Frantz Fanon and Global Combative Decoloniality
Guest Editors:
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Universidad de Connecticut y Fundación Frantz Fanon
Mireille Fanon Mendès France
Fundación Frantz Fanon
Email: fanon_centennial@protonmail.com
Frantz Fanon remains one of the world’s most influential thinkers more than a century after his birth. His work, read and nurtured by collectives of the “condemned of the earth” long before it entered the academy, provides indispensable analyses of colonization, racism, anti-blackness, ethical-political agency, and decolonial struggle. Fanon’s descriptions of modern/colonial power and his provocative analyses of the challenges of decolonization become particularly relevant today, when many are facing the intensification of the coloniality of power, including the resurgence of fascism and its entanglement with open racism, sexism, imperialism, discourses of Western superiority, televised genocide, misanthropic and anti-democratic technological developments, the persecution of migrants, and the criminalization of dissent, to name only some of the most visible forms of domination and extermination today.
This special issue focuses on thick descriptions and analyses of struggles against coloniality and the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century. We invite authors to contribute to the understanding of combative forms of decoloniality, which, in light of Fanon’s work, could be understood as forms of decolonial struggle that are rooted in grassroots movements and collective organizing. Combative decoloniality also tends to involve the birth and/or enrichment of decolonial attitudes, the emergence of rich solidarities, and the cultivation of a sense of agency that aims to create the “world of you” (Fanon) and therebycause the “end the world as we know it” (Aimé Césaire; Fanon).
Combative decoloniality is prominently found in communities with legacies of maroon struggles, and in the work of those who demand social, political, and epistemic reparations that require the creation of decolonized institutions and an-other world. Projects and expressions of combative decoloniality are too many to name, but examples include: the 2009 general strike in Guadeloupe against the rise of living costs and low wages; the work of the Pan-African and Black conscious Soweto-based BlackHouse Kollective leading to and after the rise of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements in South Africa; the thought and actions of the umbrella organization Decolonize This Place, along with the strike against the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City; the work of the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the artist collective AgiArte, and similar organizations in Puerto Rico that continue cultivating the spirit of the “verano combativo” (combative summer) that led to the resignation of Puerto Rico’s governor in 2019; and the student encampments in protest against the genocide in Palestine.
We invite research-based articles that explore connections between Fanon’s decolonial analyses and the discourses, actions, artistic works, performances, and strategies of combative decolonial organizations, movements, and collectives. Such work necessarily includes the active participation or at least the explicit authorization from the organizations, movements, and collectives in question. Ours is a call for Fanonian analyses of the work of combative decolonial organizations, movements, and collectives around the globe on the basis that Fanon’s own work is first and foremost, not a scholarly exercise in one discipline or another, but an example of combative decoloniality, including collective writing as part of a liberation front. The special issue thus seeks to provide, not only examples of scholarly inter- and trans-disciplinarity, but, more importantly, elements that contribute to a cartography of the decolonial turn from below. The goal of such cartography is not to accumulate knowledge, but to build relations that in turn lead to more knowledge, actions, and artistic creations that counter the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality and that generate new worlds. In that sense, we are also interested in works that pay attention to new geopolitical configurations of power and that explore a thematization of shared horizons of struggle within specific regions and globally.
For further information or to submit your complete manuscript along with an abstract (in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), please write to: fanon_centennial@protonmail.com
The deadline for submissions is October 20, 2026.
Contributions shall be unpublished, the result of research work, and presented in compliance with the journal’s guidelines. See more on this on: Tabula Rasa’s guidelines.
