this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Many such cases. I've said it many times and will never stop, The Wretched of the Earth ^(pdf^ ^DL^ ^link)^ is fundamental required reading for anyone in a colonialist or colonized country (or both, in the case of settler-colonies). It is absolutely critical for a material understanding, and Fanon being a professional doctor and psychologist as well as a Marxist gives incredibly valuable foundational insights to not only a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the material conditions, relations, and struggles in and against colonialism, but also of the superstructural political, social, cultural, and psychological outcroppings from the colonial relation and their mutual interpenetration and cyclical reinforcement.
It is also the direct theoretical lineage of so many liberation struggles which came after, including in the US with the BPP and BLA; and so it is quite literally necessary, in general and in particular in the places which inherited the legacy of those Fanonist struggles, for one to engage with in order to not be speaking nonsense about colonialism and the colonial relations which exist, and the contradictions and struggles therein. Fanon is no lesser than what Malcolm X was to the heart of the struggle and its history and theoretical body of work.
From there the next step is reading the criticism and self-criticism and analytical adaptations from the experiences and lessons of those struggles (Huey Newton, George Jackson, Maroon Shoatz, and newer generations such as Kevin Rashid Johnson), which are also necessary because their knowledge derives from practice and its lessons better than anyone who has not this experience. As Mao wrote in On Practice:
If one could hypothetically only read one thing about colonialism, the Wretched of the Earth would be firmly at the top of the list I give them. There is also Orientalism by Edward Said which is too invaluable for those in "the west", but is more of a broad-focused general deconstruction of the historical notions of "the west" and "the east" and such politically-charged and inherently violent concepts as "western values" (as opposed to the values of these 'others') which Fanon touches on in its specific relations and expressions in colonialism, but Said does more broadly in its superstructure and relation to its base in the roots from whence it arose and was constructed out of the dialectical relationships of the history of europe, and of imperialism and colonialism, etc. It is more of a deconstruction through historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the broader history and concepts in and out-of-from "orientalism" than acting as a direct foundational analysis of and for the specific struggles which have been carried out as the Wretched of the Earth has.