Fanon’s Two Memories

This essay frames Fanon’s work on revolutionary consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth with the problem of memory. In particular, it asks how Fanon’s conception of the colonized is underwritten by a double-movement of remembering and forgetting. The colonized must remember grievance against the colonizer and gather the affect of rage into a will to act. At the same time, the colonized must forget memories of intra-African violence and the grievances produced by that violence. Fanon’s two memories, then, create an undecidable tension of memory and history at the heart of his project in The Wretched of the Earth.