Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon
Contributor(s): Ato Sekyi-Otu, Beata Stawarska, Josias Tembo, Philippe Van Haute, Reingard Nethersole, Robert Bernasconi, Ulrike Kistner
- Publication Date: Sept 2020
- Dimensions and Pages: 229 x 152 mm; Extent: 176pp
- Paperback EAN: 978-1-77614-623-9
- eBook EAN: 978-1-77614-624-6
- PDF EAN: 978-1-77614-624-6
- Rights: World
- Recommended Price (ZAR): 300.00
- Recommended Price (USD): 20.00
This collection of essays turns Hegel right side up. In thrilling yet scholarly style, it identifies the mistranslations and misconceptions surrounding the influential lord-bondsman dialectic—transmitted by Kojève, reproduced by Fanon, and perpetuated by much of postcolonial and decolonial literature. Opening up vital conversations about the nature of human strivings, the moral ambiguity of violence, and the agency of the colonized subject, this book is a necessary rejoinder to the dominance of the French Hegel.
– Wahbie Long, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, and a Mandela Mellon Fellow of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University
These essays offer new insights on the conversation that Fanon undertook with the western philosophical tradition and thinkers of his time, especially Hegel through the lens of Kojève. It offers a wonderful and stimulating journey through questions of violence, emancipation and the conquest of one’s own humanity.
– Felwine Sarr, Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University
| Hegel is most often mentioned – and not without good reason – as one of the paradigmatic exponents of Eurocentrism and racism in Western philosophy. But his thought also played a crucial and formative role in the work of one of the iconic thinkers of the ‘decolonial turn’, Frantz Fanon. This would be inexplicable if it were not for the much-quoted ‘lord-bondsman’ dialectic – frequently referred to as the ‘master-slave dialectic’ – described in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Fanon takes up this dialectic negatively in contexts of violence-riven (post-)slavery and colonialism; yet in works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth he upholds a Hegelian-inspired vision of freedom. The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel’s text, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. |
Preface – Hegel/Fanon: Transpositions in Translations – Ulrike Kistner and Philippe Van Haute
Introduction – Fanon’s French Hegel – Robert Bernasconi
Chapter 1 Dialectics in Dispute, with Aristotle as Witness – Ato Sekyi-Otu
Chapter 2 Through Alexandre Kojève’s Lens: Violence and the Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks – Philippe Van Haute
Chapter 3 Reading Hegel’s Gestalten: Beyond Coloniality – Ulrike Kistner
Chapter 4 Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman Dialectic and the African: A Critical Appraisal of Achille Mbembe’s Colonial Subjects – Josias Tembo
Chapter 5 Struggle and Violence: Entering the Dialectic with Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir – Beata Stawarska
Chapter 6 Shards of Hegel: Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s Readings of The Wretched of the Earth – Reingard Nethersole
Contributors
Index
Ulrike Kistner is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria.
Philippe Van Haute is Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria.
Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Ato Sekyi-Otu is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Social Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. He is Associate Fellow of Thinking Africa, Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University.
Josias Tembo is PhD researcher at the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria.
Beata Stawarska is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.
Reingard Nethersole is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg where she inaugurated Comparative Literature.
This collection of essays turns Hegel right side up. In thrilling yet scholarly style, it identifies the mistranslations and misconceptions surrounding the influential lord-bondsman dialectic—transmitted by Kojève, reproduced by Fanon, and perpetuated by much of postcolonial and decolonial literature. Opening up vital conversations about the nature of human strivings, the moral ambiguity of violence, and the agency of the colonized subject, this book is a necessary rejoinder to the dominance of the French Hegel.
– Wahbie Long, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, and a Mandela Mellon Fellow of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University
These essays offer new insights on the conversation that Fanon undertook with the western philosophical tradition and thinkers of his time, especially Hegel through the lens of Kojève. It offers a wonderful and stimulating journey through questions of violence, emancipation and the conquest of one’s own humanity.
– Felwine Sarr, Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University
