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Lookup NU author(s): Dr David VenturaORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon seemingly rejects the role that the past can play in the creation of decolonized futurities, famously writing: “I am not a prisoner of History (l’Histoire). I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.” On this basis, Fanon’s thought has often been read as opposed to the more prophetic vision of the past offered by Édouard Glissant, which emphasizes the contrapuntal potentialities that inhere in Black vernacular cultures and histories. In contrast to such readings, this paper contends that Fanon and Glissant similarly uphold a dual conception of the past as encompassing both History (l’Histoire), or the racialized fantasy of chronological linearity that was invented by Western modernity, and histories, a subterranean and mobile network of memories that always remains fugitive to the colonial machinations of History. Tracing this more ambivalent conception of the past through Black Skin, White Masks, Wretched of the Earth, and the writings that Fanon penned during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria, I argue that Fanon’s thought on the past, far from being opposed to Glissant’s, in fact similarly upholds the prophetic value that the past qua histories can play in unleashing decolonized futurities.
Author(s): Ventura D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: The CLR James Journal
Year: 2024
Volume: 30
Issue: 1/2
Pages: 221-248
Online publication date: 17/12/2024
Acceptance date: 27/11/2024
Date deposited: 19/12/2024
ISSN (print): 2167-4256
ISSN (electronic): 2325-856X
Publisher: Caribbean Philosophical Association
URL: https://doi.org/10.5840/clrjames20241216114
DOI: 10.5840/clrjames20241216114
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/j2qe-mj80
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