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HUM 3306: History of Ideas--The Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Anxiety
Summer 2012


POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN THE MODERN WORLD
 

In the embedded texts below, you will learn about the legendary Franz Fanon, who radically resisted French imperialism and has become something of a hero among militant-minded thinkers of revolution against oppressive European-state power. 

Fanon is concerned with the psychological difficulty (but also necessity) of waging war against unjust authority. He combines the revolutionary fervor of Marx with the psychological insight of Freud to indicate that the colonial oppressed can only overcome humiliation and the false introjection of "white" authority by expressing revolutionary anger in physical revolt.

Before you begin: Remember John Locke's main point that you "own" your body; one of Fanon's main points is that colonial servitude steals the "native's" body and that it can only be recovered through muscular revolutionary action.  For Fanon, violence becomes the necessary solution to colonialist oppression.

In his day, the French colonialist authorities, who ruled Algeria, perceived Fanon nearly as a terrorist.  Fanon was not, but his analysis of humiliation and state oppression and how to overcome it through strategic violence certainly has resonance with contemporary strife in the Middle-East.

For Fanon's biography, click here:  Frantz Fanon biography

Now read a speech by Fanon, which provides a good summary of his ideas:  Frantz Fanon speech