Fanon's dialectic of experience PDF
Preview Fanon's dialectic of experience
, FANON'S DIALECTIC OF EXPERIENCE , FANON'S DIALECTIC , 0F , EXPERIENCE , ATO SEKYI-OTU Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1996 Copyright © I996 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States ofAmerica Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon's dialectic ofexperience/Ato Sekyi-Otu. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-674-29439-4 (cloth: alk. paper).-IsBN 0-674-29440-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Fanon, Frantz, I925-I96I-Contributions in social sciences. I. Title. H59·F28s45 I996 300-dc20 For Mansa With deepest.love and immeasurable gratitude ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted in so many ways to several people for the gestation and completion of this book. I must first express my gratitude to Alkis Kontos for insisting a long time ago that I write on Fanon, and for years of intellectual stimulation and unflinching friendship through joyful and tragic times. Alkis, firstling of the common humanity Fanon envisioned, thank you. I would also like to thank other friends and colleagues who, through a judicious admixture of coercive flattery, tough love, and gentle censure, prodded me to keep on keeping on, especially atthose moments when the mind was willing but the spirit flagged: Lorraine Markotic, Herb Addo, Fred Case, Himani Bannerji, Patrick Taylor, Althea Prince, Paget Henry, Anani Dzidzienyo, loan Davies, Modupe Olaogun, Mwikali Kieti, and James Oscar, Jr.-particularly the last named, for sharing with me his sensitivity to Fanon's dramaturgical vocabulary. Thanks are also due to my students at York University, especially successive members of my graduate Social and Political Thought seminar "Marxism and Political Discourse," with whom I first dis- viii"''''''''''''' ACKNOWLEDGMENTS cussed my rethinking of Fanon's project. I am grateful to York University for a sabbatical leave in the 1992-93 academic year which permitted me to write the book. I wish to thank Michelle van Beusekom for her diligent preparation of the manuscript. Many thanks to Lindsay Waters for his prompt attention to my manuscript and Maria Ascher for her superb editorial work. To my children, Efua, Ato, Kurankye, and Kobina, I am enor mously grateful for their loving support and especially for under standing the perverse manner in which I have contrived to rearrange the natural rhythms of sleep, work, and living. As for my wife and best friend, Mansa, I think she probably knows why this book is dedicated to her. CONTENTS Abbreviations for Works by Frantz Fanon x Prologue I 1 REREADING FANON IO Postindependence Hermeneutics IO Narrative as Dialectic 24 Dialectic as Politics 3I 2 IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE 47 History as Antidialectic 47 Aristotle as Witness 55 Antidialectic as Space 72 Struggles over the "Dividing Line" 87 The Dividing Line as the "Divided Line"? 99 3 BEWILDERING ENLIGHTENMENT IOI Narrative, Catastasis, Dialectic I 0I "The Weary Road toward Rational Knowledge" I I I Baneful Inconsequence? The Life History ofthe "National Bourgeoisie" I23 4 POLITICAL JUDGMENT I57 The Ambiguity ofExclusion Reprieve ofProdigal Reason Allegories ofAppropriation Woman the Measure 2II Epilogue: The Record and the Vision 236 Notes 243 Index 269
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