ABSTRACT
Reading Frantz Fanon is an exhilarating experience. His words, even in translation, speak well to the tones and aches of my social body. His sentences brace my spine. Lost in his texts, I find myself circling and underlining, underlining and circling one paragraph after another but reluctant to go or be anywhere else. Captivated by their beauty, I steal his passages – copying them into my notebooks – neatly, gently, lovingly. Taking his prescriptions, I begin to sense and see what Fanon, I imagine, wants me to see, sense and act on decisively: the colonial organization of international politics. Reading Fanon, you could say, is a slightly different experience from reading International Organization. If international relations is an ‘American social science’ then Fanon pro-
vides a particularly different ‘locus of enunciation’ for international politics. This other locus speaks to and for the global majority, the ‘wretched of the Earth’, who are routinely, and often rudely, summoned to knowledge of international politics through the provincial terms (Chakrabarty 2000b) of Europe-America-West.
