The National and Colonial Questions Revisited

This paper takes as its point of departure the possibility that Frantz Fanon may have read Vladimir Lenin and M. N. Roy’s debate at the Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920. I revisit the stakes of this earlier debate alongside Fanon’s later interventions and explore affinities and differences in how Fanon and Roy approach the class politics of anticolonial revolution. The paper also compares their critiques of nationalism and respective appeals to a “new humanism.” I argue that while Roy more clearly recognizes the difficulties of trying to transcend nationalism by working through it, he also loses his earlier confidence in the political agency of the masses, which proves an enduring feature of Fanon’s new humanism

Colonialism · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian American and Pacific Histories