“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes the sentence as a claim about what decolonisation is, not about a mood one might choose. Whatever heading is used, national liberation or a new formula, Fanon says decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. A competing reading hears a licence for any later violence that borrows his name, which a definition of a historical process is not. He is opening the book by saying the substitution of one species of humankind for another, in the colonial situation, does not happen as a polite change of administration. Farrington's English is the familiar phenomenon. Philcox later prints event. The sentence is the opening of Concerning Violence. It is not the mission sentence later in the same opening movement, and it is not the compressed claim from Black Skin, White Masks. The French is his. This English is a translation, and the translator is part of the citation.

Did Frantz Fanon really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. The opening sentence of the chapter Concerning Violence, in Constance Farrington's 1963 English. Richard Philcox's later translation says a violent event, and it words the list of names differently. This card follows Farrington. The wording is a translation. It is not the sentence, already here, about a generation discovering its mission.

Where it comes from

The Wretched of the Earth (1961), opening of Concerning Violence, translated by Constance Farrington (1963)

Approximate date: 1961.

How to use it

A panel in London that quotes the sentence as a general permission, and cannot say which colonial order is being replaced, has kept the adjective and lost the subject. The phenomenon he names is decolonisation, the overturning of a colonial world. A quarrel that is not that overturning does not become his by sounding like the cadence. The sentence is also not a claim that every independence ceremony was a battle. It is his description of what the change comes to, including the changes that prefer not to say so.

A mindset reading

Always is his word, and it is why the sentence is severe. A reading that keeps only the violence and drops the subject, decolonisation, has made a different claim. A reading that keeps the subject and treats the violence as optional has also made a different claim. Farrington says phenomenon. Do not mix that word silently with Philcox's event and call both one quotation.

Understand the philosophy

Les Damnés de la terre, 1961, opens the chapter on violence with this sentence. The key clause, in Constance Farrington's 1963 translation, is that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. Philcox's English differs and should be cited as Philcox if it is the one being quoted. The generation's mission, already in this library, is a later sentence in the same opening movement. Black Skin, White Masks is the earlier book. This card is the third passage, and it is a translation.

Related

• “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “The black person has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white person. A black person behaves differently with a white person and with another black person.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related fallacy. Ad hominem. An ad hominem answers a claim by attacking the person who made it, instead of the reasons. A fact about the speaker is relevant only when it actually bears on the evidence, such as a shown conflict of interest or a record of false reports on this subject.

Practise the nine skills