In early October 2019, the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought held a conference in honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu. I was the principal organizer and I was aided by a number of graduate students. The conference included a variety of scholars, many of whom were Ato’s former students from York University. The conference was lively, with robust debate and packed seminars in the latter two days of the conference. Several well-known scholars (including Himani Bannerji, Lewis Gordon and Charles Mills) gave papers at the conference that are not included in this volume. The final plenary of the conference was the paper that Ato gave (included at the end of this volume). There were over 150 people in attendance for the final plenary and we had to shift rooms at the very last minute in order to accommodate an ever-increasing number of guests.

For those who do not know, Ato Sekyi-Otu is widely known for his two very important works – Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996) and Left Universalism, AfricaCentric Essays (2019). The first work made waves due to its very unique reading of Frantz Fanon. The idea of reading Fanon’s work as one “dramatic dialectical narrative” was ground-breaking at the time. Moreover, the idea of integrating Fanon into a body of work known as social and political thought was equally important. These ideas, of the dramatic dialectical narrative, where consciousness shifts according to circumstances in an attempt to finally arrive at what Fanon, parodying Hegel, would call “national consciousness” is still an important if under-utilized idea within the frame of Fanon Studies. While I do not wish to defend the book here, the validity of the dramatic dialectical narrative is borne out in several examples in Fanon. For instance, is it not the case that Jean Veneuse (or Mayotte Capécia), the hapless “abandonment neurotic(s)” of the early chapters of Black Skin, White Masks (2008), reappear in a different context in chapter 4 of Wretched of Earth/Les damnés de la terre (2004) as “the colonized intellectual?” The second time we see Veneuse, with Sekyi-Otu’s work in mind, it is with a chance to redeem himself in the struggle for national consciousness.

In addition, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, in line with the work of Nigel Gibson and Lewis Gordon, has been central to restoring Fanon’s legacy to its rightful place, i.e. within national liberation movements and anti-racist struggles, as opposed to the post-structuralist appropriations of Fanon which too often seek to evacuate his political commitments and render him a metropolitan intellectual concerned with an identitarian concept of “recognition” and the failures of “totalizing discourse?” These claims, while not in and of themselves problematic, are simply inaccurate when they are made with reference to Fanon, as many now clearly understand.

Ato’s second book Left Universalism, AfricaCentric Essays should also stand the test of time, if the essays included here is any indication. It is, like the first book, a critique of certain strands in post-structuralism, namely those who have jettison “truth” or universality (les grands récits in Lyotard’s words) in favour of local knowledges, or the idea of a theoretical bricolage. Sekyi-Otu’s position, quite simply, is that these anti-foundationalist claims of post-structuralism are wholly negligent if not dangerous if applied to the colonial and post-colonial present. Left Universalism advances the argument that in spite of the failures of a universalism made synonymous with Eurocentrism, the concept itself is indeed worth rescuing, and should not be cast aside by those who bear its brunt as it were. In Ato’s Preface to Left Universalism, he notes (2019: x):

Universalism is an indispensable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it is especially indispensable for radical conditions of existence in post-colonial societies and for vindicating visions of social transformation.

The failure of universalism and the failure of political projects has been announced in a number of registers who claim that particularity (or a kind of narcissism) is a sufficient beginning and ending for politics. What has been missed by such critics is that while identity or particularity is a precondition, it cannot be its final word. Any ethical claims made in a given social setting have to be both universalized and made local or partisan. If this is not the case, visions of social transformation are rendered impossible and the narcissism of identity is made to be the first and last act of the movement from bondage to freedom. This of course is a contradiction. Identitarianism or particularism can only be one act in the play if it is not to lead to a demoralizing pessimism (the current Afro-pessimist trend is but one example). Sekyi-Otu wisely and generously reminds his readers that the perils of this position were famously laid out in the chapter 3 of Wretched of the Earth/Les Damnés de la Terre, where Fanon reminds his readers that without an idea of national consciousness (something beyond identity), a narcissistic nationalism or “primitive Manicheism” will reign. In addition, Aimé Césaire’s Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) is a tragedy precisely because Christophe is seduced by the French to the extent that he tries to force the newly independent Haitians to act like them. Moreover, the work of many African writers of the post-independence period, who have been described by Ngugi Wa Thion’go as writing “footnotes” to Les Damnés de la terre, is written with this in mind.

As opposed to a primitive Manicheism, Sekyi-Otu offers his readers a paradox, or an oxymoron – partisan universalism. Not the totalizing and disabling universalism of the colonizers, of which the recently discovered dead bodies of indigenous children in various sites of Canada’s residential schools is again but one example, but rather an ethical universalism borne of the particular and prevailing conditions of any given setting. The paradox (if you will) of partisan universalism is that the same ethical claims are made by humans in different vernaculars and as such, to paraphrase the work of Aimé Césaire, no race has a monopoly on beauty, or ethics, or the idea of the universal. To quote Césaire further, in the Tragedy of King Christophe: “Le plus petit canton de l’univers est immense, si la main est vaste, et le vouloir non las.”^[1] In other words, the universal can only speak in a language of the particular. But it is our job as political commentators or intellectuals to discern how the universal is being spoken in a particular register.

In addition to his writing, Ato is perhaps best known as a teacher and mentor to many of us who appear in this volume. In addition to his undergraduate teaching and informal mentoring, Ato Sekyi-Otu taught two graduate courses primarily in his tenure at York in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought – “Marxism and Political Discourse” and “Frantz Fanon and Contemporary Social and Political Thought.” I can say now, having been Graduate Director Social and Political Thought for several years, that these courses were absolutely crucial to students looking to make their way out of a brutally Eurocentric Marxism as well as a politically hopeless post-structuralism. I had the great fortune of taking the former course when I was a first year MA student in 1991. In that course, there were several students who went on to do very important scholarship (two of whom –myself and Nergis Canefe, appear in this volume). What I remember the most was the rigour that we were expected to produce, by reading for example, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in just two weeks. In addition, students sat and listened to Ato’s lectures with which he concluded each class. In those seminars, we tried our level best to keep up with him. It was only upon publication of Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience that I finally got the clean copy of those lecture notes that I so desperately wished for in 1991! More importantly, it was only years later that the title of the course as well as the readings were meant (once again) to show that the post-structuralists (or anti-foundationalists) did not have a monopoly on the idea of “discourse” and that within Marxism and its descendants, there was a tradition of understanding discourse, but always with a view to improving social conditions, an argument Ato made much more explicitly in Left Universalism as well as in his 1987 essay “Toward Anoa, Not Back: Grammar for a Revolutionary Homecoming”.

In addition to attending that course, I have had the great fortune of teaching the latter course as faculty several times in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought (having first taught it in 2007). In carrying out these duties, I also had the pleasure of reading Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience again and again in order to prepare myself for teaching the seminar. My own idea, which I only generally advance in my chapter in this volume, about the necessity of reading Fanon via his interlocutors (including Césaire, Nietszche, Hegel, and Lacan) would not be possible without these experiences.

One of Ato’s lasting legacies (the conference showed this very clearly) was his generosity, wit and compassion. Intellectually speaking, it is clear from this volume that Ato has left his mark on a number of scholars and critics working in fields of philosophy, African studies, and literature. Those present at the conference paid homage to him for his adherence to a left politics that does not lapse into the twin misadventures of racial separatism or imperialist universalism. But of equal importance, the success of the conference was the result of his teaching, and his desire for a community of thinkers (if you will) who have adhered to this cause.

As such, what you have before you are a series of essays that deal with the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu as a scholar, teacher and friend. All of the essays show a profound degree of love and respect for both Ato the person and the academic. Each of the essays in this volume is in some way a deployment of some of the scholarly categories introduced by Sekyi-Otu which I briefly outlined above. Moreover, the essays are all of high quality and this volume will make a significant contribution to several current debates both in contemporary social and political thought, as well as in other fields such as African Studies and radical philosophy.

The series begins with Stefan Kipfer’s article “Fanon for a post-imperial world.” In addition to defending the claims made in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, Kipfer compares Norman Ajari’s and Etienne Balibar’s respective understanding of the universal to Sekyi-Otu’s conceptions of partisan and vernacular universalism. Kipfer’s argument that these two conceptions, as well as Ajari’s own notion of accidental universalism, are essential to think the possibility of a post-imperial world is compelling and helps to place Sekyi-Otu’s work in the current debate on universalism and race in France.

Patrick Taylor’s paper argues in line with the claims of Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism, that Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black invokes new ways of human understanding and relationality. Taylor draws on theories of the Black Atlantic and postcolonial haunting to show how Washington Black critiques notions of white benevolence and enlightenment while reclaiming black creativity, scientific knowledge, and humanity in a radical transformation of social relationships and building of new communicative spaces.

Sophie McCall’s essay is an attempt to return to what she calls the “fraught debate on the politics of recognition” in order to ask whether a(n other) politics of recognition, or perhaps the language of recognition is possible, and necessary, in the ongoing project of working towards social justice on unceded and Treaty lands in Canada. Her work here revisits Glen Coulthard’s reading of Frantz Fanon, and McCall argues for a defense of the paradox of “left universalism” and “Africacentric” perspectives as a possible strategy in crafting an open-ended, critically informed conception of recognition in the context of Indigenous studies.

My own essay is a reassessment of the influence of Jacques Lacan on the work of Frantz Fanon. My work here draws on what I see as breakthroughs in terms of interpreting the question of subjectivity and the practice of psychiatry in Fanon offered by Alice Cherki (2006) and Gibson and Beneduce (2017). In both works, the emphasis is to show the continuities in the work of Fanon and Lacan as well as the important differences. As such, I take a different approach to that of some of the previous literature on these two thinkers (including Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience) which tended to read them as discontinuous. In addition, I argue that the difference between these two thinkers lies in the question of context, or more specifically, in their conceptions of the “real.” The paper, in the end, is a subtle defence of Sekyi-Otu’s claims in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, by suggesting that what Gibson and Beneduce see as Fanon’s “critical ethnopsychiatry” might be better understood, within certain contexts, as structuralist psychiatry, an argument that Sekyi-Otu alludes to but does not explicitly follow.

Jeremy Glick’s essay mobilizes a line from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule, that delineates the differences between “we” and “you and I” as a springboard to think about how Ato Sekyi-Otu defines universalism against his detractors. Glick’s work aims to link Brecht and Sekyi-Otu’s work on the form of the parable in projects of social transformation. Glick explores problems of naming and the a priori constitution of revolutionary subjects outside of their unfolding in concrete struggle. This cluster of theoretical frameworks informs the paper’s case-study: Kwame Ture’s (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) employment of the song “Big Boy Pete” by the Olympics as a way to proffer a theory of contingent and open-ended revolutionary politics.

Nigel Gibson’s paper is a turn to the partisan Frantz Fanon to discuss the relation between partisan universalism and new humanism in Fanon’s thought. Gibson outlines the importance of self-movement in Fanon’s praxis as formally expressed in his critique of Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks, where he notes that “consciousness committed to experience knows nothing … of the essence and determination of being.” This is the dialectic of partisan universalism, a dialectic committed to human freedom that Fanon further explicates in Les damnés de la terre. This expression of partisan universalism is linked to Fanon’s notion of the rationality of revolt, which Gibson argues, in its multi-dimensionality, becomes the basis for a new type of organization in which a partisan universalism can be elucidated.

Jeff Noonan’s essay follows to some extent the line of argument in Glick’s essay. Noting that posthumanist theorists have revived the post-structuralist argument that the understanding of human beings as self-determining subjects is a mask for Eurocentric domination, Noonan argues for a “left universalism” that foregrounds the struggles of oppressed groups themselves against their oppressors as opposed to dissolving claims universalist ethical claims. Noonan draws on the work of Fanon and Sekyi-Otu to argue that resistance to oppression presupposes and proves that oppressed people are human beings: i.e., the self-determining subjects that their oppressors claim that they are not.

Esteve Morera’s work is also a claim against a certain Eurocentric universalism that locates the appearance of a “new” theoretical attitude or “new” mind —the rational mind— that suddenly appeared in ancient Athens. Drawing from a suggestion by the ancient African philosopher Somet, his paper contends that this bewilderment evinces a simplistic view of the nature and history of philosophical reflection. Morera’s claim, in line with Sekyi-Otu’s work and his homage to the ethical communism in African thought, suggests that philosophy emerges over the course of millennia, by small steps, small modifications of the mind —not the least of which is the invention of Mathematics in southern Africa some twenty thousand years ago— which silently, almost imperceptibly, produced some of the first forms of abstract thought on which philosophical reflection grew.

Tyler Gasteiger’s work shows that in Husserl’s late work transcendental phenomenology becomes historically self-reflexive to investigate the crisis of modern reason. Though this work thematizes the culturally specific lifeworld in which the ideality that constitutes philosophy as a universal cultural form is originally instituted, its blatant Eurocentrism is a fundamental obstacle to dialogue with any post-colonial universalism. Gasteiger dialectically provides an interesting counterexample to Husserl: the early work of Tran Duc Thao, which aims to renew Marx through the tools of transcendental phenomenology and uses this synthesis to analyze the breakdown of rational communication in the colonial situation of French Indochina. Yet Thao’s concept of possibility remains prisoner of certain modern ontological presuppositions that both presage his turn to a dogmatic form of dialectical materialism and limit his vision of an alternative modernity for post-colonial Vietnam. Gasteiger notes, following Sekyi-Otu, that an alternative would be to bring transcendental phenomenology into dialogue with Ernst Bloch’s concept of objectively real possibility and his radical rethinking of the concept of progress.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s essay is a reading of Kwame Gyekye’s Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. Táíwò rightly notes that Gyekye recommends “moderate communitarianism” as an adequate socio-political theory for understanding Africa’s engagement with modernity. Contrary to Gyekye’s contention, his moderate communitarianism is no less vulnerable to the strictures against what he identifies as “radical communitarianism”. In line with both the work of Fanon and Sekyi-Otu, Táíwò contends that both of Gyekye’s claims, in turn, cannot deal with the individual or take the individual seriously. Taiwo notes that this is a singular failing given the urgent need to free the African individual from the suffocating embrace of an uncritical, dated communitarianism.

In Susan Brophy’s essay, she follows a line from Fanon’s Dialectics of Experience, when Sekyi-Otu asks: “How do we tell apart an insurgent community of meaning forged by critical interlocutors of the world-system from the innocuous nihilism of composite cultural idioms promiscuously signifying everything and contesting nothing?” (Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 21). In pursuing this question, Brophy notes that Giorgio Agamben’s existentialist philosophy is exemplary of this “innocuous nihilism.” In so doing, she exposes the political consequences of this nihilism, and by turning to social reproduction theory, explores the conditions of possibility for partisan universalism.

Chris Balcom’s paper reads Ato Sekyi-Otu’s 2019 Left Universalism: Africacentric Essays alongside Amy Allen’s 2016 The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Balcom argues that Allen’s critique of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory reveals the limits of an exclusively immanent understanding of “decolonizing theory.” In particular, it argues that Allen’s work suffers for its neglect of context-transcending claims emanating from non-European contexts. The paper responds to these limitations in Allen’s work by engaging Sekyi-Otu’s “visionary foundationalism” and argues that Left Universalism’s attention to the context-transcendent appeals of African ethical thought illustrates the limits of a purely immanent mode of critique.

Nergis Canefe’s paper engages with the discussion on Marxism, the ideal of justice and the Global South and attempts to situate it within the theoretical canon of Marxist thought. The main purpose of the essay is to explore applications of Marxist theory as it pertains to the role and function of the law in these presumably different contexts of discontent. Specifically, it focuses on politics of dissent and subject formation that articulate ideals of justice across these ‘alternative geographies’. The question of how to deal with the Marxist category of emancipation outside or on the margins of the traditional domain of capitalist relations rings through these contested spaces in which the very concept of the Global South finds full embodiment in the language of justice and contestations of the post-colonial state as a form and decolonization as a condition. Here, Ato Sekyi-Otu’s work on left universalism is highly relevant in establishing a new language of hope above and beyond the liberal conceptions of justice.

The book closes with the version of the paper that Ato gave at the conference. It is – to be frank – a torrid critique of recent trends in Black Studies, particularly Afro-pessimism. The criticism is that Afro-pessimism, by walling itself up into its own experience, is indeed a rejection of universalism in favour of the singularity of “the black experience.” It is an important essay on many fronts, but perhaps chiefly for the reason that it disputes one of the main claims of Afro-pessimism, made by Frank Wilderson, that argues for the particularity of “a black experience” and rules out the “ruse of analogy” which assumes that one could share a common understanding of suffering (and perhaps an amelioration of that suffering) across racial lines.

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