Fanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) [Paperback]

Lewis R. Gordon (Editor), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Editor), Renee T. White (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 1996 | Series: Blackwell Critical Reader (Book 3)

The wide range of disciplines represented here enables the volume to stand as a contextualizing work in Fanon studies. It contains new original essays on Africana philosophy, the human sciences, dialectical humanism, women of color studies, neocolonial and postcolonial studies, violence, and tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

The wide range of disciplines represented here enables the volume to stand as a contextualizing work in Fanon studies. It contains new original essays on Africana philosophy, the human sciences, dialectical humanism, women of color studies, neocolonial and postcolonial studies, violence, and tragedy.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (September 9, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557868964
• ISBN-13: 978-1557868961
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lewis Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker,and musician. He is the founder and co-director, with his wife Jane Anna Gordon, of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, a research center dedicated to developing reliable sources of information on Afro-Jews and Jewish diversity. He is also a research affiliate of the Institute for Jewish Research and Community in San Francisco and the Be'chol Lashon ("In Every Tongue") think tank. His formal academic appointments are as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, with affiliations in African American Studies and Religion at Temple University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He has also taught at Brown University (where he was the founding chair of the Department of Africana Studies and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Contemporary Religious Thought), Yale University (in African American Studies and in Philosophy), and Purdue University (in Philosophy, African American Studies, and the Doctoral Program in English and Philosophy). Gordon achieved his PhD in Philosophy with distinction from Yale University and his B.A., with multiple honors, through the Lehman Scholars Program at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York. He had taught as a Social Studies teacher in the Bronx, where he was also founder of the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School. He has received many accolades for his writings and teaching, including the Gustavus Myer's award for outstanding work on human rights in North America, for Her Majesty's Other Children, the netLibrary's eBook of the month in February 2007 for his co-edited A Companion to African-American Studies, the Purdue African American Studies Book Award for Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, and, more recently, the James and Helen Merritt Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to the Philosophy of Education. He has organized conferences worldwide on such themes as antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, and he lectures regularly across the globe. He is a board member of the Institute for Caribbean Thought in Jamaica, the same for the Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery in Amsterdam, and he has worked in a variety of public media, including as one of the first news analysts for the National Public Radio Program On Point. He was executive editor of the first five volumes of the journal Radical Philosophy Review, and he was president of he Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2003 till 2008. Gordon still plays drums and piano. He could be viewed discussing philosophy of music and playing drums for the Philosophical Installations series--"Lewis R. Gordon--Philosophy at home": http://philinstall.uoregon.edu/#independent-videos.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent (critical) reader, November 29, 2002

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Rm Pithouse "Richard Pithouse" (Durban, KwaZulu-Natal South Africa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) (Paperback)

This book includes twenty-one articles on Fanon as well as a `Forward', an `Introduction' and an `Afterward' which are all valuable pieces in their own right. The standard of the work is generally high and a particular feature of this volume is that many of the contributions make use of the editors' new, and often illuminating, translations from Fanon's original French.

The introduction includes a brief but compelling biographical sketch and a useful five stage outline of the development of Fanon studies. This runs from the early engagement with Fanon's ideas by practical revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Paulo Freire through to biographical research; investigations into Fanon's contribution to political theory; the analysis of Fanon by postmodern and postcolonial thinkers like Said, Bhabha, Gates and Spivak and on to the recent attempts to use Fanon's thought to develop original work. The editors make it clear that this is where they locate this volume and that their purpose `is neither to glorify nor denigrate Fanon but instead to explore ways in which he is a useful thinker' (p. 7).

Fanon is clear about the necessity to develop `a voracious taste for the concrete' and it's no surprise that Marxists like Cedric Robinson have attacked Homi Bhabha, Louis Gates Jr and Gayatri Spivak for bringing `an imagined Fanon in (to) their self-referential debates on colonial discourse'. Most writing here takes the world outside the seminar room into account and the majority of the articles are valuable attempts to investigate how Fanon's work can help us to make sense of the world. Fanon's ideas are bought to bear on everything from the struggle to decolonise psychiatry and psychoanalysis through to the politics of identity, the sociology of resistance and the relationship between national and feminist struggles.

In recent times, Fanon has often been appropriated and domesticated by commentators who chose to ignore his clear commitment to, as Cedric Robinson puts it, `locate and subsequently advertise a fixed and stable site of radical liberationist criticism and creativity' (p. 87). Moreover, as well as ignoring Fanon's commitment to revolutionary change in the economic structure of society, many commentators have also ignored, his understanding of the role of the intellectual as well as his critique of the national bourgeoisie's attempt to reduce the nation to itself, his Leninist theory of imperialism and his insistence that the struggles of black Africa and black America are not equivalent.

While not all of the papers in this book take Fanon's African radicalism as their central concern, none of them can be accused of writing as though Fanon were not a revolutionary. Only a few write as though Fanon saw no distinction between material conditions in America and Africa. The majority of the papers here, as well as the introduction and afterward which frame the collection, do give due and welcome recognition to the consciously and explicitly radical and African intellectual legacy of Frantz Fanon. Although all the contributors to Fanon: A Critical Reader were based in the USA at the time of writing their papers, at least five of the 21 papers in the volume are likely to be of particular value to readers seeking to think from Africa about Fanon has to say to Africa.

The first is by South African émigré David Goldberg. He contributes an excellent paper on race and in/visibility. He begins with a careful analysis of Fanon's highly nuanced phenomenology of invisibility (in terms of his excellent analysis of the significance of `the veil' in colonial context) and goes on to argue that `the value and virtue of in/visibility are contextually determined' (p. 189). And so, the invisibility of a group can make them powerless and shield them from power. Equally, the visibility of a group can make them powerful and leave them exposed and threatened. Goldberg applies this insight to a number of contemporary examples including the way in which the increased visibility of the racially marginalised in Los Angeles and Johannesburg has led the powerful to organise the entrenchment of spatial segregation and the insulation of racialised daily life experiences through `fences, alarms, and private armed response units' (p. 196).

Another useful paper is the one by Gail Presby who, at the time of writing, was working on the Sage Philosophy project in Nairobi. She develops a comparison on the role of violence in the thought of Gandhi, Mandela and Fanon. Her argument is that all three thinkers share a common diagnoses of the colonial condition and that, while their strategies for achieving a more human world have much in common, there are significant differences. In particular, Fanon aims at quick and total destruction of relations of domination, while Mandela seeks to `force the enemy to give in while preserving as much as possible the future hope of healing the community' (p. 296), and Gandhi advocated the preserving of the lives of the enemy in order to win them over. Her assessment is that the best strategy will be determined by `the concrete circumstances of each situation, where history and culture play a role in shaping the consciousness of the people' (p. 296)

Further contributions are by Olufemi Taiwo and Paget Henry. Taiwo applies Fanon's critique of the national bourgeoisie to Nigeria and Henry's piece is an interesting meditation on the failure of Caribbean Philosophy to cultivate (as has been achieved with other forms of expression, such as music) a Creole identity.

The volume closes with Lewis Gordon's excellent paper on Fanon's `Tragic Revolutionary Violence'. There is some overlap between this paper and Gordon's well-known contribution to Emmanuel Eze's Post-colonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. That paper is a general investigation into the tragic dimensions of neo-colonialism but here, Gordon's focus is more specifically on Fanon and the idea of revolutionary violence as tragedy. Gordon begins, by way of Aristotle, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, with some incisive observations on the nature and social function of tragedy. He then shows that colonialism is a state of institutional dehumanisation which is nevertheless inhabited by humans. Gordon points out that violence in support of, or against the system must, tragically, be directed at a `shrieking flesh-and-blood reality' (p. 305) rather than some dehumanised enemy. However, the struggle for liberation is morally distinct from the struggle to maintain oppression because in the accomplishment of the former's struggle is the possibility, fragile though it may be, of a world that is not by dint of its very structure violent (p. 306).

Gordon's paper will be of enormous value to anybody interested in trying to understand the ethical dimensions of struggle or the nature of post-apartheid reconciliation.

Fanon: A Critical Reader is a very well thought-through collection of essays and an excellent tool for stimulating critical thought about Fanon's rich legacy.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Theory of a Theory, August 16, 2010

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M. Chida - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) (Paperback)

A big fan of Fanon and Sartre - I stumbled on this reader and wanted to read more on people's interpretations of Fanon. An insider to the African struggle and cultures, I was very disappointed by the book. Although I read several, successfully written, English interpretations of Fanon, I was seriously struck by the majority of the authors in this reader (except a few who unfortunately should have published elsewhere). The majority tried too hard to interpret theory with theory, without offering any depth at all - used too many quotations to support their argument, and a few were in direct opposition of what they were trying to put forward in the first place! I do not doubt the authors best intentions, but we all know too well that good intentions alone do not make for a good argument.
In sum, I would not recommend this book.