ABSTRACT
Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, when it was a French colony. In Fanon’s short life of but 36 years, he had become a global figure—as much for his work in Africa’s decolonizing movements as for his classical critical theories of the violence of white colonizing. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon redirected his trajectory. His ultimate political position was not to be fully formed until well after 1954, when he became active in Algeria’s National Liberation Front. Fanon’s stark conclusion is argued in reference to the then current psychoanalytic and philosophical literature in France. In particular, while the importance of Bridle’s la longue duree to Immanuel Wallerstein’s analytic attitude toward modern capitalism is easy to see, the necessarily abstract theories of Prigogine may seem far removed from Fanon’s revolutionary politics. The conclusive purpose of Wallerstein’s project is to assert the Braudelian fact that capitalism was a world-system among others actual and possible.
