Frantz Fanon Quotes on Knowledge
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), the Martinican psychiatrist and theorist of decolonization, developed in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) the most rigorous early postcolonial analysis of how colonial conditions structure the categories through which the colonized come to know themselves and their world. The phenomenological analysis of the gaze — the moment at which "Look, a Negro!" interrupts the bodily schema of the colonized subject and substitutes the racial epidermal schema imposed from without — anticipates by decades the later philosophical literature on epistemic injustice.
Quotes
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.”
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“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
pp. 38 -
Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“What matters now is not to know the world but to change it.”
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“Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from traditional embrace of the haik , every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.”
A Dying Colonialism -
“Introduction, page 7”
Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed. Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. -
“At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell.”
Introduction, page 8 -
“Introduction, page 8”
At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell. -
“Introduction, page 8”
The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. -
“Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”
Introduction, page 9