#The Wretched of the Earth

[tendermimi]

Palestine will be free. (frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth)

[shihlun]

Karim Aïnouz

- Mariner of the Mountains

2021

[philosophybits]

Colonialism almost never exploits the entire country. It is content with extracting natural resources and exporting them to the metropolitan industries thereby enabling a specific sector to grow relatively wealthy, while the rest of the colony continues, or rather sinks, into underdevelopment and poverty.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[recreationaldivorce]

The settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native's work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler.

- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans. Constance Farrington)

[propertiesofjoy]

the wretched of the earth, frantz fanon

[nitewrighter]

It's true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich. You warned them: if they shed too much blood you would pretend to disown them; the same way a State--no matter which one--maintains a mob of agitators, provocateurs, and spies abroad whom it disowns once they are caught."

--Jean-Paul Sartre's Preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

[littleliteraturelegion]

"The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e, with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessential of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil."

-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[facelessinthesun]

the close

[chainmail-butch]

I'm reading Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and I find myself agreeing with Sartre (who wrote the preface) for the first time ever. I suppose this is what they call 'character growth.'

Not for me though, for Sartre.

[damnesdelamer]

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon available here.

The Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon available here.

[scamallach-1]

From Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. The arts/being an artist/an artist’s place + the settler-colonialism that touches so much of the arts in The West has been on my mind ever since I was looking at what decolonial scholars and educators have been saying about it. Then I came upon this excerpt this morning.

[thethirdbear]

every spectator is a coward or a traitor.

[iasirene]

Today marks 63 years since the death of Marxist decolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon, here is a quote from his most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth:

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

[philosophybits]

The awakening of the people as a whole will not be achieved overnight; their rational commitment to the task of building the nation will be simple and straightforward; first of all, because the methods and channels of communication are still in the development stages; secondly, because the sense of time must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather that of the rest of the world; and finally, because the demoralization buried deep within the mind by colonization is still very much alive.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[lumi-colchicine]

Constantly while reading The Wretched of the Earth, I can't help but draw connections over and over again to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. So much of Fanon's analysis maps effortlessly onto the contemporary struggle of the Palestinian people... I don't think anyone could read this book, take it to heart, and still believe there's any possible way the zionist entity could exist or have a future not entirely predicated on the complete annihilation of the Palestinian society it has colonized.

Maybe later I'll post some quotes to illustrate the parallels I'm talking about, but this book is absolutely worth reading in its entirety.

[propertiesofjoy]

the wretched of the earth, frantz fanon