| Description |
In my paper, I go back to Frantz Fanon as an important founding figure of postcolonial theory in order to argue for the relevance of paying more attention to the existential-phenomenological and humanistic elements of his thought. I situate Edward Said and Homi Bhabha as important theorists of discourse analysis, which I define as a linguistic and epistemological approach to the effects of colonialism on the colonized. I use Aime Cesaire's poetry and thought as a framing device, and utilize Sylvia Wynter's thought as a way of bridging discourse analysis with the existential-phenomenological side of Fanon in order to argue for an anticolonial humanism that locates the effects of and criticizes colonialism on the basis of the ontological question of the definition of what it means to be human. My research suggests that discourse analysis already finds itself in the midst of important ontological questions, but that these remain implicit to such an extent that they need to be more explicitly brought to the foreground. On the other hand, I argue that as Fanon radicalizes and renews various elements of European philosophy such as existential-phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism in order to more fully respond to a specifically anticolonial context, so does his work point towards a radicalized humanism that transcends the European context of that term. Ultimately, my thesis suggests that a Fanonian humanistic critique of colonialism points towards the creative, narrative based, and always-a-bit-more-than-contextual elements of human existence that colonial violence seeks to deny but has not yet been able to completely destroy. |
