Fanonian decolonial project: proposals for a transmodernity?

• Grant number: 16/23056-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: March 15, 2017
• End date: March 14, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Valter Roberto Silvério
• Grantee: Dionisio da Silva Pimenta
• Supervisor: Nelson Maldonado-Torres
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/26145-0 - Narrating postcolonial nations: representation of subjects and experiences in the novels Mayombe by Pepetela and Terra Sonâmbula by Mia Couto., BP.DR

Abstract

The project aims to understand Frantz Fanon's works, specifically Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1979), as critical formulations to modernity. The first hypothesis is that, in these texts, Fanon engages in a deconstruction of modernity and its repertoire - official languages, civilization, subject, citizenship and national state - insofar as he discusses the possibilities of emancipation from colonial process of racialization. The second hypothesis is that each book's reception originated a theoretical field - cultural/postcolonial and decolonial studies - with different approaches based on culture and economy. In this sense, the project's goals consist in: a) reading the bibliographical production of those fields, identifying Fanonian appropriations and registering how they deal with culture and/or economy; b) analyzing Fanon's books through cultural/postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, approaching them as critical formulations upon modernity from three axes: modernity/coloniality, the struggle for recognition, and a new humanism; c) to apply the results achieved in the analyses of the novels Mayombe, by Pepetela, and Terra Sonâmbula by Mia Couto. The research will be methodologically theoretical and bibliographical.