Abstract
This chapter analyzes the response to Hegel’s views on Africa by postcolonial theorists, focusing on Frantz Fanon. It shows how Fanon effectively rewrites Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and how the Hegelian notion of recognition is central to both Fanon’s account of the “black man” as a construction of “white” ideology, and his political agenda for achieving humanity in a necessarily reciprocal fashion. Fanon provides a transition to the next section of the book inasmuch as he makes a connection between the imperialistic and Eurocentric nature of Hegel’s dialectic and the institution of slavery.
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Notes
- 1.
Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 2008), pp. xvi–vxiii. Hereafter cited as BS.
- 2.
Charles Villet argues that, in this context, the white master seeks recognition not from the black slave but from the white community to which he belongs, “Hegel and Fanon on the Question of Mutual Recognition: A Comparative Analysis,” Journal of Pan African Studies 4.7 (2011): 43.
- 3.
Frantz Fanon , The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 102. Hereafter cited as WE.
- 4.
John K. Noyes sees the characteristic of Hegelian negativity as inhering in the fact that the Other “refuses to go away.” Fanon , he suggests, elaborates on this, viewing negativity as “the identifying impetus of black consciousness that refuses to play the identifying game of white consciousness,” “HFNE.”
- 5.
See WE, 313.
References
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Tran. Constance Farrington, 102. New York: Grove Press.
———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox, xvi–vxiii. Reprint 1952. New York: Grove Press.
Villet, Charles. 2011. Hegel and Fanon on the Question of Mutual Recognition: A Comparative Analysis. Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (7): 43.
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Habib, M.A.R. (2017). Frantz Fanon: An African Reading of Hegel. In: Hegel and Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68412-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68412-3_5
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