Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James on Intellectualism and Enlightened Rationality

Abstract

This essay explores critical accounts of modern rationality and efforts to articulate a conception of reason that is tied to the idea of decolonization as project. It focuses on the work of two of the most widely known and influential Caribbean theorists: the Martiniquean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the Trinidadean Marxist C.L.R. James. The essay first focuses on Fanon‘s diagnosis of reason in the colonial context and the overcoming of its ambiguities and limits through what he calls "sociogeny." Sociogeny is instrumental for the combination of theory with ethics and politics, which provides the ground for a conception of the intellectual as a radical humanist and a revolutionary. James‘s view of rational activity in terms of making the "abstract universal concrete" and his approach to culture complements in important ways Fanon‘s typology of reason and human agency in important ways, but it introduces problems that a Fanonian understanding of the limits of modernity helps to address.