The JFFS is now an open-source peer-reviewed journal (what we should all hope is the wave of the future for academic journals). This issue includes, besides a number of articles (including one by Leonard Lawlor on the project of "continental philosophy" with which a first glance tells me that I will probably disagree on a number of points but from which I am sure to learn, as always with Lawlor), a forum on Fanon; as history would have it, the 50th anniversary of Les Damnés de la terre coincides with the "Revolutionary Spring of 2011."
What better way to celebrate, commemorate, critically reflect on, and think through Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth fifty years after its publication with a new North African syndrome: Revolution—or at least a series of revolts that continue to rock regimes across North Africa and the region. Fanon beginsThe Wretched writing of decolonization as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order—often against the odds—willed from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is instead an absolute replacement of one “species” of humanity by another.
In periods of revolution, like the one we are experiencing today, such absolutes appear quite normal. Indeed, radical change becomes the “new normal” and the idea that revolutionary change is impossible is simply the rantings and ravings of the conservatives and reactionaries of the ancient regime.
Too long buried under the weight of the tomes of academic discourse, Fanon has been resuscitated by the new dawn of North African revolutions.
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