Humanities (Oct 2014)

No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention

  • David Marriott

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040517
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3, no. 4
pp. 517 – 545

Abstract

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What happens to Fanonism when, instead of resistance or liberation, it becomes a discourse of invention? What happens to Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his imagining of a decolonial future, when that critique and imagining are staked not on the refusal of racial humanity itself (in the sense of an appeal to a “new humanism”…), but in the sense that Fanonism itself, as such, would be a discourse and reading of invention? In this essay I compare Fanon’s reading of invention with that of C.L.R. James’s reading of spontaneity in Notes on Dialectics.

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