Fanon's Dialectic of Experience

✍ Scribed by Ato Sekyi-Otu

• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 289
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative.Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
......Page 10
Abbreviations for Works......Page 11
Prologue......Page 14
Postindependence Hermeneutics......Page 23
Narrative as Dialectic......Page 37
Dialectic as Politics......Page 44
History as Antidialectic......Page 60
Aristotle as Witness......Page 68
Antidialectic as Space......Page 85
Struggles over the “Dividing Line”......Page 100
The Dividing Line as the “Divided Line”?......Page 112
Narrative, Catastasis, Dialectic......Page 114
“The Weary Road toward Rational Knowledge”......Page 124
Baneful Inconsequence? The Life History of the “National Bourgeoisie”......Page 136
The Ambiguity of Exclusion......Page 170
Reprieve of Prodigal Reason......Page 184
Allegories of Appropriation......Page 198
Woman the Measure......Page 224
Epilogue: The Record and the Vision......Page 249
Notes......Page 256
Index......Page 282