Phenomenology of the Political: Fanon's Religion

Chapter 3 probes the complex place of the secular in colonial epistemology in conversation with Frantz Fanon. It discusses Fanon’s complicated relation with religion. Against the prevailing narrative that emphasizes Fanon’s antagonism toward religion, the chapter argues that Fanon does not simply dismiss or turn away from religion in search of a secular, decolonial future. Instead, Fanon’s phenomenology of the political hints at the significant place of religion in Fanon’s critique of colonial modernity. This critique is read as a critique of the political theology of coloniality (whiteness). Religion, be it a conceptual apparatus or a constitutive element of the social fabric, occupies a substantial place in the formation of anticolonial struggles and thoughts. Reading Fanon and religion with these complexities in mind lends an interesting twist—and insight: Fanon’s critique of religion (political theology) is a critique of the secular, even when he is not naming it as such.