SENIOR SEMINAR (The Political Thought of Frantz Fanon) | Chrisman | TTh 1:30-3:20 | 19614 |
Caribbean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon was one of the 20th century’s foremost anti-colonial theorists. His mid-century writing addresses many of the issues that concern late 20th -century postcolonial studies, including racial subject-formation, the semantics of colonial space, the relation between aesthetic culture and national liberation, the function of capitalism in colonialism and vice versa, the uses and abuses of nationalism, the dynamics of gender in decolonization, the role of intellectuals and cosmopolitans in political movements, the cultural and material operations of neo-colonialism, and the socially transformative potential of sonic and visual technology. This course focuses on Fanon’s major posthumous works: /The Wretched of the Earth/, /A Dying Colonialism/, and Toward the African Revolution. We situate these works in the anti-colonial context of their production, and through rigorous close reading work towards a fuller understanding of Fanon’s political vision. We additionally consider a variety of ways that intellectuals have applied and debated his thought.