Decolonizing trauma with frantz fanon

Abstract

Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has critically engaged with the concept of trauma, interrogating its role in political processes such as commemoration, post-conflict reconciliation, and identity formation. Together this scholarship has called for a rethinking of trauma in order to more accurately represent the social and political dynamics of the concept. However, whilst offering insights into the politics of trauma, this literature remains distant from the concept's original discipline-psychiatry. This article contends that Frantz Fanon, as a psychiatrist and political revolutionary, presents a unique viewpoint from which to problematize the relationship between psychiatry and politics as it continues to structure trauma (and trauma scholarship) in the present day. Drawing on Fanon's sociogenic psychiatry, this article contends that both Fanon and contemporary approaches to trauma are constrained by an exclusive, Eurocentric psychiatry. Subsequently, it argues that a rethinking of trauma is insufficient. Rather, a decolonization of psychiatry is required. Three themes in Fanon's practice-the universal, morality, and gender-demonstrate the necessity of engaging with psychiatry's positionality within the contemporary sociogenic principle. Here, international political sociology provides for an analysis of trauma attentive to the relationship between society, health, and power.