Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T15:24:04.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some Aspects of the Political Philosophy of Frantz Fanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

L. Adele Jinadu
L. Adele Jinadu*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Political philosophy is concerned with the ends and purposes of government. It involves a conception of “the good life” and is primarily, though perhaps not exclusively, concerned with human beings. A conception of the good life presumably implies a view of how to attain that end. In this view, then, political philosophy is also concerned with the question of means, or how is the good life to he won and secured for the members of a particular community or society or state? Of those people of African ancestry who have done systematic thinking about the ends and purposes of government in Africa in the period since the end of World War II, there are few who measure up to the stature and originality of Frantz Fanon. (For biographical sketches on Fanon, see Caute 1970; Geismar 1969, 1970; Césaire et al. 1962; de Beauvoir 1965, Ch. 5, especially pp. 583, 591-597, 606-607.)

A rejected evolué in both Martinique and France, Fanon came to realize the extent of his own depersonalization and that of other blacks. It was this awareness which, in Geismar's words (1969, p. 24), led him first to make “a revolutionary carthartic break with the past,” and then to “a more definite African revolutionary ending.” His life, as Aimé Césaire (1962, p. 119) pointed out, was short, active and full of personal tragedy.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , September 1973 , pp. 255 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES CITED

Ananaba, W. The Trade Union Movement in Nigeria. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1970.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969.Google Scholar
Avineri, Shlomo. Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization. Doubleday, 1970.Google Scholar
Beling, W. A., ed. The Role of Labor in African Nation-Building. New York: Praeger, 1968.Google Scholar
Bienen, Henry. Violence and Social Change. Chicago, 1968.Google Scholar
Bondy, François. “The Black Rousseau.” New York Review of Books (March 31, 1966).Google Scholar
Callaway, David and Callaway, Marina. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Cliffe, Lionel. One Party Democracy. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967.Google Scholar
Césaire, Aimé et al “Homages a Frantz Fanon.” Presence Africaine, nouvelle serie trimestrielle No. 40 (ler trimestre 1962).Google Scholar
de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. Trans. by Howard, Richard. London: Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965.Google Scholar
Dike, Kenneth. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Some Collective Expressions of Obscenity in Africa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. LIX (1929).Google Scholar
Fallers, Leon. “Are African Cultivators to Be Called ‘Peasants’?” Current Anthropology, Vol. II, No. 2 (1971).Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967a.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Studies in a Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1967b.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1967c.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Feraoun, Mouloud. Journal, 1955-1962. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.Google Scholar
Geismar, Peter. “Frantz Fanon: Evolution of a Revolutionary.” Monthly Review (May 1969).Google Scholar
Geismar, Peter. Fanon: The Revolutionary as Prophet. New York: Grove Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Gottheil, F. M. “Fanon and the Economics of Colonialism: A Review Article.” Quarterly Review of Economics and Business (1967).Google Scholar
Gurr, Ted. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Kedouri, Elie. Nationalism in Asia and Africa. World Publishing, 1970.Google Scholar
Kilson, Martin. “African Political Change and the Modernization Process.” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. I, No. 4 (December 1963).Google Scholar
Kilson, Martin. Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lansberger, H. A. Latin American Peasant Movements. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. “The Politics of Economic Modernization in Theory and Practice: Interpreting the Kenyan Experience.” Paper read at the Eighth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, August 31-September 5, 1970.Google Scholar
Lynd, G. E. The Politics of African Trade Unionism. New York: Praeger, 1968.Google Scholar
Markovitz, Irving. Leopold Sedar Senghor and Politics of Negritude. New York: Atheneum, 1969.Google Scholar
Memmi, Albert. “Review of Peter Geismar, Fanon and David Caute, Frantz Fanon.” New York Times Book Review (March 14, 1971).Google Scholar
Meynaud, J. Trade Unionism in Africa. Barnes and Noble, 1967.Google Scholar
Nghe, Nguyen. “Fanon et les problemes de l'independence.” La Pensee (January/February 1963).Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. Uhuru Na Ujamaa (Freedom and Socialism). London: Oxford University Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Perham, Margery. The Colonial Awakening, quoted in Hodgkin, Thomas, “The Relevance of ‘Western’ Ideas for African States.” In Pennock, J. R., ed. Self-Government in Modernizing Nations. New York: Prentice Hall, 1964.Google Scholar
Plamenatz, John P. “The Use of Political Theory.” In Quinton, Anthony, ed. Political Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Quandt, W. B. Revolution and Political Leadership: Algeria, 1954-1968. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Saul, John. “Africa.” In Ionescu, Ghita and Gellner, Ernest, eds. Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.Google Scholar
Schachter, Ruth. “Single-Party Systems in West Africa.” American Political Science Review, Vol. LV (June 1961).Google Scholar
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Discourse pronounce a l'Université d'Oxford. Oxford: St. Anthony's College, 1961. Mimeo.Google Scholar
Shanin, Teodor. Peasants and Peasant Societies. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.Google Scholar
Shepperson, George. “The Politics of African Church Separatist Movements in British Central Africa.” Africa, Vol. XXIV (1954).Google Scholar
Staniland, Martin. “Frantz Fanon and the African Political Class.” African Affairs (London), Vol. LXVIII, No. 270 (January 1969).Google Scholar
Stokes, Eric. “Traditional Resistance Movements and Afro-Asian Nationalism: The Context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion in India.” Past and Present, No. 48 (August 1970).Google Scholar
Williams, Gavin. “Social Stratification of a Neo-Colonial Economy.” In Allen, C. and Johnson, R. W., eds. African Perspective: Papers in the History, Politics and Economics of Africa Presented to Thomas Hodgkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Williams, Phillip M. Wars, Plots and Scandals in Post War France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Worsley, Peter. “Frantz Fanon: Revolutionary Theories.” Studies on the Left, Vol. VI, No. 3 (May/June 1966).Google Scholar
Zolberg, Aristide. “Frantz Fanon: A Gospel for the Damned.” Encounter (November 1966).Google Scholar