Contemporary political theorists tend to understand popular assembly in terms of embodiment in the present, part of an effort to temper linguistic determinism in prevailing theories of collective action. These accounts go too far. Instead, symbolic acts of memorialization may facilitate collective identity in the present. This technique emphasizes narrative recitation and judgment in a manner that may foster both disruption and preservation. Thus, the unfolding of mass demonstrations in late 1970s Iran accorded with descriptions of a collective subject in the image of Zaynab bint Ali. This feature of Iranian history recalls and departs from theories of popular assembly as self-witnessing, also described in scholarly debates as collective self-regard.

This chapter reconstructs Ali Shariati’s discussions of Islam as an “intermediary doctrine” (maktab-e vāseteh), in light of his speeches about the Karbala paradigm, used as inspiration for insurrection. For Shariati, to be intermediary is to assume a central position in global affairs. But the term intermediary also signals a groundless condition on account of which human beings exercise their capacity for choice. Its enactment recalls the status of the human being in Islamic theology. It also approximates eternal truth. The chapter presents Shariati’s method as intermediary, consistent with his notion of an intermediary doctrine. Read together, these ideas reveal a concept of revolutionary subjectivity as intermediary. Shariati crafts an archetype for revolutionary action around the figure of Zaynab, the daughter of Fatima and Ali, the first Shia Imam. Shariati invites audiences to think and act in accordance with the model he performed, which mirrored Zaynab’s actions in response to the battle of Karbala, a founding myth for Shia Islam. As befitting Zaynab’s role in Shia memorialization, later historical events would exceed Shariati’s designs.

In this chapter, the starting point is the Bandung conference and the early development of Third Worldism as an ideology. Many socialists and social democrats in the West saw Israel as a progressive force in the years before and after the Jewish state was established. From the mid-1950s, however, there emerged new perspectives on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs as the relationship was increasingly seen in the context of global anti-colonialism and anti-racism. The Suez crisis of 1956 contributed significantly to this interpretation as the conflict was seen as a clash between old imperialist powers and an emerging Third World. Through the 1960s and 1970s, this perspective came to dominate the view of Israel on the political left. Lines were drawn between the conflict between Israel and the Arabs and other conflicts, such as the war in Vietnam and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The conflicts were increasingly understood as local expressions of a global war between white oppressors and oppressed peoples of color. In this worldview, the Jews were eventually to take the place as the whitest of white oppressors.

Chapter 5 follows Souffles–Anfās editor ʿAbdellatif Laâbi to Beirut in 1970, where he theorized Maghrebi thought within Arabic transregionalism, which he dubbed a Second Nahḍa (Renaissance). The chapter studies his translations of, and commentaries on, Palestinian poetry, particularly by Mahmoud Darwish, as performing dialectical ties between national and Arab scales. For the Moroccan thinker, transregional poetry (or “totality”) amplified readers’ perceptions of a common Arab experience by mobilizing gendered figures of Arab revolt across proper languages. His translations, against conservative ideas of fuṣḥā under the Moroccan monarchy, attested to the revolutionary vitality of Arabic in the Mashreq. Laâbi critically reclaimed Arab nationalism from Frantz Fanon, who dismissed it as a racialized frame for culture under colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. The chapter also theorizes Laâbi’s French-language poems on Palestine and Arab nationalism as transregional Arabic literature in French.

This chapter interrogates the South–South internationalism of renowned US Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín. It argues that the abjection in Morocco featured in his poem “Tangiers” reacts to French coloniality. More specifically, Algarín’s Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a Third World alliance fails. Although his engagement with African self-determination exhibits residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term a poetic Latin-African solidarity, his South–South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American – and, by extension, Latinx – identities have been sidelined.

The interview questions were designed to enable the psychiatrists to reflect on their lived experiences, that is their personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand experience. This standard definition emphasises the subjective knowledge that individuals form through direct encounters, interactions and observations. The authors were particularly interested in learning about how the negotiation between South Asian and British cultures played out in the course of their working lives at the level of the lived experience rather than abstractly. Frantz Fanon’s existential-phenomenology is used as an example of an approach known as ‘critical phenomenology’ understood as a form of politically engaged practice capable of reflecting the concrete conditions of existence. Fanon’s significance within this context is heightened, given his credentials as a psychiatrist and his method of the lived experience as the route to learning about difference. Living through the era of French colonialism, he examined the devastating impact of colonialism and its concomitant effects on the self, on himself, as the colonised but also as the psychiatrist, and had a greater understanding of and empathy with his patients because of their shared experiences. Through powerful phenomenological description, he described his own feelings of being othered and displaced, and how this precarious sense of selfhood had lasting effects on his sense of identity.

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.

This chapter aims to engage with decolonizing turns within the history of medicine as a set of sources and as a discipline and will consider how such readings and pedagogical choices might help us reflect upon a decolonizing turn within the English literary curriculum. Literary sources intersect seamlessly with histories of medicine, science, disability, and emotion. However, it is still possible that history and literature as complementary but starkly different methodologies rarely reflect adequately on one’s disciplinary borrowings from the other. This chapter is an attempt to facilitate such a conversation and knowledge exchange. For my purposes, I define “literature” for the historian in a way that incorporates a broader range of “creative” writing, including ethnography, memoir, psychological or psychoanalytic notetaking, and polemics.

Iran engaged with global decolonization movements on two levels: state-to-state and non-elite contexts. As Iranians observed global crises such as apartheid and race riots unfold in South Africa and the United States, they sharpened their understanding of racial politics. At the same time, Iran tried to assume a prominent role in these debates by hosting the UN Human Rights Conference in 1968. The shah faced a quandary: on the one hand he saw Iran as aligned with other Third World countries that had suffered from imperial politics. On the other hand, he wanted Iran aligned with the United States and the West in a partnership of equals. Moreover, although the king supported global human rights, he was unable to facilitate democratic political participation in Iran.

Using Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonial city in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a starting point, this chapter argues that the very disjunctiveness of Manichean colonial urban forms is key for perceiving, analysing, and indicting the colonial system, as well as for imagining paths for decolonization. Moreover, understanding the city as a site of contestation and anticolonial desires allows us to rethink the role of the urban in world literature studies. In contrast to models that assume the city as a node that endows literary value, this chapter views the (post)colonial city as a crucible in which the critical energies of decolonization emerge, take literary expression, and circulate in new ways. The chapter examines three representative literary examples, all focusing on Asian metropolises: José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere; Kim Chi-ha’s Five Thieves (Ojŏk); and Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger. Respectively, they depict a racially-divided colonial capital at the end of the nineteenth century (Rizal’s Manila); a recently decolonized, post-civil war city under dictatorship (Kim’s Seoul); and a paradigmatic conurbation of twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism (Adiga’s Gurgaon).

This chapter explores the possibilities and limits of translating race through a comparative reading of two recent plays by the French-Algerian playwright Mohamed Rouabhi: Vive la France and All Power to the People! It argues that the divergent reception of these plays – Republican outrage about Rouabhi’s play on French colonialism, liberal praise of his representation of racism in the USA – is based on a profound misunderstanding of the ways in which Rouabhi translates race on the French stage. If the reception of Vive la France speaks to a longstanding reluctance to acknowledge the experience of racialization and the memory of colonization, it also inadvertently reveals the political stakes of staging American Blackness in France. This chapter mines transcolonial performance for its transformative possibilities and performative insurgencies, and argues that theatrical performance makes possible a mode of translation that brings the original back into circulation in a comparative, relational, and transitive sense.

Emma Stone Mackinnon explores the different ways in which the leaders of the Algerian Revolution, Ferhat Abbas, Mohammed Bedjaoui and Frantz Fanon, deployed history, and in particular the French Revolution of 1789, to support the idea of rightful rebellion against French colonial rule. Critically reviewing Reinhart Koselleck’s identification of the French with the ‘modern’ concept of revolution, Mackinnon shows how the Algerians sought variously to present their revolution as the fulfilment and supersession of the legacy of 1789, and the ‘rights’ it had proclaimed. One route, taken by Bedjaoui, was to adapt the arguments for national liberation championed by the Free French theorist René Cassin during World War II (though Cassin then opposed Algerian independence). More radical, Fanon argued that Algeria must cast revolution in a new form. In each case, temporality and history were crucial: in asserting a ‘right to rebellion’, the Algerians were not invoking universal ideals, but contesting and disrupting the narrative of a gradual diffusion of such ideals from a European centre.

Chapter 1 begins by broadly sketching how the movement of the masses of African peoples towards armed struggle can be understood within the framework of Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition. Within this context, the First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) of 1958 takes centre stage as it brought a number of soon-to-be liberation movement figures together with older veterans of the post-WWII anti-colonial struggle on African soil to deliberate on the direction the decolonization process would take. During the conference, a debate emerged among conference participants on Kwame Nkrumah’s non-violent positive action versus Frantz Fanon’s armed struggle. After exploring how this was resolved, the chapter moves on chronologically to a broad examination of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition as it in consistent patterns fuelled non-violent insurgencies, dreams of freedom and decisions to return to armed struggle. The second half of the chapter follows Stokely Carmichael in Tanzania. This section is less about Carmichael or Tanzania, but more about tracking how Black Power ideas, concepts and praxis interacted with and within various liberation movements and continental African peoples. Carmichael saw Black Power as important for emerging states which were majority African/Black but was met with resistance by the ANC.

Engaging with the rich complexities of revolution, this chapter troubles the accepted narrative of Black resistance in 1960s America, specifically the uses of violence, and the ways it stretches the movement across space and time. It considers the violence of Black protest in the 1960s in more expansive terms, going beyond the turn-the-other-cheek violence of what often is described as nonviolent protest. Engaging with Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965) and selected speeches, read through the influence of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), this essay reads the two as representative of a global Black model of revolution predicated on outwardly directed violence. This chapter’s counter-narrative challenges the geography, temporality, and structure of Black revolution in the 1960s, decentering the U.S., acknowledging the influence of French intellectualism, and reaching back to acts of resistance of earlier generations, ultimately complicating the linear narrative of nation-bound, peaceful protest that has come to define Civil Rights.

This chapter explores what historical significance Manicheism has for the work of Frantz Fanon. It explores the role that St. Augustine’s anti-Manicheism might play in Fanon’s thinking, and the ways in which members of the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian war were deeply conscious of the historical terrain of Manicheism. This chapter argues that the quasi-Hegelian absolute negative is Fanon’s most powerful rebuke to both conventional Hegelian dialectic itself, and to the colonial manicheism that Fanon urges the colonized to overcome.

The chapter starts with Fanon’s criticism of the so-called dependency complex of the colonized and ends with him playing the Arab Doctor in Blida--Joinville, devising forms of social therapy and ergotherapy. In between, I read fiction by Aminatta Forna which examines forms of resilience in the dispossessed not graspable by ubiquitous psychiatric paradigms.

This chapter focuses on The Rape, Sa’dallah Wannous’ 1989 play in which he broke his literal silence after almost a decade of not writing plays. It reads Wannous’ work in tandem with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of violence in postcolonial societies in The Wretched of the Earth--which appears in Arabic translation among the books in Wannous’ personal library housed at the American University of Beirut--as a means of assessing Wannous’ significance now, after the uprisings that began in 2011 in a number of Arab countries that led to violent state repression and war. The chapter argues that, like Fanon, Wannous warned that authoritarianism and “blind nationalism” would severely undermine the development of a self-critical and realistic national consciousness as a basis for a democratic postcolonial future.