Frantz Fanon and the Diagnosis of Social Pathologies in Post-Imperial Britain

In a moment in which anti-migrant rhetoric, exclusionary ethnic nationalisms and the authoritarian populisms they fuel are on the rise, it becomes increasingly important that political theorists do more than offer a moral indictment of racism and xenophobia. This is where this article contends that Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic approach to the critique of ‘race’ and racialisation makes a valuable contribution, even in postcolonial conjunctures that have moved beyond colonialism’s crude Manichean binaries. I read Fanon as a diagnostician of the social pathologies produced by colonialism and white supremacy, showing how he worked from the colonised subject’s experiences of inferiorisation and the coloniser’s experiences of racial superiority and self-mystification to advance a negative critique of racial hierarchies. Crucially, across his oeuvre, Fanon stresses that the fundamental driver of these alienated states that he analyses is the social, not the individual psyche. I conclude by gesturing towards why Fanon’s objects of critique remain not only relevant but increasingly urgent in a postcolonial Britain where racialised ideas of Englishness and anti-migrant moral panics stand in for the more difficult work of building antiracist and social-democratic politics.