Chapter 6: Decolonization As Utopia and the Potentiality of Ethnic Studies: Beyond Neoliberalism and the Settler State

In his closing pages of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon begins the final chapter with a quote from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Fanon’s version of Marx’s text reads:

By incorporating this epigraph, Fanon reiterates a common theme of Black Skin, White Masks, linking the psychopathologies of colonialism and white supremacy to the notion of time. Fanon, meditating on the colonial situation of the Black Antillean, finds the brutality of colonialism a process that effectively creates the colonized subject, distorting their desires, and placing the colonized in a static temporality of otherness that is situated in juxtaposition to the historically progressive Europe (Fanon, 2008). By invoking Marx, Fanon offers the possibility of what Keeling (2009) refers to as a “poetry of the future” (p. 564), in which the foundations of decolonial desire and futurity for the colonized are forged without the colonial, linear building blocks of the past, and built with a new relationship to time, future, and freedom. As Keeling argues, Fanon seeks to eliminate the “temporality of the colonial modes of representation of otherness,” and in doing so, reveals a temporality that “raises the possibility of the impossible within colonial reality, black liberation” (Keeling, 2009, p. 564).