Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization, and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of ‘space’ in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for ‘third-space’ thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian–Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation. Fanon analyzed everyday racism as an alienating spatial relation, treated colonization as spatial organization, and viewed decolonization in part as a form of reappropriating and transforming spatial relations in the colonial city and through the construction of nationwide sociospatial alliances. Fanon's complex historical-geographical perspective on everyday racism, the colonial issue, and national liberation makes it possible to link his work to Henri Lefebvre's insights into the processes by which postwar French urbanization mediated a shift from colonial war to the ‘colonization’ of everyday life in the metropole. Given the growing role of controlling urban space in the core and peripheries of our neo-imperial world, excavating an urban and spatial Fanon is promising for strategies to emphasize the urban dimensions, microaspects and macroaspects, and multiple scales of what colonization means today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".