Celucien L. Joseph, “Prophetic Religion, Violence, and Black Freedom: Reading Makandal’s Project of Black Liberation through A Fanonian postcolonial lens of decolonization and theory of revolutionary humanism,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3:4 (August 2012):1-30. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fanon’s ‘The Negro and Hegel’ or How to Appropriate the ‘Miraculous Weapons’ Found in the Oppressor
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020
Hegel is the thinker who has given one of the most decisive philosophical guarantees to Western domination. Yet, Fanon, known to be one of the greatest theorists and activists for the independence of colonised people, found the conceptual tools which enabled him to develop his theory of liberation of people enslaved by and to the West. By relying critically on the Hegelian analysis of domination and servitude popularised by Kojève under the name of master-slave dialectics, Fanon produced a theory of liberation adapted to the system of colonial dependence and, therefore, different in its prerequisites to that of Hegel. While the latter makes labour the main source of the emancipation of slaves, Fanon presented mental decolonisation of the colonised and the violent overthrow of the colonial and neocolonial system as prerequisites to the full liberation of people under Western domination and, in particular, Africans.
Continental Philosophy Review, 2021
Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History in light of Hegel's reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon's work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel's dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève's master-slave dialectic, as the latter-an anthropological (mis)interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness-is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel.
Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship
Legacies of Enslavism and White Abjectorship, in Broeck/Junker, Postcolonial - Decolonial - Black Critique, Frankfurt: Campus, 2014
Broeck addresses the humiliate-ability, the enslave-ability, the rape-ability, the abuse-ability, and the ship-ability of Black people in the discourses and practices that shape European white collective memory as well as the contemporary repertoire of thinking Blackness in the white European mind. These discourses and practices add up to a longue durée of white abjectorship and un-humanization of Black being dating from the early modern period, through Enlightenment modernity into the postmodern moment. The ‘slave’s’ assumed ‘slavishness,’ that enduring topos in which Blackness has been contained in white philosophy from Hegel to de Beauvoir has blatantly disregarded the histories of Haiti, and other local and globally important acts, practices, and Black discourses of Black rebellion, and of Black freedom narratives, and has kept negating all forms of Black life. It persists in contemporary modes of un-humanization of Black being which – like the un-mournability of lost African lives in the Mediterranean – need to be analytically connected to early modern transatlantic trajectories of enslavement.
Introduction Slavery and the Racialization of Humanity: Coordinates for a Comparative Analysis
Antropologia, 2020
This introduction provides some historical and conceptual coordinates for a comparative analysis of the multifarious ethnographic manifestations and performative powers of the "racial legacies" of slavery in contemporary contexts in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. What is the connection, if any, between current expressions of racism and historical experiences of slavery? How is "race", with its relations with ideas of colour, origin and descent, locally conceptualized? How is "blackness" embodied and performed, experienced and contested, by different social actors-slave descendants, marginalized groups, sub-Saharan African migrants, students or professionals? In addressing these broad questions, this Special Issue radically expands the conversation on the legacies of slavery beyond the Saha-ra-Sahel, which has been the main focus of academic attention to date. You can download the entire special Issue at the journal's website: https://www.ledijournals.com/ojs/index.php/antropologia
Alternation 33 , pp. 87-113, 2020
In this article, I propose an overdue connection between the critical concept of decoloniality, and the framework of what I call enslavism, as a term for the human abjective practices of enslavement of Black life during the hundreds of years of the transatlantic slave trade, New World slavery and its ongoing afterlives. It seems to me that much of recent decolonial theory has – beyond making nods to the event of transatlantic slavery – not extensively addressed the specific history and present of enslavist anti-Black violence in its connection to the history of imperial coloniality. Keywords: slavery, imperial coloniality, settler colonialism, enslavism, hu-man abjective practices
Existing leaders just use the same template that colonial rulers employed previously. The difference is that, instead of occurring at a transnational level, exploitation has scaled down to the intra-state level in Africa (as certain individuals in high positions live off the land-and its people-while the masses live in poverty). However, it is the duty of the oppressed to remove these shackles, both physically and mentally. As Wood (2004:54) states “how we are thrown into the world is not within our control. Each of us does, however, have some control over what we do with our throwness.” West (2010:111) reiterates this view point by saying that “human beings are free to make or remake themselves. They do not simply fulfill a predetermined essence as, it seems, plants or animals must do. If human beings embrace their freedom, they have the possibility of an authentic existence.” In light of the above, the main goal of this paper is to critically analyse Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks.” More specifically, this paper will deal with his views on language and his psychoanalysis of the relations that take place between black and white people (and between black and black people). The first section of this paper will entail a brief historical overview of his life. The purpose of this is to shed some light on any events that might have shaped his writing or the ideas he put forth. The second section will deal with his work (in the way that was outlined above). A succinct conclusion shall be provided in the end with the purpose of summing up the essay. The sources used to undertake this task were books, journals and the internet.
The STARACO project (STAtus, ‘Race’ and Colour in the Atlantic World from Antiquity to the Present), financed by the French Region Pays de la Loire, is offering support for doctoral students and post-docs (from Europe, Africa and the Americas) to participate in the Summer Programme in Nantes from 22-26 June 2015 on the subject “Freedoms and Slaveries in the Atlantic World.” Conference Focus Today, bibliography on the phenomenon of slavery in the Atlantic is incredibly vast. However, our research group on the definition of hierarchies of colours and of 'races' cannot avoid addressing this subject. It is clear that the deportation of millions of African captives towards the Americas constituted the most powerful impetus for the racialisation of slavery, leading to the ‘natural’ representation according to which all slaves are black. This simple equation, however, covers over a complex historical process that this research conference seeks to analyze more closely. We must begin by ‘denaturalizing’ the concept of slavery. The term slavery, in fact, includes situations that are very different in time and space, which the various specialists in our research network will be able to compare. This is why we use the word ‘slaveries’ in the plural. The diversity of slaveries mirrors that of the modes of liberation and the various statuses that freedom generated. Here, the goal is to show that slavery does not respond to a single definition, but rather describes a process. Similarly, coming out of a servile condition led to the creation of various statuses, ranging from full access to equal citizenship (in modern times) to certain situations of minority, for people who could no longer be identified as slaves but still carried its stigma in freedom. The condition of slave was certainly a status, but it was also a state that could, within certain limits and under certain conditions, be negotiated in social practice. In this perspective, the problem of abolitionism and its ambiguities may be explored through the implicit renewals of forms of slavery in the nineteenth century, beyond the legal abolition of that particular institution.
Philosophia, 2008
This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the "face" of political life and the importance of the concept of "home" for a cogent theory of freedom.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2017
please note: this is a draft version, unpublished manuscript, please do not quote without permission. This article argues for the necessity, for white scholars, to turn to the study of what I call enslavism, a term necessary to situate current anti-black practices in the “future that slavery has made” (Hartman), and thus to critique them as the ongoing afterlife of enslavement, instead od addressing slavery as an event in bygone history. Conceptualizing their work with this term, white scholars may labor to contribute to Black Studies by way of “sitting with” (see Sharpe 2016) Black knowledge which can enable us to produce a critical protocol, to paraphrase Hortense Spillers, of enslavism as the ongoing afterlife of social, cultural and political anti-Blackness in the future that transatlantic enslavement has made (Hartman 2007). To produce those critical protocols means to re-read the longue durée of humanism in a way that abolishes the human’s ontological reign of life, and of knowledge, based as it has been on Black non-existence for the human.