Becoming in a colonial world: approaching subjectivity with Fanon

Abstract

Space and place were the objects of colonial domination, but the transformation of minds–through language, education and more–was where colonialism also shaped subjectivities. For Frantz Fanon, understanding the relationship between the colonial conditions in which one is situated, and the interiorised effects of these conditions, was a psycho-political problem of immediate relevance to anti-colonial struggles. Putting into conversation Fanon scholarship that helps bring into view this relationality, this essay argues that his thinking on the self as a material phenomenon, constituted and re-constituted in dialectical relation to the world, rests on three broad aspects: historicity, embodiment, and creative action. Sustaining fault lines in the experiential effects of colonialism, these can foster conditions of transformation in people’s ways of relating to themselves and to one another–the reconstituting of their subjectivities–in contextually determined ways. Understood through these characteristics, Fanon’s conceptualisation of subjectivity advances routes of ‘becoming’ despite and out of colonialism. As such, I propose that even though his self–world dialectic does not look to circumscribe the outcomes of these transformations, it decisively locates the remaking of selves within confrontations with the world that pursue the liberation of others.