ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling provides an important philosophical and phenomenological means of illuminating questions of postcolonial being and temporality alike. This Heideggerian concept provides a way of framing Fanon’s overarching agenda in The Wretched of the Earth, a text which can be understood precisely as Fanon’s struggle to build the postcolonial as a house for dwelling. Fanon’s pronouncement in The Wretched of the Earth, “Perhaps everything needs to be started over again,” can be read in terms of the foregoing imperative; it is the making of a dwelling that must be sought for, built, in the act of the “starting over again” that is required of the genuinely postcolonial nation. Such an agenda requires that we utilize the aligned Heideggerian ideas of dwelling, building, and thinking. Important implications follow. Indeed, understanding the postcolonial as a dwelling precedes, for Fanon, the act of building the nation. At the core of dwelling, moreover, is thinking. And building – to add the further Heideggerian qualification – is not so much an instrumentalist act, as in the making of the nation, as it is the manifestation, the “presencing,” of the thinking of dwelling.
