Stealing the Enemy's Book;Pursuits of Fanon's Decolonization Theory in sartre,Zahar,and Said

As Chris Taylor has noted in his recent review of Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), postcolonial studies is now under intense self-scrutiny as part of a collective guilt shared among humanities and social sciences scholars for failing to “get a critical grip” on the increasing ferocity of global capitalism in all its tumbles and turns. At the heart of this self-criticism lies the accusation that postcolonial studies emerged as an attempt to “convert the collapse of both First and Third World projects for popular emancipation into an ideological and epistemological norm.” This essay was conceived in part as an attempt to understand this charge against postcolonial studies by drawing on Franz Fanon’s theory of decolonization as an important site of convergence for different commentaries and responses contributing to the formation of postcolonial studies. My view is that that if there was such an act of “ideological or epistemological conversion”, it must have taken place at Fanon where his radical, often controversial ideas of liberation continue to serve as a historical as well as theoretical backdrop that informs critical and postcolonial theories in all their theoretical moves and adjustments. The essay tries to explore how a few of the most well-known theorists and critics try to come to terms with Fanon’s theory of decolonization, a task that compels them to confront the political as well as ideological fissure drawn between them and Fanon, and its cultural and political implications in their own theories of liberation.