- Title
- Fanon’s political ethics of intersubjectivity in Postcolonial African governance and citizenship
- Creator
- Ogunsakin, S S
- Subject
- Political ethics
- Subject
- Postcolonialism
- Subject
- Black nationalism
- Date
- 2024
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/29878
- Identifier
- vital:79034
- Description
- This dissertation investigates failures in postcolonial African governance and citizenship that sustain subjective and structural aspects of Black alienation, which continue to undermine critical agency and limit genuine spaces for the emancipation for postcolonial Black citizens even in the absence of direct and explicit repression. Drawing primarily on the phenomenological insights of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre into intersubjective alienation, and on contemporary analyses of postcoloniality, in the work of Achille Mbembe, Lewis Gordon, and Tseney Serequeberhan, I consider normative grounds of possibility for postcolonial Black dis-alienation, which are relevant for contexts of self-subjectification and indirect oppression, given the alienation that is engendered by structural violence, which Fanon ascribes to colonial displacements that continue to pose potential drawbacks to a vibrant postcolonial African society. Despite divergences in their accounts of postcolonial Black alienation and the construction of possible alternatives for Black freedom, I identify complementary analyses of postcoloniality in the work of Mbembe, Gordon, and Serequeberhan. All three theorists employ Fanon’s psycho-existential phenomenology of postcolonial Black alienation as a foundation for a working model of implicit, subjective, and social conditions that undermine genuine Black freedom. I argue that Serequeberhan’s hermeneutic alternative, grounded in the historico-cultural context and situatedness of Black experience, provides useful insights into the possibility of overcoming Black alienation through trans-cultural intersubjectivity and radical openness, while he departicularize solutions to the contextualized Black problems he identified. At the same time, I argue that, while Gordon redeploys Fanon’s sociogenic phenomenology to critique postcolonial Black alienation, his position remains trapped in the polarities of North South coloniality and American racial dynamics, which precludes understanding of novel configurations of power and subjectivity in postcolonial Africa. In his account of postcolonial Black alienation, Mbembe describes a distinctive situation of deficient intersubjectivity resulting from failures of postcolonial African governance systems that are characterized by autocratic leadership and further complicated by a self-defeating public complicity, wherein Black citizens reproduce their own oppression. Despite the lack of potential emancipatory clues, I argue that Mbembe’s conception of convivial politics and mutual zombification provides a compelling account of postcolonial Black alienation and self-subjectification, revealing distinctive oppressive relations marked not only by violence and alienation exclusive to dominant ruling forces, but also by social complicity and reciprocity. To respond to these challenges, I argue that Fanon’s prescient account of Black dis-alienation and practices in the context of psychiatric medicine sets out implicit complementary sources of normative political practices on the basis of which we can develop an emancipatory ethics of intersubjectivity, which suggests a nonviolent pathway to emancipatory social transformation in postcolonial African governance and citizenship, by which the Black citizen may emancipate herself from alienating conditions of oppression evident in features of structural governmentality, and in the continual reproduction of self-subjectification in the postcolony, which Mbembe describes.
- Description
- Thesis (MSoc Sci) -- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2024
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (194 leaves)
- Format
- Publisher
- University Of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- rights holder
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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UFH Department of Philosophy
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | OGUNSAKIN STEPHEN SOLA DISSERTATION.pdf | 58 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |