Journal Article — Re-Reading Frantz Fanon: Language, Violence, and Eurocentrism in the Characterization of Our Time — by José da Mota-Lopes

The highly critical way the work of Frantz Fanon was received by the most important national liberation movements of the African continent has, in the last thirty years, more or less disappeared from our collective recollection. This is so much more anomalous as his most important writings were produced within and for one of those movements, the Algerian FLN. After discussing other more well known readings of Fanon, this article recalls some of the basic aspects of that specific, politically-engaged, militant way of reading his work within the liberation movement. It asserts that this side-by-side consideration of different readings allows a more accurate, stimulating, and multidimensional approach to Fanon’s work, in general, and to his conclusions about colonial language, spontaneous violence, and Eurocentrism, in particular.