Abstract
In race theories of education, there has been a resurgent interest in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, as they apply to the racial politics of schooling. This makes sense within a US context because of Du Bois’ public status as an intellectual. By comparison, there has been less attention paid to Frantz Fanon, whose work on decolonization was formative in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter introduces the opening that Fanon provided for intellectuals in critically understanding the colonial interaction as part of the broader architecture of race relations. Although colonial administration has changed and adapted over time, the fact of coloniality continues, tucked away effectively within the discourse of neoliberalism. Focusing mainly on Black Skin White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, we introduce critical Fanonian concepts, like the mask, anti-blackness and violence as a way to explain contemporary US race relations and education. By doing so, the chapter assesses the continuing relevance of Fanon’s lifework against colonialism even after the official fall of colonialism, survived by a new condition of coloniality that is necessary to take into account if Fanon is to remain useful for education scholars.
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Notes
- 1.
Although our argument is grounded in an understanding of the US context and therefore is bounded by a nation-state narrative, the decolonial standpoint we take allows the analysis to become relevant in an international milieu where the colonial predicament is found, such as Australia, Africa, and South America. In this sense, so-called postcolonial societies function through coloniality as a continuing structure of power. Furthermore, we frame the problem of colonialism not unlike the way Gramsci (1971) describes the role of the capitalist state in securing hegemony. He explains that as the capitalist state in advanced western nations relies more on culture and common sense, the state begins to take on an educative function. Likewise, we argue that advanced colonial states maintain an educative function by saturating civil society with a colonial common sense. In this, education policies certainly take an important seat at the table, but the colonial state’s educative function is broader than schooling insofar as the coloniality of power is a fully social set of relations wherein the citizenry’s consent is won, where violence is sedimented at multiple levels of social interaction, including policy.
- 2.
It should be noted that we are writing within the context of the United States, and any direct references to empirical studies or the lived experiences of students of colour are located within the US. We employ the commonly used phrase ‘students of colour’ to mark racialized student groups who embody the colonized positionality. These students represent diverse groups, and oftentimes their relationship and connection to colonialism may vary, particularly in a settler colonial state like the United States. It should also be noted that while we write from the United States, colonial power relations are pervasive at a global scale, and Fanon’s insights must be extracted and adapted to fit different contexts. Furthermore, Fanon’s colonizer–colonized framework in our use does not function as a strict binary, but rather as a web of messy power relations informed by colonial/racialized social and material structures. No two regions of the world experience this dynamic in exactly the way.
- 3.
In recognizing the multiplicity of gender identities within colonized populations, this chapter makes use of gender neutral pronouns. In this case, the pronoun, them or their, serves as both singular and plural.
- 4.
We do not want to underplay the high levels of violence involving South Africa’s ANC. The use of violence during the passage from Apartheid to a liberated South Africa was a source of contradictions and difficulties for Mandela and moving forward with the new nation. That said, in the end violence was not the determining mark of the South African revolution, preferring instead to go through the route of Reconciliation.
- 5.
US Third World feminists have developed similar theories in which decolonial thought is found in an in-between state of being. Sandoval’s reading of Fanon’s epistemological contributions are echoed by notions of mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), transgressive knowledges (Hooks 1994) and “Outsider” knowledges (Collins 1986). Sandoval herself calls this mode of thinking “oppositional consciousness” (1991).
- 6.
We are borrowing this phrase from the Southern Mexico based indigenous group El Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). The actual quote reads “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” [a world where many worlds fit] (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional 2005).
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Leonardo, Z., Singh, M. (2017). Fanon, Education and the Fact of Coloniality. In: Parker, S., Gulson, K., Gale, T. (eds) Policy and Inequality in Education. Education Policy & Social Inequality, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4039-9_6
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