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HUM 3306
(online): History of Ideas--The Age of Enlightenment to the Age of
Anxiety
Summer A 2007/ Profs. Harvey & Fantina
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