“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world

ABSTRACT

Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness outside Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new ways of theorizing for the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• fanon
• human
• communication
• self/other

Notes

1 Jenna Hanchey, “Toward a Relational Politics of Representation,” Review of Communication 18, no. 4 (2018): 265–83; and Tiara Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

2 GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.

3 Ibid., 112.

4 Leslie Baxter, “Mikhail Bakhtin: The Philosophy of Dialogism,” in Perspectives on Philosophy of Communication, ed. Pat Arneson (Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007): 249–54; Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987), 133–50;

5 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 6.

6 For more on Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of racial violence, see Armond Towns, “Whither the ‘Human’?: An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” Google Documents, unpublished article, December 29, 2019, https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit, 1–34.

7 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

8 Towns, “Whither,” 8.

9 Mehrsa Baradaran argues that, in the wake of racial slavery, the political and economic figures of the United States used the end of racial slavery, and the “improvement” it supposedly provided, as a reason to deny reparations. Indeed, slavery was deemed as a civilizing mission of the West. See Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10 To be clear, we are not making the case that to challenge Western humanness, one must learn or create a non-Western form of communication. But we are beginning with the assumption that Western forms of communication structure the way many of us can even imagine humanness, and there were material, political, and racially violent processes that make my communication with you possible.

11 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

12 Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 27.

13 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 159.

14 Kendal Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2004): 328–44.

15 Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 471.

16 I am pulling the phrasing genre of humanness from the work of Sylvia Wynter. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial, 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.