Phenomenology of Race: Poetics of Blackness Available to Purchase

In addition to offering an acute observation of the way Black bodies are registered in space (and time), Fanon’s phenomenological reflection allows us to think about life, revolt, and world-making in the face of immeasurable violence. Chapter 4 explores how Fanon’s struggle to reconfigure his body (Blackness) resignifies religion. Fanon employs the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on phenomenology as he reflects on the ways his own body is co-constituted by the world and others who inhabit it. Fanon’s phenomenological reflection on race (Blackness) offers the possibility of rethinking the sacred. The secular humanist’s staunch rejection of Western religion and metaphysics unfolds, paradoxically, alongside the unnamed figure or moment that evokes a certain sense of the sacred, a sacred presented as antithesis to the sacred. Fanon’s struggle to decolonize and restore his humanity can be read as an attempt to re-code, that is, decolonize the sacred.