Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience

by Ato Sekyi-Otu

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon’s texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure―advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth .

But the controversies attending his life―and death, which some ascribed to the CIA―are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon’s oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience―the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath―in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon’s work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Ato Sekyi-Otu is a Ghanaian political philosopher. He was born at Saltpond, Ghana in 1941 and until 1971 was known as Daniel Sackey Walker. He was educated at Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast, where he was Head Prefect in 1960-61 and completed his Cambridge Higher School Certificate in 1961 with distinctions in Greek and Latin. He went to Harvard and received an A.B. in Government in 1966. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Toronto where he worked with the renowned Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson and received his PhD in 1971.

Sekyi-Otu taught in the Department of Social Science and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto until he retired in 2006 as Emeritus Professor. He is best known for his work on Frantz Fanon and Ayi Kwei Armah. In 1996 he wrote an acknowledged classic in the literature on Fanon entitled "Fanon's Dialectic of Experience" published by Harvard University Press. His most recent book is "Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays published by Routledge in 2018, which won the 2019 Caribbean Philosophical Association Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.

Sekyi-Otu's work has been widely taken up in South Africa and in the Caribbean.

Reviews

[Shahab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baring the impenetrable language that Ato employs throughout the book, it is truly worth a read; Ato emerges successful in establishing Fanon as one of the greatest (but much misunderstood) Marxist thinkers of the 20th century.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

great ideas, sub-par writing