Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
I finally finished Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and it was a ride. One of the things that sucked me the most was his warning on the persistence of neocolonial structures (esp economic and cultural), which has made me interested in picking up Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism esp since it was influenced by Fanon.The first essay "On Violence" is one of the most famous parts of the book, but it wasn’t something I personally dwelled on much, even after reading Hannah Arendt’s critique of Fanon’s rhetoric and Homi K Bhabha’s counter critique. Now things that i have complaints on -Fanon’s emphasis on rural peasants and the lumpenproletariat as the primary revolutionary agents in the struggle for decolonization rather than the urban proletariat like other Marxists but he does not sufficiently address how their leadership would be structured to prevent disorganization and aimlessness in the revolutionary process. I would have appreciated a more developed discussion on economic planning for newly independent nations, Fanon calls for centralization, local governance, and economic restructuring but this simple analysis lacks a concrete framework for preventing the postcolonial bourgeoisie from perpetuating extractive economic practices that maintain systemic inequality which he warned multiple times about. I found Fanon’s lack of engagement with gender in the colonial experience to be a major black hole and I don’t entirely buy Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s explanation for its exclusion. That said I’m really glad to have finally read the book.
