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FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION xvii

discourses, or is the gift of liberal humanists of the Enlightenment.
His thinking lies elsewhere.
So what does Fanon mean when he wants to transcend his
ethnic perspectives and affi liation and wage his anti-colonial
struggle in the name of universal human values? What are we
to make of the fact that he also sometimes roundly denounces
this universalism? Some postcolonial theorists have seen this as
two different varieties of Fanon. Nicolas Harrison, for example,
suggests the way to reconcile “these two distinct strains within
Fanon’s writing, which is at times anti-universal and at times pro-
universal (and anti-pseudo-universal) is to relativize/historicize
them in terms of personal history and the changes in opinion
that his experiences produced. Another would be to treat his
varied claims as a writer’s rhetorical and/or strategic gestures,
and to consider their effi cacy in mobilizing opinion, generating
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solidarity, etc.” But Fanon is not anti-universal per se—he is
only anti a particular kind of universalism, one based on the
notion of superiority which projects that superiority as a universal
discourse. His stated purpose in examining (western) universalism
is clear: I hope by analyzing it to destroy it. There are not two
contradictory but one single, unifi ed position here. Moreover,
Fanon is not concerned at all with postmodern ambiguity; it could
hardly be so given the devastating dominance of the colonizer he
experienced fi rsthand. For him, the nuances in the relationship
between the colonizer and the colonized are irrelevant given the
fact that the colonizer is totally deaf to the political condition of
the colonized and what the colonized has to say.
Fanon’s idea of universalism is based on the notions of dignity,
equality and equity: on a concrete and ever new understanding
of man. It is a universalism that does not exist as yet, it cannot
emerge from the dominant discourse, and it cannot be seen as a
grand narrative that privileges a particular culture and its rep-
resentatives. It is the universalism we need to struggle for and
build. That is why Fanon is not content simply with knowledge
and criticism. He wants man—and here he does mean man as
the universal person—to be actional. Having thought, we must
prepare to act. Our prime task as humans, he asserts, is to

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