What Fanon Said

Drucilla Cornell (Afterword By) Drucilla Cornell was Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. With a background in philosophy, law, and grassroots mobilization, she played a central role in the organization of the memorable conferences on deconstruction and justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. She was the author of The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Feminism and Pornography (2000), and Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (2014). She has also coedited several books: Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (1987), with Seyla Benhabib; and Hegel and Legal Theory (1991) and Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), with David Gray Carlson and Michel Rosenfeld. She was part of a philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled Feminist Contentions (1995). In addition to her academic work, she wrote four produced plays.Lewis R. Gordon (Author) Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; and Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. His books include Existentia Africana; Disciplinary Decadence; An Introduction to Africana Philosophy; and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age.Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (Foreword By) Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun is University Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of Paris-Diderot.

"Gordon is interested in understanding and correcting the systematic delegitimization of black intellectuals, both in philosophy and within the broader scope of theory...This is how Gordon pertinently introduces considerations of race and racism within the epistemological field, engaging his readers to be more perceptive with regard to what could be called a 'colour line in theory'." -- -Lucy Kim-Chi Mercier Radical Philosophy 198 "Gordon allows us to read Fanon in new and different ways, contextualizing his thought in a wide arc of knowledge-from St. Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy to contemporaries such as De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Senghor, to more recent continental philosophers. Along the way, Gordon incorporates relevant debates from contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon Said is a provocative and illuminating study." -- -Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley "Gordon has contextualised Fanon's words in an impressive analysis of his texts in relation to other thinkers and critics." -Socialist Review "In the hands of Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said, becomes what Frantz Fanon says to us today. The book brings alive the revolutionary thought and practice of Fanon into the continuing struggles for structural economic, political, social, and psychic transformations of our world. The struggle against anti-black racism is an integral part of it, and Gordon's Fanon is the many-sided thinker who saw it all and give it words of fire in his works, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and The Damned of the Earth." -Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of Wizard of the Crow, from the Wits University Press edition

• Contents Preface, with Acknowledgments Foreword by Sonia Dayan-Hezbrun Introduction On What a Great Thinker Said Chapter 1 "I Am from Martinique" Chapter 2 Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing Chapter 3 Living Experience, Embodying Possibility Chapter 4 Revolutionary Therapy Chapter 5 Counseling the Damned Conclusion Requiem for the Messenger Afterword by Drucilla Cornell