On Frantz Fanon

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc is a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the 'phenomenological philosophy of the mind' and she is currently working on the Frantz Fanon contribution to Routledge’s book series ‘Arguments of the Philosophers’.

 

What’s your background in terms of culture and education, and how did you come to philosophy?

 

In terms of my background my father is Cambodian, my mum is Welsh. My dad came here as a refugee. I seemed to fall sideways into philosophy, I applied for it at university without actually really knowing what exactly it was, and then turned out that I really enjoyed it, so that’s why I ended up here.

 

Was there any specific part of philosophy that attracted you?

 

Don’t laugh about this: I’d read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I thought that was what philosophy was. Then I turned up and I realised that that’s not actually philosophy. I just really enjoyed the courses I was doing, my lecturer at the time Stevie Makin was amazing. She was teaching philosophy of religion at that time in my first year, and it was in St. George’s lecture theatre which was in that old church, so it was a fun experience debating whether God exists inside a church. It hooked me into the subject and then from there I just found all these amazing things I really enjoyed in philosophy. I thought about changing at the end of my first year to do anthropology but I’m glad I didn’t.

 

After that, why did you decide to do a masters and become a researcher, and how come you chose Sheffield?

 

I suppose I did my masters because I just loved philosophy and wanted to do a bit more of it. At that point I wasn’t thinking I’d try and go into it as a career. And then I loved Sheffield, the city, so I stayed. I did my undergraduate course in Sheffield, and my masters, and my PhD. Initially I got a job in Nottingham, and I thought I could commute because it’s obviously quite close, but it was actually about two hours door to door, it was just too much. Nottingham is alright but I never really felt a love for the city, so when a job came up in Sheffield where they were looking for someone who does the sort of philosophy I do. I applied and came back again.

 

Quite lucky they were looking for someone doing your type of philosophy

 

Yes, really lucky, there’s also not that many people who do the sort of thing I do

 

What do you do, what is your research, how would you describe it?

 

The main area of philosophy I work in is called phenomenology. It’s a movement in philosophy that’s associated particularly with continental Europe and it’s quite a loosely defined movement. You can’t really point to a thing that all phenomenologists believe like you can with other branches of philosophy. There’s more a sort of connection between people in terms of what concepts they get from each other. There’s some inheritance of ways of thinking about certain things, frameworks and so on. The reason I got into that is because one of the things that has always puzzled and fascinated me is embodiment — what is it to be the sort of bodily creatures that we are — and that’s one of the really central themes for phenomenologists.

 

Who are the big names?

 

The movement was started by Edmund Husserl, and then Martin Heidegger also famously one of Husserl’s students, Hannah Arendt (Heidegger’s student), Edith Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

 

It was the thing that influenced existentialism?

 

Yes, so phenomenology and existentialism sort of cross over, existentialism isn’t quite the same as phenomenology I guess because existentialism is also a literary movement. There are also philosophers that are classed as existentialists who are not also phenomenologists.

 

Right.

 

I’m always a bit unclear quite how to define these things, but you get the sort of key existentialists in the mid-20th century in France like Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, counted as phenomenological existentialists.

 

How was Fanon related to that, what got you from that onto Fanon?

 

I suppose I’d come across his name and thought he sounded interesting. I also teach a phenomenology module and it’s been on Merleau-Ponty for years as that’s what I’d been working on, and became a bit bored of it, thought we needed to change it. I thought that’s an ideal opportunity to start reading another person and then when I started reading Fanon, I thought it was amazing. I got really into it and then I’ve been slowly switching my phenomenology module over to being about Fanon, he was at one time a student of Merleau-Ponty’s so it has worked quite well.

 

Would you describe Fanon as a phenomenologist?

 

No, probably not. He was a psychiatrist, and he grew up in Martinique which was a French colony. He moved to France and then from France he moved to Algeria where he quit psychiatry to become part of the independence movement. Actually his work has got loads of different strands of traditions and things that he draws on, phenomenology is just one of those strands, so is he a phenomenologist? I feel it’s restrictive if you just said that, but there’s definitely a lot of phenomenology in Fanon

 

Do you have any personal connections beside the intellectual interest?

 

My father grew up in Cambodia while it was a French colony and before reading Fanon I hadn’t put together that the anti-colonial wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, happened at the same time roughly as the anti-colonial wars in Algeria. My dad was in Cambodia when the first war of independence in Indochina was going on, and then he fought in Algeria as a member of the foreign legion, so fighting on the side of the French. And Fanon talks obviously about Algeria but also about the war in Indochina. There was a decisive battle, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam where the Viet Minh defeated the French. The French authorities commissioned a ship to take their soldiers back from Indochina to France and my dad was put on that ship and then sent to school in France. So, he was travelling with soldiers who had just been fighting people from his country. There is all of this period of my dad’s life that he never really talked about before, and so doing this project on Fanon has led to some really interesting and also quite personal conversations with my dad. It makes that period that Fanon speaks about feel really alive and personal to me.

 

Do you think your students also see studying Fanon as a way of discovering and exploring their own identities and perhaps their own family pasts?

 

I wouldn’t know without asking them, but the philosophy canon is overwhelmingly white, it’s dead white men, and there are very few ‘philosophers of colour’ (I don’t like that phrase), that people study. The first year that I started teaching Fanon in my class, I had a student who had some Jamaican heritage, and another student from Trinidad, and I felt like it was important to them, in the same way it was important to me, to have someone whom isn’t a dead white man who we were looking at, I did feel like that was something important. As part of the course, we spoke a little bit about the Haitian revolution, we only touched on it, but it is relevant to some of the stuff Fanon talks about. One of the key writers who did so much to dig into the history of that is actually from Trinidad - Cyril L. R. James, if you look at him he is a novelist, cricketer, philosopher, a historian —how did he have the time? But it felt amazing to be talking about a philosopher from Trinidad and have someone from Trinidad in the class; I felt like it was an important module.

 

Do you think Fanon and philosophers focussing on or coming from the colonial world are an important way of decolonising philosophy, which you say is dominated by white men?

 

There’s definitely a lot more interest in it. I know quite a few people in phenomenology who suddenly are all teaching Fanon and so there’s definitely a growing interest in looking beyond the usual David Hume, Kant etcetera. There’s a lot of people who we could look at, but who just like Fanon, don’t squarely fit in philosophy. There’s a lot of philosophical content in his work as a psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker. A lot of the people of colour whom you could look at in philosophy are similarly situated between disciplines. I’ve heard it said, I don’t know to what extent I quite agree with this, that that’s a specifically Caribbean way of doing philosophy, to take a lot of influences and develop something different out of it. So that can sometimes mean that decolonising the curriculum is harder. A lot of philosophers are quite interested in policing the boundaries of philosophy. You still get some people who say that feminist philosophy isn’t philosophy, luckily they’re dying out, but there’s still this sense that if you’re not doing analytic metaphysics then what are you doing type of thing. So, I think that’s sometimes makes it a bit harder for some people to accept that you can look at these other thinkers.

 

So, in a way if you’re just doing one particular branch of philosophy, a lot of people get side-tracked, they don’t fit into the confines?

 

Yes, that’s right. You sometimes find people saying ‘I do really want to include some black philosophers but there aren’t any for me to include’. The problem is that that’s because you’re not teaching things that black philosophers are generally interested in, so you need to widen the things you think of as philosophy and teach and study in order to include people.

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Is there a way fitting that do you think, in the curriculum?

 

I think there are a lot of different initiatives that are starting to come up now, things like the Diversity Reading List Project which you may have come across. People are just really bad at looking outside what they know and so the diversity reading list tries to give people those ideas: if you’re teaching aesthetics, here are some people you could look at. And then I guess the more that people look at it, the easier it is to incorporate people. At the moment there’s not that much written on Fanon in mainstream philosophy although there are some really excellent texts, such as Lewis Gordon's books about Fanon, and other examples. There’s loads written about him in other disciplines.  Sometimes people ignore work on his philosophy because it's been published in journals in other disciplines, like French, or sometimes its looking at it from a perspective that isn’t quite the way philosophers want to look at it. But the more that people write about it the more material there is to work from and then the easier it is to teach it because suddenly you can set these things on your reading list so it kind of snowballs.

 

I first came across Fanon in English, they didn’t delve into his philosophical side, it was more analysis, reading a text through his theory.

 

Yes exactly.

 

What contribution do you think that Fanon made to philosophy?

 

Lots of different things. As I mentioned, in phenomenology, people are interested in the nature of the body and embodiment and this is really crucial to his work. One of the things he is interested in is the way that colonial ideology, the ideas associated with colonialism, play a really important role in upholding the colonial system and those ideas aren’t just understood on an intellectual level, they become living embodied reality. He has an analysis of how that happens which develops some phenomenological ideas to do with the body schema, and I think that’s a real contribution to our understanding of bodies in general. Then there’s also things like his philosophy of language, his understanding of what freedom is, one of the things that I’m working on is trying to articulate his picture of what it is to be human which I think is crucial to his psychiatric thought because obviously psychiatrists are interested in illness so you need a conception of what it is to be to healthy in order to say when somebody’s ill. Ideas of what it is to be healthy are always philosophical, actually. He’s got an understanding of what a self is which plugs into his psychiatric work but also his philosophical thought about colonialism and I think that is a really important contribution that hasn’t been very well articulated yet, so I think there are lots of different ways in which he contributes.

 

In the context of his concept of the white gaze, do you think that it is a useful mechanism for people outside of philosophy – so let’s say the average post-colonial subject, average ethnic minority, or person of colour, – do you think it’s a useful tool to become a healthier individual? Fanon talks about the colonised subject having a different, damaged, and fractured psychology.

 

Yes, I think that his analysis of that kind of relationship and the idea of the white gaze and how that functions is potentially really helpful for people to understand their own experiences and also see how to change that. One of his influences is Hegel and particularly Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Part of what’s important about that for Fanon is that the two parties get into a relationship with each other where they’re in certain roles. And those roles mean that their relationship plays out along certain lines. It’s pretty complicated and I’m not sure I can explain it all here. But in the master-slave dialectic, both parties want to be recognised by the other as human. The master subjugates the slave and doesn’t give the slave recognition as being human. Then what you find is that even though on the face of it, the master’s got all the power and the slave is powerless, because the master doesn’t recognise the slave as human, the slave’s recognition is useless to the master. The master wants to be recognised as human by another human. But as the slave isn’t human (according to the master), the master doesn’t receive recognition after all. So the downfall of the master is built into the relationship, if that makes sense.

 

So, the slave recognising the master is useless?

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Yes, because the master wants recognition and that comes from another human, not the slave because the master does not recognise the slave. What then happens is that the slave is able to achieve self-recognition whereas the master doesn’t and that then leads to the undoing of the master-slave relationship. I think Fanon was really fascinated with the idea that people can get into a certain relationships and then that relationship has its own dynamic which perpetuates it. I think he was really interested in that as a basis for understanding colonialism, and then how you get out of it. I think for Fanon that the basic unit of analysis shouldn’t be the individual person. It’s always people in a relationship which has its own dynamics and then constitutes, creates the people in it as being a certain way which then perpetuates the relationship. I think that’s a really important incite and definitely something that could be helpful for people to understand their own experience.

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Some people within philosophy argue that we shouldn’t talk about things in terms of blackness or whiteness, and this is often known as colour-blindness, what do you think Fanon would think about that concept?

 

I think he would think it’s nonsense. As far as I understand it, that particular idea wasn’t around at the time he was writing. But when he’s talking about how you progress from colonialism to an equal society, he does talk a little bit about Sartre’s idea that you should basically think of race consciousness like a kind of class consciousness. Fanon really objects to that as missing something. Perhaps colour-blindness is slightly analogous to that Sartrean idea that you can forget about race because class is more important. The way that colour-blindness functions is basically just to hide inequalities, just ignore them rather then actually try to deal with them, so I guess he would disagree with it being a helpful way to go.

 

Would you say Sartre argued for the more Marxist approach where it can’t be applied? For example we spoke to some Marxists recently who were speaking about South African apartheid and how it was essentially a class struggle. But you then have the idea that if you have apartheid you have a section of the population who aren’t even in the class system; they’re aside from it. If you say it’s purely a class struggle, you’re seem to end up being colourblind in that way you forget about the reality of it, that everyone is subject to the same thing and they’re not subject to different rules based on race but rather economics.

 

That’s really interesting, that connects well with some of the things that Fanon says. His definition of colonialism is that it’s basically an exploitative system which is essentially premised on race. The Marxist analysis in terms of just class misses the important role that race is playing. Obviously if you have exploitation, you’ve by definition got class, because you have the group that exploits and the group that is exploited. There’s more too, but what’s crucial to colonialism is that the classes are defined by race.

 

And not economics...

 

Exactly. Fanon and a lot of other anti-colonials thinkers at the same time like Aimé Césaire his teacher agree with some Marxist ideas but they all thought the Marxist analysis didn’t go far enough because it misses the way that race functions.

 

That’s what we’ve discovered, we went to a Marxist talk about the Israel-Palestine issue, and they were applying this economic, purely material analysis of it as though it was a common enemy, that the Palestinians and Israeli working class were in the same condition, they’re subject to capitalism which creates this exploitation, but it misses the reality, it’s widely inaccurate

 

That’s fascinating, because obviously Fanon was talking about this years ago, so it’s funny how that’s still a thing.

 

It’s odd how Fanon isn’t more known, because his analysis is very (for his context as well) timely in the sense of what’s going on now in terms of the struggle for BLM or simply the struggle for rights, human emancipation, racial recognition. Why do you think he isn’t more well known, is it the fact that figures like Martin-Luther King and Malcolm X were political leaders too so they were more well known?

 

That’s interesting, I don’t have a good sense of how well known he is because in some areas he’s just a sort of touchstone that everyone talks about. One of the things that’s really interesting about working with Fanon is that the people that write about him are often also really interesting. There was an Australian historian called Jock McCulloch who wrote a book about Fanon that I was reading and it turns out that the guy was a massive activist for asbestos miners, I didn’t even know asbestos was mined! But it turns out that asbestos is mined in really unsafe conditions by black South Africans and Australian aborigines well after the British companies employing them knew it is horrendously bad for you'. McCulloch is an academic historian but really heavily involved in this fight for justice and was writing about Fanon. There was another paper I came across recently that was written a while ago, maybe the eighties, where the author talks about the first time they encountered Fanon’s work when they went to some civil rights meeting in the UK and the meeting got broken up by the police. Normally when you’re reading about David Hume you don’t get that type of stuff. I think also, as you may be aware, Fanon wrote an essay called Concerning Violence as part of Wretched of the Earth which is a really long essay on violence and lots of people hate it because its basically advocating for violent revolution. I think some people have been put off his work because of that. There’s also in Black Skin, White Masks two chapters where he talks about romantic relations between black and white persons and there was a lot of feminist critique of that.

 

Did you say some of his work is still being translated?

 

There’s some stuff that’s been recently translated, a doorstop of a book, that includes his plays, letters, his psychiatric papers which are medical papers, I’ve been trying to read them and they’re heavy going. Also when he was in Algeria, he was writing for the FLN newspaper and there’s various essays as a part of that which have just been translated. He also died really young, that could be why he is less well know.

 

On the violence issue, what do you think about the idea that people simply find the idea of violence uncomfortable in general? For Fanon the idea of revolutionary violence against institutional violence is mostly justified, you can recognise it as two very different types of violence, do you think there’s something culturally ingrained about the idea that violence from institutions, the state, is fine, but violence against it is wrong, is it a kind of capitalist ideology at play here?

 

Yeah I guess you’re right, people are just uncomfortable with it, there’s a phrase to describe Fanon — ‘the apostle of violence’ — whereas actually if you read Fanon’s essay there’s a lot more in it than what is often popularised. I think people sometimes fail to really understand on a deeper level what it’s like to be in that sort of situation. He wrote it after he’d been in Algeria, and the French regime in Algeria was really brutal as well as the war. In that context there isn’t any option other than armed uprising to get rid of colonialism, there is no other option, so he’s writing from that perspective. In the essay Concerning Violence, there's a lot of analysis, military strategy; just what kinds of things work and why, and then also pitfalls that you can fall into. There’s quite a lot of talk in that of which group of people hold the revolutionary potential. He’s also thinking about the fact that Algerians fighting had loads less firepower than the colonial power but actually you have to see their actions against the context of the cold war and at the time – I hadn’t thought about this before – there was this real worry from the west that Africa was turning ‘red’ – going communist.

 

Such as Angola, Burkina Faso for example?

 

Yes exactly, there was a worry that all these colonial movements were going to get co-opted by communist forces, so Fanon pointed out that this gave those violent actions a lot more power and significance than they would have if that wasn’t the case.

 

Because the Soviet Union armed anti-apartheid fighters in south Africa

 

Yes, and Cuba was involved

 

Cuba sent troops to Angola later on against the South African invasion

 

Yes, there were communist powers arming revolutionary forces in various places. You get a similar thing in so-called Indochina with Maoist China supporting lots of the anti-colonial movements in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam etcetera. So in that essay Concerning Violence there’s a lot of interesting and complex points about those violence actions having a great force and how lots of the European powers are quite keen to decolonise certain places in Africa as a means to stop them becoming communist. But also he spoke about what decolonisation means, he has a lot of analysis about this not just being flag waving, he also considers how much economic independence there can be from the so-called mother country and what the options are for the young independent states. Actually you can see that they get done over, so Haiti, Cuba, etcetera, were really hurt by these economic measures, and all of these sort of things are forgotten when people say ‘well he’s arguing for armed insurrection and that’s bad’.

 

Well, with that you’d also be saying at the same time that Algerian independence is wrong, forgetting what the French colonialists are doing

 

Yes exactly.

 

It seemed Europe and America were very worried about a communist Africa. All the coups and assassinations in these countries such as what happened to Thomas Sankara were testament to that. In that context Fanon seemed to give the correct analysis. You mentioned in reference to decolonisation, that often it was a mask for economic exploitation, in this day that’s supposedly post-race, post-colonial, what do you think Fanon would suggest is the proper way to decolonise? Do you think it remains in the hands of neo-colonial powers, or is it something that can be enacted within these exploited countries?

 

I suppose when people talk about decolonisation at the moment there are several different things it could mean. Sometimes what they are talking about is a cultural decolonisation; so inserting more philosophers of colour in the canon for example, and I think that’s really important in many different ways but there’s also changing global power structures and that just seems a separate question. I suppose you had both those ideas of decolonisation when Fanon was around. For example the Negritude Movement, Aimé Césaire, Fanon’s teacher, argued for cultural decolonisation (among other things), and was one of the key players in that. It was born in Paris between the two world wars, there was a massive melting pot of people: existentialists, surrealists, Harlem and Haitian renaissance writers, people from French Polynesia, the Caribbean, Africa, all hanging around together.

 

So, is that when Fanon was in Paris?

 

He was a little bit after, roughly the same time, but Aimé Césaire and some of the others who he was influenced by were all there. The three main people associated with the Negritude movement were Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal. It was again not a unified movement, it had a lot of different strands. One strand was trying to give a different idea of black identity and also an Africanised identity because in a lot of the French colonies in the Caribbean people thought of themselves as French. But when they went to France, they discovered the Europeans didn't think of them as French.

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Fanon wrote about that didn’t he?

 

Yes he wrote about that. People would think of themselves as Caribbean people as superior to African people, so this idea of an African identity - Pan-Africanism, was quite radical at the time. Then there were new forms of literature and poetry coming out of that. Fanon sometimes is very dismissive, saying that this cultural movement is just for the middle classes, how will that help plantation workers, the child workers? It doesn’t, what we need is economic change. But I think he changes his mind about that as he goes. That tension between those two things we still find in questions about what is decolonisation today.

 

So, it’s a difference between a search for individual identity and asserting a cultural identity? This at the same time being separate from systematic change because you can have these cultural shifts without changing the system. You see it with corporations trying to profit from the idea of making blackness cool or different and how does that benefit people being systematically challenged by the police etc, is that a tension that is applicable?

 

Yes, I guess so, I suppose it’s the same thing Fanon was worried about, this superficiality, things that don’t address the more pressing concerns.

 

In terms of shaping identities, what do you think Fanon would say about a concept of reclamation? In America in the 60s you had Stokely Carmichael, head of a branch of the NAACP, saying how reclaiming the N-word and blackness was a good thing, what would Fanon think about that?

 

That’s part of one of the things the negritude movement was interested in, a positive conception of black identity and so on. This is a bit of Fanons philosophy that I find fascinating, he seems in Black Skin, White Masks to argue against that, as though it’s pointless. One of his objections seems to be what we just spoke about, that it’s all well and good but how does it help the lowest of the low? But then I realised recently there’s actually a bit more going on here. Psychiatry at that time was influenced heavily by psychoanalysis and there was a technique in psychoanalytic therapy which is sometimes called the ‘waking dream’. There’s different versions of it, but the basic idea is that at a certain point in treating somebody, a person needs to go on an inner journey to confront all the worst things inside his or herself, that only when you face the worst things can you be healed. There’s a bit in Fanon’s book which I’ve realised is actually that, so when he argues against building positive conceptions about black identity, I think he isn’t arguing against that per se, that’s not the end of the argument, I think part of what he’s doing is saying is that you wont hit rock bottom if you stay there, there’s no good just thinking there were great civilisations in Africa and so on, you have to get deeper, to excavate all the nasty stuff that colonialism has lodged in peoples psyches, and only when you do that can you recover from it, and I think that’s really interesting.

 

That’s really interesting. There’s a movement going on called the Going Back to Africa movement where people go in search of their roots because a lot of African Americans and European diaspora are trying to find something other than the black identity, because a lot of them are realising that the black identity is just nothing. What would Fanon think about trying to get back into your routes, finding a lost identity?

 

He doesn’t seem to like that, he makes various comments about it partly based on existentialist views of freedom, that the past doesn’t determine me, doesn’t determine my actions. What difference does it make is his thought I suppose, what difference does it make to me now? I suppose there’s also his thought that getting caught up in the past isn’t a way to move forward, and so he is sceptical about people who do get caught up in the past like that. There is again the thought that it's all very well to try and build a positive idea of black identity by thinking about past African civilisations, but it's not clear how it's going to actually help people at the bottom.

 

If I’m not wrong, he would agree with Malcolm X – the point of the X being a new identity, looking forwards not backwards, creating something new with your situation?

 

I think one of the things that Fanon says is that race is constructed, so he says at one point that the whole of human history is mine, as a human, so it seems he is sceptical of those kind of things.

 

Do you have an opinion on how can we rely on going through colour-blindness or going through a constructive way of being human, how can we transcend all this, is there a way to?

 

It’s a good question. I think that’s what he hoped for. His conception of what decolonisation looks like is tied up with his conception of a humanist philosophy where you somehow have to pass through race, so it can sound a bit like the end point is colour-blindness. I think it’s not quite the same as that, because you somehow have to pass through race, literally sort of unpick race in order to get to the humanist position. I think he never quite finished articulating what that was and I guess because he died before he had time to think more about that. It’s also maybe in keeping with the idea that its continually an open question for us, to make sure that our societies are good, just, and equal etcetera.

 

Does he suggest any way of touching the people at the bottom, reaching those who have no use for Pan-Africanism or identities of that sort, does he suggest anything – class struggle, revolution, something else?

 

Yes I guess that’s his thought, that what you need is revolution to help undo the economic structures that keep those things in place, but it’s interesting too that he died before Algeria achieved independence and then things have not gone very well in Algeria. It’s fascinating to think what he would have made of that. I’m sure he would have had lots to say about it and what analysis he would give, what would he see as having gone wrong, how would he see it as being solved? There’s a philosopher called Lewis Gordon, really good if you’re interested in black existentialism and the way he describes Wretched of the Earth and Fanon is a series of hells, like Dante’s Inferno where Fanon is describing these various hells the colonised person can end up in, which is quite depressing. Gordon wrote about the contemporary situation, he was born in Jamaica but he has been in America since he was a kid and he writes about America and race drawing on Fanon’s work.

 

You mentioned the black existentialist movement, is it a loose collection of similar conceptions or was it is genuine movement?

 

I’d say that even though that phenomenology is quite loose, it was a genuine movement, but I’d say that black existentialism was perhaps even looser. Sometimes I’ve heard people say that black existentialism is just any philosophy about black existence and then a lot of those philosophers will draw on existentialist stuff, but it seems to be quite a wide movement. There’s Lewis Gordon, Fanon is sometimes counted too, sometimes Cornel West and Lucius Outlaw categorised in that way.

 

What are you currently working on?

 

My current project is a book which is an overview of Fanon’s philosophy, there’s a book series called Routledge’s Arguments of the Philosophers and there’s one book on each important philosopher. I’m supposed to be writing the one on Fanon, there’s not very much writing happening so far, a lot of reading and digging about.

 

Do you know when it’s meant to be done?

 

The deadline is summer 2023. There are so many interesting rabbit holes I have fallen into while doing my research.

 

Thank you very much

 

No problem, thank you.