History and histories

In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon seemingly rejects the role that the past can play in the creation of decolonized futurities, famously writing: “I am not a prisoner of History (l’Histoire). I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.” On this basis, Fanon’s thought has often been read as opposed to the more prophetic vision of the past offered by Édouard Glissant, which emphasizes the contrapuntal potentialities that inhere in Black vernacular cultures and histories. In contrast to such readings, this paper contends that Fanon and Glissant similarly uphold a dual conception of the past as encompassing both History (l’Histoire), or the racialized fantasy of chronological linearity that was invented by Western modernity, and histories, a subterranean and mobile network of memories that always remains fugitive to the colonial machinations of History. Tracing this more ambivalent conception of the past through Black Skin, White Masks, Wretched of the Earth, and the writings that Fanon penned during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria, I argue that Fanon’s thought on the past, far from being opposed to Glissant’s, in fact similarly upholds the prophetic value that the past qua histories can play in unleashing decolonized futurities

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · North African History and Literature · Philosophy · Psychology

• Taking it easy

  Open Access•Xander Creed, Shyamika Jayasundara-Smit et al.•World Development•2025

  Add to list