32 chApter one
for Fanon, whose psychoanalytic practice led him to advocate for collective
violence against the colonial forces that restricted the (masculine) colo-
nized body. Fanon framed himself explicitly as a “master,” one that had
been “crippled” through the colonial relation. For him, decolonization was
an act of reclaiming this lost, masterful humanity that had been stripped
from him through the racist dehumanization of colonialism. He articulated
this through the language of humanism and universal love, even while he
cast his anticolonial humanist politics in tension with women, the disabled,
and, more subtly, the natural world.
These admittedly crude summations of Gandhi and Fanon’s masterful
anticolonialisms illustrate how tightly linked they are, despite one being
lauded as a nonviolent activist and the other criticized as a thinker who
promoted violent action. Both popular formulations selectively pluck from
the oeuvre of their political writings, abandoning, for instance, the often
perplexing necessities of violence in Gandhian thought, or the explicit calls
to love and orientation toward the Other across Fanon’s writing. Following
their narrative paths, I aim to consider their resonances through their
mutual calls for new forms of embodiment in the process of decolonization
and to attend to what such forms of masterful self- practice and embodi-
ment shape and efface in collective struggle for liberation. In the narrative
accounts of each thinker, the decolonizing body aims toward more loving
relations and more peaceful forms of sociality. Both Gandhi and Fanon
make clear that the domain of love is not dissociable from violence, and
that violence is at stake in every act of remaking the self and is always em-
bedded in the engagements of love toward oneself and others. Attending to
the messy entanglements of love and violence in these thinkers allows us to
move past the overly simplified versions of Gandhian and Fanonian poli-
tics in order both to offer more nuanced and generative accounts of their
foundational contributions to anticolonial thought and postcolonial theory
and to loosen some of the knots of their political thought so as to develop
through and alongside them different political possibilities for the present.
Fanon’s Sacrificial Women
Feminist readings have already stressed women as glaring figures of dif-
ference and subjection across anticolonial writing. Kalpana Sheshadri-
Crooks, for example, refers to “the now over- familiar feminist contention