It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations and enact a different world will be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power-the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior, while the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. First, for Fanon, the psycho-affective realm and the social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Fanon’s political theory is structured by two recurring themes. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two.įrantz Fanon is an important figure in contemporary post-colonial political thought and Black Atlantic theory, known for his theoretical reflections on and participation in anti-colonial liberation struggles (perhaps most notably, the Algerian revolutionary struggle in the 1950s).
At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective.
This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible.
The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context.
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