Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon

• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Begüm Adalet
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211009152
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211009152

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 5 –31

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211009152

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Article

Infrastructures of

Decolonization: Scales

of Worldmaking in the

Writings of Frantz Fanon

Begüm Adalet1

Abstract

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial

thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these

discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its

territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings

reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of

political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a

multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment

and the creation of selves. I show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy

between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the

national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban,

rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read

Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been

relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar

analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer

understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they

can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human.

Keywords

Frantz Fanon, colonialism, anticolonialism, geography, infrastructure,

worldmaking

1Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Begüm Adalet, Cornell University, 214 White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853.

Email: ba375@cornell.edu

1009152PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211009152Political TheoryAdalet

research-article2021

6 Political Theory 50(1)

In the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), Frantz Fanon

describes a haunting encounter with a mother and her son on a train, relating

the child’s reaction upon seeing him: “Look, maman, a Negro! I’m afraid”

(2008, 91). The scene immediately turns to one of objectification as Fanon is

fixed by the boy’s interpellation and by white gaze more broadly:

In the train, it was a question of being aware of my body, no longer in the third

person but in triple. In the train, instead of one seat, they left me two or three. I

was no longer enjoying myself. I was unable to discover the feverish coordinates

of the world. . . . I existed in triple: I was taking up room. I approached the

Other . . . and the Other, evasive, hostile . . . vanished. Nausea. . . . Peeling,

stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all

over my body. Yet this reconsideration of myself was not my idea. I wanted

quite simply to be a man among men. (89)

As readers of this passage have noted, the scene captures the close rela-

tionship between “human spatiality and human embodiment” (Sekyi-Otu

1996, 82), as well as Fanon’s broader discussion of the “territorialization

of the body” (Pile 2000, 264)—that is, a tangibly material process of

racialization whereby “racial hierarchy is scratched into the surface of the

skin” (Marasco 2015, 146). Rather than present a transhistorical or essen-

tialist account of this process, Fanon describes racism as a situated and

sociospatial relation, whereby the “colonial body-self continually encoun-

ters the material landscape itself” (McKittrick 2006, 26). In these pas-

sages, spatial divisions and material conditions determine and mediate the

ways in which power shapes lived experience. Rather than facilitate ease

of movement for all passengers, the setting of the train generates asym-

metrical possibilities for mobility.

Looking more closely at Fanon’s depiction of his experience, one is struck

by his writing across different spaces—that of the body, the train, and ulti-

mately the “coordinates of the world.” His encounter with the child seals him,

as Lewis Gordon (2015) puts it, “in a world without reciprocity” (49).

Foreclosed in the moment of objectification is a “genuine dialectic between

my body and the world” (Fanon 2008, 91). Emphasizing the relationality

between the body, infrastructure, and globe, Fanon writes in these and later

passages both about the existing world of racial hierarchy and domination,

which he seeks to “restructure” (63), and about the alternative world he

would like to “build together” (92).

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial

thinkers as global figures. Gary Wilder’s (2015) account of regional and fed-

erational projects as alternative visions of decolonization and Adom

Getachew’s (2019) recasting of anticolonial nationalism as “worldmaking”