Violence, Slavery and Freedom Between Hegel and Fanon

About this book

Hegel is most often mentioned -- and not without good reason -- as one of the paradigmatic exponents of Eurocentrism and racism in Western philosophy. But his thought also played a crucial and formative role in the work of one of the iconic thinkers of the "decolonial turn," Frantz Fanon. This would be inexplicable if it were not for the much-quoted "lord-bondsman" dialectic -- frequently referred to as the "master-slave dialectic" -- described in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Fanon takes up this dialectic negatively in contexts of violence-riven (post-)slavery and colonialism; yet in works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth he upholds a Hegelian-inspired vision of freedom. The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel's text, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts.