Fanon's revolutionary murmurs: Toward a critical phenomenology of listening

Abstract

Decolonial, postcolonial, and postmodern criticism is indebted to Frantz Fanon for revealing the hegemony of vision and visual language in Western imperial discourse. Yet, the import of Fanon's critique of coloniality reaches beyond a focus on vision into the sonorous. Attending to the often overlooked auditory dimension of Fanon's work, I argue, brings attention to the role of listening as a condition of possibility of a revolutionary consciousness. Listening to Fanon's careful descriptions of the experience of many Algerians of listening to the National Liberation Front's radio broadcast, The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria in “This is the Voice of Algeria,” I propose that what makes possible the institution of a revolutionary consciousness is listening to murmurs. Listening to the materiality of voice and sound rather than the propositional content of speech is revolutionary because it challenges core values central to the project of colonial modernity: metaphysical logocentrism and the fungibility to which colonial modernity strives to reduce colonized subjects.