Abstract

Frantz Fanon has offered us a corpus of writing that seamlessly weaves together philosophical, historical, autobiographical, poetic, and journalistic writing. Drawing on Jane Anna Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon, this article argues that we make sense of Fanon’s irreverence to discipline and genre as not merely attempts at bricolage or formal invention. Rather, we should approach Fanon’s efforts as a way of understanding the world on new terms. Reading Rousseau and Fanon together, Gordon demonstrates this point by showing how Fanon’s creolization of the concept of the general will ultimately realizes its world-transforming possibilities. I conclude by showing how political solidarity is another creolized concept in Fanon’s corpus, which we should pay attention to.