Fanon and After

Fanon and After is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies course taught by John Drabinski.

Course Description
This course functions as a critical introduction to post-WWII Caribbean philosophy and cultural theory. Our focus will be the work of Frantz Fanon and his engagement with a cluster of European intellectual trends: marxism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. We will be guided by a simple pair of questions. What is the fate of European ideas when evaluated in and transformed by the experience of the Americas? And how does that transformation illuminate something crucial about the meaning of existence and collectivity after colonialism? Fanon's contribution to this discussion is profound, underscoring the uniqueness and fundamental newness of the Caribbean situation. But this contribution is not without intellectual dispute and debate. Following our reading of Fanon, then, we will examine this dispute and debate through close readings of Aime Cesaire, Rene Menil, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau. In these thinkers and their critical assessment of Fanon, we find sustained reflection on the meaning of West Indian postcolonial life in the experience of race, language, history, and community. Such reflections make for compelling and unprecedented interventions in existentialism, modernism, and postmodernism.