Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On
A Memorial Roundtable^
Lewis R. Gordon,
George Ciccariello-Maher,
and Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Abstract: Originally delivered to mark the fiftieth anniversary
of both Frantz Fanon's death and the publication of his seminal
discourse on decolonization. The Wretched of the Earth, these
remarks seek to offer a preliminary outline of Fanon 's continuing
relevance to the present. Conceptually spanning such touchstone
elements of Fanon's thought as sociogeny, race, violence,
the human, and the relation between decolonial ethics and
decolonial politics, the authors turn our attention to diagnosing
the neoliberal face of contemporary coloniality/modernity and
contributing to movements ftom the Arab (or North African)
Spring to the Occupy movement, ftom Philadelphia's "ftash mobs"
to the new Latin American Left.
1. Lewis R. Gordon
Why are we talking about Fanon at all? In the first place. Fanon is one of
those thinkers that people love to hate, and this is because, in a way, he's a
bit of an embarrassment. What kind of an embarrassment is he? We attend
meetings about eritieal theory, and we hear a lot of people talking about pol-
ities and aetivism and so forth, but Fanon was a person who went out there
and risked his life and stood up for things beeause he had a profound belief
1. These remarks were originally delivered at "Critical Refusals," the fourth
biennial conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society at the
University of Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2011. George Ciccariello-Maher has
edited the three presentations to prepare them for this publication, including
inserting direct quotations, references, and italics.
© Radical Philosophy Review Volume 16, number 1 (2013]: 307-324
DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201316125