When it appeared in 1996, Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience was decisive in raising Fanon scholarship to a new level while also defying existing interpretations of the Martinican, including the then dominant postcolonial- deconstructive readings. Sekyi-Otu did so by providing an integral perspective on Fanon’s lifework. In particular, he analyzed Fanon’s treatment of anticolonial struggles with a view of understanding as well as promoting a liberatory dialectic of experience. Sekyi-Otu’s masterwork has held up very well to new developments in Fanon scholarship (and broader debates about matters anti-, post- and decolonial, within which Fanon’s work has occupied a strategic place). This paper^[1] will open by highlighting the enduring relevance of Sekyi-Otu’s work (Fanon’s Dialectic and the recent Left Universalism: Africacentric Essays) after the publication of Fanon’s other writings (Oeuvres II) and new Fanon scholarship. After this opening review, I establish a relationship between Norman Ajari’s critique of Etienne Balibar’s discussion of the universal (in La Dignité et la Mort: Ethique et politique de la race) and Ato Sekyi-Otu’s conceptions of partisan and vernacular universalism. I will suggest that these two notions, as well as Ajari’s own notion of accidental universalism, are essential for projects to think the possibility of a post-imperial world. Such projects will of course have to consider in historical materialist as well as philosophical registers, the ‘place’ of universal/izing claims within the contradictory space-time of world order today.

A few years ago, Lewis Gordon suggested that ‘it is difficult to read Fanon and stay still’ (2007, p.6). He relayed a number of anecdotes that sustain the point. Here is the first one,

 ‘I have heard many stories over the years. A relative during difficult times sought refuge in my home. There, he came upon Fanon’s books. A short time later, he greeted me with his bags packed. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked. ‘I’ve read Fanon,’ he replied. ‘I do not know where. I only know it’s time to go’. (Gordon 2007, p.6)

For me, it was the second (but first systematic) reading of Fanon that was the most moving. I remember consolidating all my assembled quotations and annotations by and on Fanon while spending a week in Montreal in the early 2000s. Completing a day’s work pushed me out of the apartment to digest what I had worked through by running through the city’s streets. While breaking a sweat and clearing my mind, it dawned upon me that the Fanon I was reading in full was not the Fanon that was offered to me previously, when I encountered him only in fragments or through secondary literatures. What I read was neither the other of Marxism (as I heard from anti-Marxist nationalists and some metropolitan Marxists), nor was it the word of someone content with destabilizing the binaries of colonial and racist culture, albeit in a seemingly anachronistic discourse of national liberation (as was the common postcolonial-postmodern viewpoint at the time).

Fanon’s words defied the terms of social theory that dominated the Anglo-American academy in the 1990s. The book that helped me sort out with great precision why that was the case was Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Sekyi-Otu did so in three major ways. Although centred on Wretched of the Earth, Sekyi-Otu offered: (1) an integral reading of the Martinican, one that refused to ignore Fanon’s early works for the benefit of his later writings, or vice versa, and rejected the related idea that Fanon’s work could be split into separate, cultural, inter-subjective and political, historical-materialist compartments. Avoiding any suggestion that Fanon’s work was cut in two by some sort of epistemological break brought about by shifts in Fanon’s biography, Sekyi-Otu showed: (2) that The Wretched of the Earth highlighted and recast Fanon’s life-long search for human-subjective potentials and capacities against the seemingly iron-clad divides of the colonial world and its dehumanizing racialized fixities. In so doing, Sekyi-Otu not only showed that Fanon’s lifework is a contribution to dialectical thought; he also demonstrated with precision how exactly Fanon went about stretching Marxist-inflected dialectical concerns for the purpose of anti-colonial liberation strategies and new humanist horizons that seemed permanently foreclosed by the ontological strictures produced by racialized and (neo-)colonial capitalism. Finally, (3) Ato Sekyi-Otu insisted on the strategic place of the art of politics and, indeed, considerations of political theory in Fanon’s dialectic of experience. This insistence led him to suggest that Antonio Gramsci is nothing less than a ‘precocious Fanonist’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.118).

As we will see, recent scholarship on and with Fanon attests to the pertinence and originality of the Dialectic of Experience and its three major claims. These also helped me clarify why Fanon prevented me from standing still for specific personal reasons. They helped me answer a question I face here and there from students. Why should Fanon matter to those who do not figure among his primary target audience: White men. Beyond the obvious answer to this question (anyone interested in revolutionary praxis must know much about one of the foremost revolutionaries), I can now respond by relaying what Fanon taught me at the time more comprehensively than some of his contemporaries James Baldwin (1984a-b) and Richard Wright (2008): that Whiteness is lie propped up by a relational social reality that results from multi-layered historical processes and their manifold everyday manifestations. Loaded with the historical baggage that explains why the much-cited White French child spontaneously reduced Fanon to his Blackness (Fanon 1967a, p.112; 1952, p.90), Whiteness, too, is an alienation, a strange combination of privilege and impoverishment, a shrinking of human potential brought about by the very experience of being on the dominant and domineering side of the global colour line and its various local forms. Fanon offers ways of thinking about the conditions necessary to ‘solve’ the ‘White problem’ at various levels of reality. At the level of world order, tricontinental revolution would put in place Euro-America. This broad transformation could reshuffle the cards of history so as to clear the deck for genuinely reciprocal human relations to be built at the level of everyday life in various parts of the world. As Fanon (and Aimé Césaire) saw it, a side benefit of this new card game could be to liberate ‘Europe’ and its inhabitants from the brutalizing effects of its own imperial histories.

Fanon scholarship today: some remarks about the English-speaking literature

As if to do justice to Lewis Gordon’s observation about the unsettling nature of Fanon’s work, Fanon scholarship has not stood still since the late 1990s. The major event was without a doubt the publication of Fanon’s Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté in 2015. This volume includes a range of as of yet unavailable Fanon texts: three plays written in politically coded existentialist registers, psychiatric writings (his doctoral thesis, notes, letters, academic articles and hospital journal entries from his work in St. Alban, Blida and Tunis), additional political texts (including anonymous articles in El Moudjahid he may have (co-)authored), his correspondence with Ali Shariati, François Maspéro, and Giovanni Pirelli, and an annotated list of books in his library, which is stored in Algiers. As the editors Jean Khalfa and Robert Young point out, corroborating in effect Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, the collection makes it impossible to separate Fanon’s philosophical, historical and political interests from his continuous concern with the human subject, including his medical psychiatric practice that became a sustained entry point to the contradictions of everyday life. The link between the two aspects of Fanon’s work is provided by the ‘the spatial and social relations involved in shaping consciousness’ (Khalfa and Young 2015, p.8) and his newly humanist concern with the imperative to ‘think and construct liberty as disalienation’ (p.11).

In this volume, one does indeed learn, once again, that Fanon knew more than anybody that the project of ‘humanizing man’, which involves transforming the character of humanity by means of ‘relations ripe with generosity’, was not a liberal-humanist one, as he lectured in Tunis in 1959 and 1960 (2015, p.446). Such a humanization cannot happen by extrapolating from colonial and bourgeois worlds. It demands nothing less than social and political revolution to facilitate a deep, protracted challenge to all aspects of the colonial world, including the racist naturalisms he encountered in colonial psychiatry itself. For Fanon, national liberation was a ‘struggle with a two-sided character’ (El Moudjahid, 1957 in 2015, p.478). It entailed freeing promising historical aspects of colonized societies from colonial shackles while transforming other aspects of these same societies in open-ended processes of building something new: ‘a nation to come’, as he said in his letter to Ali Shariati (2015, p. 543). This project of building a new world through struggle has liberatory implications even for those in the imperial heartland. As he makes clear in his comments about the future of democracy, victory against the spectre of fascism in the France of the late 1950s depended on the prospects of Algerian independence, period (p.501).

Those who had already interpreted Fanon in an anti-humanist register recognize the evidence to the contrary presented in this new edition of Fanon texts. One of these is Achille Mbembe (2016). For various reasons, including Foucauldian and Afrofuturist ones, Mbembe remains skeptical about Fanon’s project of subjective and political transformation. But he is willing to entertain positions that are closer to Fanon’s own. One of these is Sylvia Wynter’s, the eminent feminist writer based in the English-speaking Caribbean, who has become increasingly central to a range of fields since the turn of the millennium (Bogues 2006; McKittrick 2015). Wynter has mobilized multiple sources, Fanon included, for the purpose of ‘re-enchanting humanism’ (2000). Like Fanon, she is well aware of that such a re-enchantment is fraught with deep obstacles. For her, it must be a ‘new’ humanism: ‘embattled’, ‘dissonant’, ‘non-identitarian’, ‘comprehensive’, and ‘planetary’ (Wynter 2000, pp.121, 158). This humanism cannot be a property of Europe; it must be wrested away from the ‘ethno-classes’ that have imprisoned (and falsified) humanism within the confines of bourgeois-colonial particularisms (2000, pp. 195-7), thus drowning out the possibilities of the human with typically naturalizing, economistic, and gendered claims to Man (Wynter 2003; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). According to Wynter, the conditions of intelligibility of the contradiction between the human and Man can be found in the works by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire and what made them possible: the liberation struggles that peaked in the 1960s and 70s (Wynter 2003; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015).

In the 2000s, Alice Cherki’s biography (2006) gave us a wealth of insight about Fanon’s life, notably as far as his psychiatric work and the problematic of violence is concerned. In their monograph (Cherki, 2017), Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce (2017) provide additional context to the psychiatric dimensions of Fanon’s Oeuvres II. Corroborating Cherki, Khalfa and Young (2015), they highlight that psychiatric work constitutes a crucial thread of continuity to Fanon’s lifework. Not unlike Henri Lefebvre’s detailed analyses of architecture and planning projects (through which he ended up generating theories of space and urbanization), Fanon’s reflections on psychiatry function as a sort of labour process through which he solidified key concerns and concepts. His double psychiatric project (his critique of colonial and bourgeois psychiatry and his efforts to (re-)build human-subjective capacities with his patients through various forms of socio-medical experimentation) helped concretize his understanding of uneven racialization in France and the colonies. It also helped forge his conceptions of thingification (Gibson and Beneduce 2017, pp. 127, 232), (dis-)alienation and (de-)humanization, including ‘absolute depersonalization’ (pp.113, 249). Gibson and Beneduce go as far as suggesting that Fanon’s view of colonial social space (which was not merely metaphorical) was sharpened by his intimate knowledge of how space was produced in the colonial mental hospital, through the segregating physical arrangements and staff-patient relationships in the microcosm of Blida-Joinville (p. 143). From Gibson and Beneduce’s study, we also get a clearer sense of the contours of Fanon’s politicism. For Fanon, the primacy of political struggle did not mean that anti-colonial revolution could resolve all problems at once; ongoing ‘healing work’ would remain a key task in the construction of a genuinely post-colonial world (pp. 5, 234).

Accompanying the release of Fanon’s second collection of writings and the exegeses that help us understand it has been another wave of works on and inspired by Fanon. Some scholars have returned to the task of looting out Marxist resonances in Fanon’s work. Both Leo Zeilig (2016, 9-12) and Peter Hudis (2015, 9-19) have stressed that Fanon, while never a card-carrying Marxist, was in continuous touch with Marxian themes and methods while also extending the reach and substance of historical materialism. In contrast to some earlier Marxist critics, they insist that Fanon’s broader political and theoretical arguments withstand the limitations of some of his particular claims (about the role of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat, for example, which don’t hold up to close scrutiny in every (post-)colonial context) or strategic recommendations to other revolutionaries (which, while rightfully opposed to stagist or official Soviet recipes, were at times characterized by an excessive impatience (Zeilig, op. cit., pp.62, 120-121, 187, 203, 207, 243)). As we already know from Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, key among Fanon’s broader achievements was his contribution to dialectical theory. Hudis stresses the challenges racial slavery brought to the Hegelian dialectic of recognition that assumed a basic, pre-existing human symmetry between slave and master. For Hudis, Fanon’s anticolonial dialectic of liberation requires that the Manichean, brutal and dehumanizing impasse created by racial slavery be broken violently, for example with existential claims to Blackness (Hudis 2017, pp.869-871).

In current Fanon scholarship, Hudis is only one among several others who have returned to earlier debates about Fanon’s ‘untidy dialectic’ (compare Gibson (1999) to Bernasconi (1996), Turner (1996, 1999, 2001), and, of course, Sekyi-Otu, 1996). Another is George Ciccariello-Maher (2017), who underlines that Fanon’s dialectic, while peculiar, is still a dialectic, thus defying both Afropessimist and neo-Jacobin appropriations of Fanon.^[2] Bypassing Ato Sekyi-Otu’s work, regrettably, Ciccariello-Maher suggests that such a dialectic is best developed by connecting Marxian and Hegelian traditions to decolonial theory, thus making sustained contact between Fanon’s ‘zone of non-being’ (1967a, p.8; 1952, p.6) and ideas of ‘colonial difference’ (Mignolo 1999), ‘coloniality’ (Quijano 2000) and ‘exteriority’ (Dussel 2002, p.221). On his part, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that Fanon’s dialectical legacy must be recast to take into account the peculiar assimilationist pressures in hyper-majoritarian North American settler colonies. The enduring and pervasive pressures North American White settler colonialism has placed on Indigenous peoples exceed the already formidable role minoritarian White settlers played in the colonial Algeria known to Fanon. As a result, Coulthard (2014) links Fanon and Marx to Indigenous liberation theory in order to advance a critique of a politics of recognition and tie Fanon’s notion of proper decolonization (as a double transformation) to a dynamic conception of tradition, or to be more precise, a strategy to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ sides of tradition to advance Indigenous self-determination.^[3]

Finally, Matthieu Renault has argued that a proper rendering of Fanon’s contribution to dialectical thought benefits from a closer look at Fanon’s relationship to Simone de Beauvoir, notably her attempt to read Richard Wright’s conception of double consciousness to further subaltern appropriations of Hegel’s dialectic (2014). Renault posits that Fanon’s engagements with de Beauvoir are part of a broader understanding, voiced also in Algeria Unveiled and The Algerian Family, that anti-colonialism constitutes an ‘erotics of liberation’ that demands a decolonization of sexuality, among other things (2011). As others have recognized (Gordon 2015, pp.29-44, 59-69), Renault contributes to an interpretative lineage that has reclaimed Fanon from masculinist aspects of his work to buttress anti-colonial feminism (see also Dubey 1998; Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 1996, Sekyi-Otu, 1996). In 2001, Drucilla Cornell brought this lineage to the point when she suggested, referencing Algeria Unveiled in particular, that although ‘Fanon was not a feminist, his understanding of culture and revolutionary struggle, the prominent place he gives to the creation of new forms of being a woman as these arise from that struggle, keep his work at the heart of anti-imperialist feminism, a feminism that does not succumb to Western projections of ‘Third World’ women as passive victims or fetishistic objects’. (2001, p.34)

Next to adding particular insights to our understanding of Fanon’s work, the recent wave of Fanon scholarship has thus buttressed Sekyi-Otu’s main interpretative claims by clarifying the range of plausible Fanon interpretations, a range that has pushed to the margins the postmodern-postcolonial readings that infused Fanon scholarship in the 1990s with strong anti-humanist sensibilities. On the basis of his earlier work, Lewis Gordon (2012), for example, has continued to underline the gulf between Fanon’s new humanism and the ‘essentialist anti-essentialism’ of post-theory. He has done so by developing his long-standing existentialist-phenomenological take on Fanon (2015) within the broader confines of Africana philosophy, arguing that Fanon’s work attests to all three overarching concerns of this tricontinental intellectual constellation: debates about the human (philosophical anthropology), liberation and freedom, reason and rationality (Gordon, 2000, 2008, 2013). Complementary to Lewis Gordon’s way of placing Fanon in Africana philosophy, Reiland Rabaka’s comprehensive survey of Fanon scholarship suggests that Fanon’s variegated insights can be developed in various theoretical and political directions (anti-racist, anti-colonial, Marxist, feminist) provided that these various paths do not lose sight of Fanon’s consistent, overarching and eminently transdisciplinary commitment to a revolutionary form of humanism (Rabaka, 2010, pp.12, 37).

On universals and particulars: Ajari and Balibar

Recent Fanon scholarship has underlined in effect (but not often enough in intent) the pertinence of Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, its integral reading of Fanon’s work, its insistence on Fanon’s dialectical humanism and its emphasis on the centrality of politics for Fanon’s social theory, a centrality that is also stressed in Jane Anne Gordon’s recent study on the general will in Fanon and Rousseau (2014). Let me expand on the importance of Sekyi-Otu’s work on and with Fanon with reference to current debates about the universal, universality, and universalism (if not the university itself). I begin with Norman Ajari’s recent intervention, La Dignité ou la mort: éthique et politique de la race (Ajari, 2019b). His book is a philosophical tour de force through European and African philosophy, decolonial theory, arguments for and against Afropessimism and the ontological turn in political theory. His main, frequently Fanon-inspired concern: to develop an African-inflected decolonial approach to dignity. In this light, dignity appears as a struggle concept, as a political claim against the indignities of dehumanization (colonial and anti-Black) (Ajari, 2019b, pp.65-66) and for an ‘authentically human’ life (p. 110). As most current Fanon scholarship, Ajari’s intervention says goodbye to the twin pitfalls of identity politics and deconstruction. The ‘essentialist anti-essentialism’ (Gordon, 2012) in both Ajarji considers anti-minoritarian in its philosophical hostility to enduring collective agency and the historical foundations (the memories, lineages of collective experience, traditions of struggle he terms historicité profonde) upon which political capacity can be built (Ajari 2019b., pp. 101-132).

A crucial sub-argument developed by Ajari is a militant’s defense of the particular in debates about the relationship between the universal and the particular. His key interlocutor in this case is Etienne Balibar (see also the public debate videotaped in Paris in 2019, Ajari, Balibar and Attia, 2019). Following earlier reflections on ‘the ambiguity of universality’, Balibar (2016a) published a collection of essays in 2016 that aimed at mounting a nuanced philosophical defense of the problematic of the universal. In this endeavor, Balibar was careful to underline that he was not arguing for a generic universalism but in favour of paying attention to the ambiguity of the universal and one of the sources of this ambiguity: contestations among multiple universalisms. He considered unearthing these contestations to be more significant than debates about the relationship between the particular and the universal per se (2016a, p. 131). Like Ajari’s, Balibar’s reflections on the universal remained on the terrain of philosophy even as they insisted that philosophical engagements must reflect upon the institutions, anthropological differences, and worldly forms of existence through which claims to the universal are made, validated or denied.

Balibar’s main goal was to emphasize the equivocal character of the universal. He did so with the primary help of Hegel (The Phenomenology of Spirit) and Marx (The German Ideology) as well as secondary assistance from Walter Benjamin and others who have been debating the difficulties of intra- and trans-linguistic translation as a practice of universalization. In this view, the universal refers to a product of processes and practices rather than as a pre-existing entity or condition (Balibar 2016a, p.38). Two eminently dialectical observations can be made about the universal in this light. First, the universal is unavoidable insofar as claims to the particular cannot help being made in the register of the universal (2016a, p.69). This may be true in a weak sense: claims to the particular are made to be understood and accepted by others; they thus presuppose general conditions of linguistic intelligibility that exceed the particular standpoint of enunciation. And it can be true in a strong sense whenever a defense of particularity is made in a general form within which particulars (cultures, languages, experiences) are placed as if interchangeable. Balibar delivers examples to sustain his view about the universal dimensions of what are often seen as particularist, or particularizing claims: multiculturalism, civilizational relativism, and some racist anti-universalisms. As to the latter case, he builds on earlier reflections (1991) to emphasize that anti-universalist racist claims can be said to depend on universal assumptions insofar as they rely on general benchmarks (of culture or the human) to compare groupings of people whose common humanity or human potential they otherwise deny.

Second, Balibar follows Hegel when he underscores that claims to universality also tend to flip over into their opposite. No claim to universality can avoid being made from a particular vantage point. This fact militates against the content of its own claim, at least in the short term. And it raises the spectre of multiple competing universalisms, which Balibar considers the usual state of affairs in modern politics (he references battles between faith and reason, liberalism and socialism) (2016a, pp. 9-11, 30-35, 41, 43, 107-110). With Marx, Balibar goes a step further to remind us that the problematic of ideology denotes with precision one of the processes through which claims rooted in particular social positions try to universalize themselves prematurely by subsuming other particularities under their own expansive, state-bound umbrellas (2016a, pp. 111-115, 42, 50-59, 86-88). These arguments indicate that universalist and particularist claims are often tied up with violence and domination, be it in the form of oppressive universalisms or in the form of particularisms that homogenize their internal component parts in order to become operative weapons against the universal itself (2016a, pp. 20, 142-144). Against violent universalisms and violent particularisms, Balibar proceeds to combine extensive with intensive claims to the universal. In his proposal for égaliberté, projects to generalize (extend) claims to equality combine with deepening (intensive) claims for liberty, including the right to have rights even against oppressive universalizing claims (2016a, pp.47, 138).

Ajari accepts a range of Balibar’s arguments about the equivocal nature of the universal, including his observation about the unavoidability of the universal (2019b, 156-157). He agrees that opposing universality tout court would be akin to battling windmills (Ajari, Balibar and Attia, 2019). In fact, Ajari’s nuanced engagement with Balibar stands in contrast to his uncompromising critique of Alain Badiou (2015). He calls Badiou’s notion of universality (as developed through the figure of Saint Paul) ‘voluntarist’ for abstracting one-sidedly and undialectically from the particular. Developing the universal by subtracting the particular, Badiou risks replicating the very false, (bourgeois) universalism he himself criticizes (Ajari 2019b, pp.145-151). Ajari rightly puts his finger on a sensitive spot in Badiou’s work, which, in the name of emancipation, detaches political claims, including the idea of communism, from their social particularities, thereby robbing the subaltern of the ground for collective agency.^[4] Even when cognizant of the need to transform subaltern subjectivities to advance universal aspirations, this agency cannot but remain contingent on a collective capacity built on the historically layered social situation shared by (a) particular group(s) in question.

Ultimately, Ajari’s critical vision catches up to Balibar’s own hedged defense of the universal, however. He rejects Balibar’s starting point (about the relationship between the universal and the particular being of lesser philosophical significance than the task of sorting out battles between competing universalisms). In conversation with arguments for dignity as a claim for political autonomy (made in the context of French political anti-racism (Khiari 2013) and against the falsely abstract conceptions of the universal that continue to shape strands of French republicanism (Bouamama 2019, pp.231-232), Ajari’s superordinate concern is with the particular. What is more, he defends the particular not through a quest for equality or liberty but through the problem of self-assertion as understood in personal as well as political terms, as claims to dignity and sovereignty. He thus replaces Balibar’s égaliberté with souverainedignité. ^[5]

Advancing such a twin claim for sovereignty and dignity leads Ajari to argue that the only good universals are ‘accidental’ universals: the product of chance discoveries that lead some (like Ali Shariati) to mobilize others (like Frantz Fanon) for their particular, situated political purposes of self-determination (2019b, p.161). In so doing, Ajari picks up on a particular practice of universalization also discussed by Balibar: the practice of translation. In contrast to Balibar, however, Ajari is adamant that the only admissibly universalizing form of translation is contingent; its universality can only be universal after the fact, the result of an unintended, accidental discovery that properties, ideas, and practices emanating from a particular source and context can in fact travel beyond the situation that first produced them. Ajari is categorically critical of anything beyond contingent universals, universals that become so despite themselves. For him, notions of the universal as desire, as passion, as normative project or as a pre-existing condition are bound to negate alterity by being complicit with colonial civilizing missions (Ajari 2019b, pp. 161-162, 164-166).

Ajaris’ notion of accidental universals is intriguing. This is in part because, in contrast to Afropessimist approaches, he treats the experience of Blackness not as exceptional but as paradigmatic (as the «cornerstone of social violence » (Ajari 2019b, p.272).^[6] Blackness thus becomes a central point of reference that, while qualitatively distinct, is comparable to other situations and remains open to unpredictable liberatory claims. Ajari’s recent comments about the French yellow vest movement (2019a) attest to the dynamic character of his thinking about the comparative character of political claims and the potentially shifting experiences they refract. In his view, the vests initially expressed a form of indignation that belonged to the sequence defined by the Indignados movement and its North African antecedents, a sequence different from claims to dignity by those denied the very right to make claims. But, says Ajari, the deliberately life-threatening brutality, humiliation and dehumanization experienced by the gilets jaunes as they faced a level of state repression as yet unknown to them have infused their dignity claims with elements of ‘négritude’. In this view, realities tied to the experience of anti-Black racism become accidentally universal in an unforeseen historical situation that brings into contact distinct social histories.

Universals, partisan and vernacular: Sekyi-Otu

Despite these dynamic reflections about accidental universalisms, Ajari’s rejection of all other forms of the universal veers onto a collision course with Fanon (and some others in the Black radical tradition).^[7] He is certainly right to take to task those who pay insufficient attention to the particular in Black radical and anti-colonial writers.^[8] But Fanon’s commitment to the universal as a project is as undeniable as it was enduring. This commitment is of a peculiar kind, of course. In his 1996 book, Sekyi-Otu called it partisan to describe the strong and dynamic relationship it carries with projects and decisions emanating from particular positions and experiences (pp.3, 16, 26, 104). In his commitment to liberating human potentials from the strictures of race and its determinants, Fanon differs from liberal and some Marxist universalisms. He refuses to bypass or ignore the dehumanizing realities that exclude some from the realm of the (fully) human, that ‘zone of non-being’ analyzed in detail by Lewis Gordon (2005; 2015). Liberation from race and the conditions that produce it can only come about through a dialectic sparked by political acts and orientations centred on the experience of those so dehumanized. To put it differently, Fanon’s partisan universalism accepts that a dialectic of liberation must confront and transform the very realities of racialized and colonial capitalism that he himself, in his disalienating quest for human possibilities, refuses to make eternal, that is to say, ontological.^[9]

Much of The Wretched of the Earth and the rest of his ‘Algerian’ reflections from the late 1950s to Fanon’s untimely death are devoted to grappling with the dynamics through which an anti-colonial dialectic of liberation might be produced at a subjective level. As Sekyi-Otu demonstrates, Fanon foregrounds the role of struggle and political action (collective organization, leadership, education) in anti-colonial liberation, and this at multiple, local, national and international scales. For Fanon, as for Gramsci, politics is the decisive agent of subjective transformation, but not in a one-sided, voluntarist sense. As Fanon outlines in his reflections on spontaneity, nationalism, the national bourgeoisie, religion, the family, and gender relations, decolonization can only succeed through a double transformation of thick subjective and objective realities, a successful challenge to (neo-)colonial rule and a selective restructuring of colonized social formations. Fanon’s political project is thus not abstract; while foregrounding rupture, it does not posit a historical tabula rasa but proposes to create something new (the national, the human, the post-imperial) by transforming fragments inherited from the past: those elements that are not fully deformed by colonial culture and thus remain open to being appropriated in emancipatory struggle. Fanon proposes to do so through actions that operate at multiple time horizons; these range from armed revolution to the kind of daily interventions he never stopped practicing as a psychiatrist. Insofar as Fanon’s project includes forms of translation (creative transformations of meaning emanating from a range of subaltern situations), its universalism is not only accidental; it is as intentional as it is anticolonial.

What about the idea of the universal as an existing condition or presupposition (which Ajari also considers dangerous for anticolonial purposes)? Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism, Africa-Centric Essays (LU) is all about demonstrating the inverse relationship between universal presuppositions and colonial or Eurocentric leanings. Like Fanon’s Dialectic (FD), LU also relies on Fanon as a ‘pathfinder’ on a mission to rescue and redeem categories and orientations deeply tainted or forgotten in the course of modern colonial and imperial history. As he says,

To be cogent and coherent, the debunking critique of reason, truth, and ethical universals such as individualism as mirages or power-serving fabrications must issue not in truth-relativism and value-relativism, but rather in their normative redemption on the basis of the transcendental presuppositions of that very critique – the normative redemption, above all, of the twin principles of universality and individuality …. Fanon for one championed individuality and championed it for the very same reason that he subscribed to universalism. How could it be otherwise, given that the racial polity he was sworn to dismantle is that peculiar institution whose constitutive principle is the simultaneous denial of human universality and personal individuality? (Sekyi-Otu, 2018, 169)

While FD recasts universalism, humanism, modernity and historicism through a painstaking reading of Fanon, LU expands its textual scope (beyond Fanon) and range of conceptual targets (to individualism, multiculturalism, and communism). It does so with a sense of urgency (about the weight of class and other ‘domestic’ mediations of imperialism) that is brought about by the experience of coming home to Africa after long years in the North American diaspora (2018, pp. x, 74).

On the matter of universalism, LU continues to fight counterfeit universalisms with partisan ones. In this sense, the book also grapples with competing universalisms, as does Balibar’s. Sekyi-Otu says that the essays in the book ‘defend and practice universalism for Africa’s sake; they enact and exemplify Africacentrism as a testimony to the universal: the universal wrested by partisans from contending interests and ends’ (2018, p.12). In this case, Ato Sekyi-Otu advances a partisan universalism not so much as the product of a historical and intersubjective process (a dialectic of experience mediated by national liberation struggles, as in FD), thus moving a step or two away from the Gramscian inflections of FD. Nor is Sekyi-Otu content with Samir Amin and others who see a radicalized universalism as a necessary response to modern historical conditions: the real if necessarily incomplete, contradictory and fraught universalizing processes unfolding within the constraints of a deeply uneven and still Eurocentric world capitalism (Amin 1989; Lazarus et. al. 1995, see Sekyi-Otu 2018, p.73). Sekyi-Otu presents universalism as an unavoidable ethical and moral starting point. He argues that without such ethical presuppositions, ‘substantive moral and political arguments and commitments’ are as unthinkable as ‘radical critiques of conditions of existence’ (2018, p. viii).

In what sense are universal ethical presuppositions subversive of colonial and other counterfeit universalisms? On this front, LU approaches the universal not like Balibar, who puts the universal into sustained contact with the world and its network of places (2016a, pp.158-163). For Balibar, this cosmopolitan articulation of the universal is not abstract but tied to long-standing concerns about migration, borders, citizenship, racism and nationalism (1991; 1998; 2002b; 2016b). Given the ethno-nationalism and civilizational racism that shape European politics at all scales today, it is certainly defensible, limits notwithstanding). Unlike Balibar’s universalism with a transnational bent and Ajari’s concern with Black or indigène particulars, Sekyi-Otu’s universalism is vernacular, ‘native’, and local:

To the argument for universalism as conceptual adequation to historical materiality, this book appends what may be described as a fundamentalist case for universalism, universalism as first and foremost a native necessity, one embedded in our regular practice of judging things… It is under the aegis of such an everyday universalism that, upon encountering a victim (or news) of harmful or degrading or unfair treatment, an Akan speaker in Ghana voices her outrage with this simple question:….Is s/he not also a human being?……(Sekyi-Otu 2018, p.17)

The Akan invocation of the human is an effective measuring stick for false and impossible civilizing missions because its universality is both ‘intracultural in provenance’ and ‘transcultural in meaning’ (p. 16). It claims what imperial culture also claims in its false and brutalizing ways (human universals) but without requiring assistance from that very imperial culture. ‘Anterior and transcendent to empire’, vernacular universalisms posit the ‘general question of the human’ without requiring a ‘discourse spawned by travel, translation, transmission of crosscultural or exogenous semantic resources’ (p.16). They stand on their own.

What Sekyi-Otu offers here is a strategy of critique that avoids the twin pitfalls of Eurocentrism and Occidentalism, which despite diametrically opposed ends share a key premise: that ‘Europe’ can be trusted when ‘it’ says that it owns the copyright to all manners human and universal. Here is Sekyi-Otu:

The history of the ‘the West and the rest’ has, it is true, given universalism and its cognates, such as humanism, a bad name. That is no reason to repudiate the idea altogether. A stance that indicts the Western geist for its willful and violent ignorance, its contempt for plural identities and symbolic forms, local self-understandings, endogenous varieties of human knowledge, alternative paths to modernity, that very stance seems incongruously heedless to one ubiquitous fact and benign paradox: the universalism that speaks in variegated tongues as they convey the ordinary languages of moral and political judgement, to say nothing of vindicatory visions of mending the world’s disorder. It is especially ironic that non-Western critics of perverted universalism are all too often unwilling or unable to hear the homeland idioms in which universalism as the self-surpassing work of particularity is accomplished, thereby conferring upon the West, in a strange act of complicity, exclusive property rights to, well, a human universal. (2018, p.14)

Vernacular universalism can develop a ‘homestead moral vigilance’, a ‘self-scrutinizing neighbourhood watch on the lookout for infractions of human dignity’ without calling on ‘benighted natives and nativists to embrace’ a ‘cosmopolitan Enlightenment’. Vernacular universalism ‘is the stuff of native transcendentals, at once anteracial and transracial, pre-Black and post-Black’ (p. 19). Fundamentally independent of the colonial and imperial world, vernacular universalism is key for genuine decolonization understood as a project to resume history (the history interrupted by colonialism) without invoking a past that never existed or granting eternal intellectual powers to empire (Sekyi-Otu 2011, pp.54-55).

 For Sekyi-Otu, more so than for Ajari and Balibar, the link between (vernacular) universalism and communism is direct, and this not only because of the etymological and conceptual connections between what is universal and was is held in common (Das (All)gemeine), which Balibar has underlined elsewhere. In LU, the argument for a universalism as a vernacular ethical presupposition finds its counterpoint in ethical arguments for communism. Borrowing from Ayi Kwei Armah and his double critique of African and utopian socialism (1984) as well as G.A. Cohen’s argument (2000) for an ethical turn in Marxism, Sekyi-Otu suggests that communism represents not only a project for a new order and a new set of social relations but also a ‘continuous practice of self-interrogation’ about the communist character of this very project, its goals, ends and moving dynamics (2018, p.133). Both universalism and communism represent self-reflexive ethical practices at an everyday level. What is more, they defy abstractly one-sided universalisms and particularism alike. Neither universalism nor communism must be the result of diffusion (unidirectional generalization); nor can they rest on practices that are deemed civilizationally incommensurable (place- and culture-bound in a value-relativist sense). Understood as a fusion of revolution and universal justice, communism can be advanced on multiple paths (Armah 1984, pp. 39-40).

Universals, historical and geographical

Sekyi-Otu, Balibar, and Ajari all develop their arguments self-consciously at the level of philosophy or social and political theory. Conceptually, their arguments (about the universal and the particular) are thus not meant to stand and fall with the time- and space-bound realities of political practice. This also means that the difference between the particular and the universal is not to be confused with scalar distinctions (between the local and global, the national, the international or the cosmopolitan). And yet, all three authors are cognizant of the dependency of philosophy and theory on other aspects of life. This recognition returns us to a key question, which I ask in the spirit of anti-colonial historical and geographical materialism strongly influenced by Fanon as well as Gramsci and Marx (Kipfer, forthcoming; Hart 2018b; Bannerji 2011): how should one grasp the relationship between universal/izing/ist claims and the modern capitalist world? As we know, the latter is defined by multiple temporalities and has produced increasingly intense world-wide connections even as it has generated deep socio-spatial separations of various kinds, including the quasi-ontological divides generated by modern racism. The question can thus be restated: What is the ‘place’ of universal claims within the historico-geographical web of relations and demarcations that characterize the modern world?

As we have seen, Balibar differs from Ajari and Sekyi-Otu by arguing that the world-wide, the historically shifting relationship between global, continental and national scales represents the explicit reference point for philosophies of the universal. His depiction of this relationship is not cosmopolitan in a liberal and idealist sense. In contrast to his frequent interlocutor Jürgen Habermas, he takes into account at least some of the contradictions of the historical process. But even just in a European context, Balibar’s project remains historically and geographically underspecified, and in-sufficiently rooted in the balance of struggling forces. Crucial questions arise for Ajari, too. One may ask about the historical-geographical conditions that make distinct experiences (of Blackness, for instance) comparable to others.^[10] And one can also ask if particular historical-geographical features of the modern world are particularly conducive – or hostile – to the nature and frequency by which the universalizing potential of particular claims are discovered by accident, after the fact. For example, what were the circumstances that it made it possible for Ali Shariati to discover Fanon and recognize the translatability of his words? What social and political patterns do these circumstances reveal to help us understand the historical and geographical constitution of the world?

Finally, Ato Sekyi-Otu establishes a relationship between the universal and space-time when he links both the universal and the vernacular to the local. This argument makes it legitimate to ask whether it is possible to find localities and vernacular cultures today that are not already condensations of translocal connections, connections that may predate modern world orders, result from the last few hundred years, or what is most likely, express a combination of both .^[11] Place-specificity and cross-local connectivity need not be seen as opposites. As we know from critical historical geographical debates, to insist on the relationality of place and locality allows us to grasp their immanent geographical openness to the world without reducing the local to an afterthought of translocal connection (Massey 1991; Hart 2018a; McKittrick 2006). In my view, this critical historico-geographical insight strengthens Sekyi-Otu’s argument about universalism and communism. It allows us to see the range of historical geographies that may tie together the intra- and trans-cultural dimensions of any vernacular and partisan universal. And it highlights clearly that multiple historical geographies may be at work in communist projects of building egalitarian relations of social connection and maximizing human possibilities in and against the shackles of (neo-)colonial capitalism.

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