ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concepts of violence and nonviolence that are understood and legitimated in the work of Mohandas Gandhi and Frantz Fanon. They have been seen subsequently as offering two rival theories of how truth should speak to power for liberation and civil rights movements in divided and hierarchical societies. They both were involved in resistance to colonial violence in its ideological as well as material manifestations. They are fully committed to finding new ways of doing politics beyond colonialism and imperialism, but also beyond an anti-imperial, anti-colonial reaction. At the same time, one suggests that successful reinventions of their political vocabulary invariably draw on their existing conceptual repertoire, anchoring new meanings in familiar categories. This means that the liberating of their political imaginations is never the straightforward replacement of appearance with an unmasked reality, but rather a new masquerade, which will bring with it familiar as well as novel deceptions, constraints, ambiguities and creative possibilities.
