Fanon’s other children: psychopolitical and pedagogical implications

Abstract

Discussions of the writings of theorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, in the fields of education and childhood typically focus on his account of a traumatic encounter with a white child, whose fear at the sight of a black man is said to create a vilified, racialized identity and installs an irreversible social and corporeal alienation. Yet Fanon's writings include a range of other depictions of children, childhood and education which reflect his broader views of colonial and decolonisation processes that include recognisable tropes of classic developmentalism, including gender chauvinisms. Nevertheless it is suggested that the diversity and complexity of child-related allusions across his texts allow for other critical readings that can inform educational debates on anticolonial analyses, of children, childhood and of their more general role in post and anti-development discourse.

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

“…We are interested in how the child functions as a metaphor for colonized, racialized, psychiatrized and disabled peoples. Literature on the iconography of childhood usually makes a distinction between metaphorical or symbolic and actual 'flesh and blood' children (Burman 2016;Morrigan 2017). We also make this distinction here by exploring the performative nature of 'child as metaphor' for those deemed child-like, and for actual children.…”

“…Furthermore, we recognize that given the "societally as well as intrapsychically invested character of childhood, arguably all appeals to "the child" are metaphorical" (Burman 2016, 2;Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992). Our point of departure, then, is the analytic task outlined by Burman (2016) to render "explicit the work done by the rhetorical appeal to childhood" (2), and the task in this article is to trace the work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, specifically in relation to colonialism, madness and disability. While we are concerned with the effects of metaphor, we are cognizant that the conceptual basis on which 'child as metaphor' functions is largely a Euro-Western construction of childhood as an early rung on a linear developmental ladder and a stage marked by a lack of intellectual capacity, dependency, irrationality, animism, emotionality, -or 'rule by passion', and economic unproductivity (Blaut 1993).…”

“…Thus, the "classic connection in the colonial library is, of course, that between the colonized other and the white child" (Eriksson Baaz 2005, 52). Burman (2016) states that "longstanding colonial dynamics link children with the colonised", where child/colony comes to stand as other/ed to the male western industrialized liberal self (10). Yet unlike ableist imaginings of the ideal imperial white child, colonized peoples are constructed as permanently child-like, unable to develop further (Barker 2011), and as stuck within a state of savagery and 'mental infancy' (Scott and Chrisjohn forthcoming).…”

Perspectives (of People of Color) on Psychological Science: Does Psychological Science Listen?

“…Ture drew on the work of several intellectuals of his day, including the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who will be discussed shortly, and the psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose own work, and pioneering collaborations with Mamie Phipps Clark that helped end school segregation, have been insufficiently highlighted in psychology, as evidenced, for instance, by a recent APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention, and Training in Psychology Task Force Textbook Initiative Work Group (2004) on Introductory Psychology textbooks. Frantz Fanon is increasingly considered the founding figure of a genuinely anti-racist and decolonial psychology (Adams et al, 2015;Bulhan, 1985;Burman, 2017;Gaztambide, 2021;Hook, 2005;Laubscher et al, 2022;Maldonado-Torres, 2017;Turner & Neville, 2020;Utsey et al, 2001;Watkins, 2015), and of the entire field of global health, the latter designation being offered by the editor of the influential medical journal, The Lancet (Horton, 2018). And yet Fanon's most lasting influence up to this point may be on social movements, community groups, and intellectual domains outside of psychology and psychiatry, from political science and philosophy to literary theory and African American studies.…”

The Manichean division in children’s experience: Developmental psychology in an anti-Black world

“…She turns to Frantz Fanon’s work to illuminate the vast differences between the impacts of colonialism on the subject formation of the White child and the Black child, focusing explicitly on how the social-symbolic order of White superiority inherent to the modern/colonial project fundamentally distorts the Black child’s sense of self. As Burman (2017) discusses, theories of human development have been exemplars of Eurocentricity in the field of psychology, often by its assumption of a universal human subject while simultaneously enacting colonialist ends in both theory and practice. Indeed, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are all social constructs that must be interrogated by those in psychology who are interested in better understanding “human development,” but this interrogation carries particular import in this moment that Sylvia Wynter refers to as the “time of Man and its overrepresentation as if it were the human” (2003, p. 331).…”