Dialectical praxis and the decolonial struggle: Sartre and fanon’s contributions to political phenomenology

Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon are the preeminent phenomenologists of racism. Combatting the conventional wisdom of their time, Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew and Fanon in the fifth chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks already recognized that racism was not reducible to beliefs or attitudes and so could not be effectively combatted by education. In subsequent works they came to focus on colonialism as a racist material system according to which racism was primarily embedded in and reproduced by the material social structures. In that context they both recognized the need to abandon conventional modes of thinking and embrace a version of dialectics to let that system appear as such. On their accounts praxis, specifically revolutionary praxis, is, when approached phenomenologically, dialectical. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth are examined in order to show how their engagement with colonialism led them to initiate a transformation of political phenomenology.