To Remake the World: Frantz Fanon and Martin Luther King Jr. on Self-Emancipation

Abstract

Martin Luther King Jr. and Frantz Fanon are often conceived as offering incompatible political strategies for liberation from the structures of white supremacy and colonization. While in 1958 King contended that the choice was not between “violence and nonviolence, but between nonviolence and nonexistence,” three years later Fanon would famously insist that “decolonization is always a violent event.” This essay refuses this apparent opposition by positioning King and Fanon as partners in a shared conversation, each grappling elements of a core dilemma: remaking the world requires new subjects not formed by domination, but these subjects must remake themselves while still enmeshed in them—must somehow act out of them. Reading with and against David Scott's (2004) conception of a “problem-space” shows how King and Fanon respond to the problem posed by the impossibility of a clean, emancipatory break with the past and present. Deploying Paul Gilroy's (1993) conception of antiphony, the essay stages a “call and response” that reveals not a romantic narrative of overcoming but a working-through of fragile, partial, and paradoxical political practices that yoke the self to a world-not-yet-made, cultivating nascent democratic publics who, as yet, lack a world in which they can survive.