In this article I put forward an interpretation of what is at stake in Frantz Fanon's claim that there is a reciprocity at the basis of G. W. F Hegel's master-servant dialectic. I do this by staging a critique of the ‘shared-humanity’ interpretation of Fanon's claim. Fanon's problem, as this interpretation understands it, is that the master-servant dialectic describes a situation in which two human beings knowingly confront one another as such. Such a situation—because human-to-human confrontation is assumed—does not adequately (...) describe a racially divided situation because of racism's dehumanizing force. Fanon's problem would thus be that Hegel assumed shared humanity. I contest this reading by claiming that Fanon's issue is not reciprocal humanity but reciprocal struggle. To get to this point requires demonstrating that the shared-humanity reading is implausible on a variety of grounds. Thanks to the work of Philippe Van Haute it can already be said that in Hegel's text no shared humanity takes place. But Van Haute nevertheless claims that the shared-humanity problem is present in Kojève. Thus, it first needs to be shown that Kojève's text disallows such a reading. With this result in hand, I move to show the textually unsupportable nature of a subset of the shared-humanity reading—the ‘ontological reading’—whose strategy of reading Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks obscures the Sartrean-Beauvoirian commitments which would in fact allow a more accurate reading of Fanon's claims about reciprocity in Hegel to be made. I then seek to show—with reference to these commitments and a broadly Kojèvean emphasis on the centrality of struggle in human subject-formation—that Fanon's comments about reciprocity take aim at the question of mutual struggle in Hegel and Kojève. ‘The French Negro’, Fanon argues, did not get to experience the cost and value of freedom, unlike Hegel's servant. (shrink)

The emergence of a new generation of antiracist activists and theorists seeking to advance an anticapitalist agenda creates a new vantage point for re-examining how racism relates to the logic of capital. This essay explores sources in the work of Marx, twentieth-century Marxists, and Frantz Fanon that can provide direction for overcoming the binary of class and race.

Scholars who write about Fanon's engagement with Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks divide into roughly two groups. One group takes it that Fanon engages with Hegel to critique his philosophical views. This group takes it that Fanon views Hegel as irrelevant to the Black struggle against modern, anti‐Black racism. It is easy to see why this reading is natural and tempting, given the widely held belief that Hegel's philosophy is essentially racist. The second group believes that Fanon relies on (...) Hegel to explain the predicament of Black people who face racial discrimination. Indeed, some in this group believe that Fanon relies on Hegel to justify his call to violence in The Wretched of the Earth. I side with the second group. Fanon's engagement with Hegel is not a critique, but a thoughtful application of Hegel's thought that illustrates the connection between self‐consciousness, autonomy, and interpersonal recognition. In this article, I'll explain the positions of both camps and provide reasons to think the second camp has a better take on Fanon's reading of Hegel. (shrink)