Fanon and the Refusal of Colonial Time

This article elucidates the violent imposition of the linear timeline on the racialized and colonized subject and the diverse incipient refusals of this colonial imposition, which suppresses the nonlinear temporalities of the racialized and colonized bodily experience. Frantz Fanon’s 1952 publications ‘The North African Syndrome’ and Black Skin, White Masks elicit the potential for a revolutionary praxis to develop from within the oppressive temporality of a racist and colonialist lifeworld. With Fanon’s recognition that the racialized and colonized subject is infused with the phantoms of violent colonial pasts comes his medical diagnostic of intergenerational trauma. This article argues that such refusals invite the concept of colonized sociality, in which the terror of dead generations is viewed as constitutive of the contemporary experience. Hence, the recognition that violent colonial pasts shape the fraught psychic life of the present can lead to the growth of a future anti-colonial consciousness.