Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience - Softcover

Sekyi-Otu, Ato

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674294408 ISBN 13: 9780674294400

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative.Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

With the growth of interest in postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. Fanon's Dialectic Of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience---the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath---in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much-misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.

About the Author:

Ato Sekyi-Otu is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, Ontario.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674294408
• ISBN 13: 9780674294400
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288