‘That the tool never possess the man’: taking Fanon's humanism seriously

Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism

“…My reading of Fanon defies some characterizations of his work as inconsistent, as exemplifying postmodern ambiguity and ambivalence, or which downplay his social analysis for Lacanian psychologizing (Bhabha, 1994(Bhabha, , 2004. It instead aligns with studies that draw out his social and humanist strands, including his 'transnational humanism' (Alessandrini, 1999(Alessandrini, , 2000Gibson, 2003;Gordon, 1995;Pithouse, 2003). My reading is also inspired by Vergés (2001) who includes Fanon in her analysis of 'creole cosmopolitanism', though my goal here is to draw out Fanon's cosmopolitanism further than she does; as such, my reading of Fanon differs significantly.…”

“…On the very first page of his Introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, he declares that he strives 'for a New Humanism' (Fanon, [1952. At the end of The Wretched of the Earth he beckons, 'For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man' (Fanon, [1961(Fanon, [ ] 1968; see also Pithouse, 2003).…”

“…Yet, as Edward Said (1999: 209) notes, much of the existing characterizations of Fanon as an ‘apostle of violence’ tend towards a ‘caricatural reduction’ which does not adequately capture the nuances of Fanon’s views on violence. 4 Pithouse (2003) finds that Fanon was in fact horrified by violence and any endorsement of it was always ‘given within the context of an ethical commitment to existential good faith that requires the person who has decided to resist armed domination with counter liberatory force to recognise the full humanity of the enemy before acting’ (Pithouse, 2003: 109). Fanon’s views on violence, therefore, do not so much betray his new humanism as manifest it.…”

“…4.For more on violence in Fanon’s thought, see Gordon (1995: 79–83), Pithouse (2003: 109) and Sekyi-Otu (1996). …”

Humanism, race and the colonial frontier

“…The legacy of humanism may be ‘an obstacle, an ideology, a myth’ (Badmington 2004, 1344), and the notion of ‘the human’ may have to be redefined contingently and strategically as a moral category rather than a biological category discrete from the non‐human, 5 but it may be a necessary political fiction, providing a resource for the construction of a new cosmopolitanism (Mignolo 2000), or even, in Fanon’s words, a ‘new humanism’ founded in human immanence rather than transcendence (Alessandrini 2009; Fanon 1967, 7; Pithouse 2003; Murdoch 2004). We need a universality of human worth without assuming a universality of either human biology or culture, and perhaps the best way to achieve this within a new cosmopolitan humanism is, as Saldanha puts it, not to ‘eliminate’ race (cf.…”