving independence from imperial rule in Africa & the Caribbean, a call for “second independence” in Latin America, and the “third world left” in the U.S. Two of his other books, A Dying Colonialism  and Toward the African Revolution, are testimony of Fanon’s prophetic vision for the times. Nonetheless, Fanon as a critical thinker and a radical activist transcends his times. His legacy of critical creativity, radical sensibility, moral integrity, and coherence between theory and praxis, between words and deeds, remains relevant as an epistemic and ethical resource for the times of deep crisis we are living, an interregnum that as put by Gramsci, the old had not die and the new is not born yet.  Fanon’s radical Black humanism responds to an utterly violent and destructive human condition that threatens life itself with a poetics and politics of love, a project of decolonization as the humanization of humanity that necessarily means dismantling the racial-colonial order of things. All of this makes Fanon a classic, an essential thinker, a prime example of a revolutionary intellectual for deeply understanding past and present, and for forging futures founded on principles and paths of liberation. Hence, contrary to Hannah Arendt’s statement that he was a “prophet of violence”, we contend that Fanon was a prophet of hope.

Agustin Lao-Montes.