Considering Fanon in the Contemporary: Tracing the Subject Through Resistance Archetypes in the 1970s

This thesis investigates a non-humanist reading of Frantz Fanon’s work and applies it to the political subjectivity in the works of Steve Biko and George Jackson as significant anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistors and writers in the 1970s, when Frantz Fanon was becoming increasingly influential. While Fanon is often characterized as a revolutionary humanist, his core diagnosis of colonialism as a system of ontological negation and social death challenges the very possibilities of humanist reconciliation. In this study, I argue that a non-humanist Fanonian framework more faithfully captures the experiences of revolutionaries and political prisoners who operate in direct conflict with the bounds of liberal recognition. Through a phenomenological analysis of the selected works of I Write What I Like (Biko, 1978) and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Jackson, 1970), I trace how both writers confront or reject humanist concepts of progress, universalism, and solidarity. Outcomes of my analysis include shared themes of resistance that are defined by a rupture with humanist thought, teleology, and assimilationist politics, with variances across the selected works in the aspects of Fanon’s tradition that they draw on.