A Philosophical Anthropology of Race and the Geographies of Liberation
Posted: 18 Sep 2017
Date Written: September 16, 2017
Abstract
In the final pages of Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues for the emergence of what he calls a “new humanity”. Efforts of human beings to realize themselves and their conditions as liberated, he reasons, must entail a disposing of Europe as the standard against which all else is judged. Much like the project of decolonization, establishing a new humanity is a totalizing project that must take seriously all domains in and by which the human being is implicated, which includes, necessarily, the spatial. In other words, liberation must involve a contending with all domains involved in the oppression of black people. This isn’t to deny progress where it is made in other domains, but instead to acknowledge the meticulous efforts by racists to construct a world where one is everywhere reminded of the problem of blackness. A deconstruction of that world must be attended to with an even greater measure of care. Thus, I examine the ways in which liberation necessarily takes on a spatial quality. In doing so, I pay particular attention to how contemporary black liberation movements, like Black Lives Matters, articulate their positions in spatial terms.
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