ABSTRACT
This chapter locates the theory of democratic political tragedy in the very important and rapidly emerging trend among political theorists and philosophers, of creolizing the canonical figures in their respective fields. Scholars like Jane Gordon, Neil Roberts, Paget Henry, and Michael Monahan have undertaken this venture by reading canonical philosophers and thinkers against the philosophy, theory, and the lived realities of people from the global south which as a whole were scarcely considered when many of the definitive works were conceived. Creolization as an analytic operation and as methodology is understood in this effort as bidirectional in terms of the revelation and insight that it affords. It is recognized for its mutually transformative effect upon the manner in which we interpret instances of canonical thought, and the instances either of theory or of socio-political experience from the global south, alongside which they are read. Democratic political tragedy follows in the tendency detected in Fanon of creolizing Hegel’s theory of tragedy and with this his broader philosophical account of the development of consciousness from its immediate stages to absolute knowing as a higher form of awareness. Fanon’s reading of the anti-colonial revolution and the political reality that it gives rise to in its wake, through the lens that Hegel affords, highlights the tragic configuration of the struggle for national independence and the implications of this for the postcolonial state as the outcome of that effort. The account of Hegel offered thereby is heretic given that the subjects of Fanon’s concern were deemed as standing outside of history from the ethnocentric world view that informed Hegel’s theorizing. Their experience with the postcolonial state nevertheless can be read as illuminating, in quite an interesting way, how far limited the popular misreading of Hegel’s account of the state as a moment of grand, triumphant overcoming and enlightenment, is. The postcolony is presented in this light as a site of enduring conflict that renders the enlightenment of national independence defunct and confirms how far the journey of consciousness and the work of experience is never quite done.
