Over the last forty years, the self-determination claims of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of “recognition”: recognition of Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an Indigenous right to land and self-government, recognition of the right to benefit from the development of Indigenous territories and resources, and so on. In addition, the last fifteen years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship which has sought to flesh-out the ethical, legal and political questions that these claims tend to raise. Subsequently, “recognition” has now come to occupy a central place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in liberal settler-polities more generally. The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, I want to challenge the now commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada can be reconciled via such a politics of recognition. Second, I want to explore glimpses of an alternative politics. More specifically, drawing critically from Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and activist traditions, I will explore a politics of self-recognition that is less oriented around attaining an affirmative form of recognition from Indigenous peoples’ master-other (the liberal settler-state and society), and more about critically revaluating, reconstructing and redeploying Indigenous cultural forms in ways that seek to prefigure alternatives to the colonial social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous lands and self-determining authority.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / This thesis argues that Ndi Sibiya, fictional writer and protagonist of the novel, Mating Birds by Lewis Nkosi develops a pathological obsession with Veronica Slater, a white woman for whose rape Sibiya is about to be executed. One of the many theorists that have commented on the effects of race on sexuality, particularly in colonized black people is Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin White Masks Fanon asks a question based on Freud’s question, “What does a woman want?” Fanon’s question is different in that he asks, what do black people want, which opens the way for a post-colonial psychoanalytical analysis of Ndi Sibiya. What he is concerned with in Black Skin White Masks is a post-colonial psycho-analytical evaluation of the state of being black in colonial societies. Nkosi does the same in his novel, whereas he deals with Apartheid South Africa as an extension of colonialism. Nkosi and Fanon are both addressing the broader psychological impact racially oppressive societies have on the black person’s psyche. Fanon in his psychoanalytical study of the black man from within the Freudian framework aims to save the man of colour from himself (9) by giving black people a warning that is not much different from the warning Sibiya’s father gives to him: do not lust after the white man’s woman.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / This qualitative study aims to use some of Frantz Fanon’s critical insights to explore how individuals within the Health Sciences Faculty at the UCT experienced change and perceived the transformation process instituted by University management and the change taking place in the wider society. Frantz Fanon, a critical theorist born in a Martinique, university-educated in France and later employed in Algeria, wrote extensively on how the colonial condition affects the psychology of individuals, thus inter-linking psychology and politics. This study selected six individuals who had experienced the institutional context before and during the process of transformation. Data was collected by way of unstructured interview schedules. A Fanonian psychoanalytic-inspired discourse analysis was employed to analyse the data. The data showed that broader discourses influences the way people talk about phenomena. Our past still plays a role in the way we construct current realities.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis, I will argue that one of the ways to think about the concept of homelessness and its relationship to violence is to trace the concept as it emerges in key theoretical texts of critical intellectuals who find themselves both in and outside the Western homeland. In attempting to do so, I limit this thesis to three key theoretical articulations from which the concept of homelessness can be extracted: the works of Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon and Michael Foucault. In bringing to bear the life and work of these individuals, the hope is to conceive of the relationship between violence and homelessness in new and unforeseen ways. I propose to bring an informed interdisciplinary and gender perspective to bear on the concept of homelessness. Accepting the supposition that the body can be seen as a site of homecoming,I explore the question of who owns the body. This exploration is undertaken through an examination of the advocacy slogan, ‘my body, my business’, and the placement of the Afrikan sex worker alongside Freud, Fanon and Foucault. The Afrikan sex worker in this work is a new feminist potentiality in much the same way that homelessness offers new postcolonial possibilities. While much of postcolonial criticism has centred on the problem of the colonized subject’s relation to the home, there has not yet been a sustained undertaking of the history and meaning of the concept of homelessness and, more importantly, its relationship to the experience of violence in the contemporary world. The history of homeless people tends to be recorded through surveillance and documentation by those institutions responsible for providing discipline, punishment, shelter and cure so as to ‘save’ and ‘rescue’ them. These responses, particularly when done systematically, can become frameworks that hold the homeless person ransom to a particular language game of ‘truth’, thereby restricting the homeless person’s movement and possibility of finding a voice. Deriving a concept of homelessness from the life and work of Freud, Fanon and Foucault allows for new insights. These thinkers offer a view of homelessness that is productive for thinking against the grain of dominant orthodoxies. This contrasts with the implication of pathologization of homelessness which arises in the frameworks of dominant political,therapeutic and social work approaches.The creation of homelessness also recalls the attendant violence of its experience. I argue that the space of homelessness needs to be contextualized. When homelessness is imposed, as with torture or a tsunami, there is a closing down of space; but when chosen, as with the transgendered sex worker who leaves her home and community due to threats, impositions and judgements, homelessness may paradoxically open up space. Drawing on the insights from these theorists, I also suggest that the concept of homelessness may at a symbolic level serve rather as a powerful space of resistance to hegemonic practices of belonging, offering a way of destabilising dominant patriarchal, heteronormative and Western constructions of home.The thesis concludes that homelessness cannot be kept outside the boundaries of the home; and neither can the homeless be fully assimilated into the homeland, as something within the home is irreducible to any ordering of things. The border, boundary and intersections of home and homelessness are blurred, forever incomplete, as the home finds itself ceaselessly stained and crossed with the uncanny, that is, the ‘unhomely’. Home, as noted by Delia Vekony (2010), is a site of hospitality. It is a space to think, play, and dream, eat, make love and raise children. But it is also a stage upon which the state apparatus, global economy, monotheistic religions and patriarchal order assert control over the body. Homelessness has been constructed as a material experience for many: a site of terror, abandonment and lack of direction. It is often experience it as free falling or as the mental foreclosure of space. Yet I underline another dimension of homelessness: as an experience of liberation. This ‘camping on the borders’ allows for a disruption of identification, a state of refuge from the demands of others and a form of nomadic thinking. Within any home setting lurks the uncanny, what cannot be housed, likewise within any homeless setting a becoming-at-home is possible. Both home and homelessness hold the possibility of terror as well as a comforting, exciting retreat and escape.

A new law regulating homosexual relations was in the year of 2009 introduced in the parliament of Uganda, resulting in wide condemnation from the west. The bill proposed harsh penalties for homosexual behavior and gay advocacy, including, but not limited to, the death penalty and life imprisonment. Despite the damning critique from certain western countries the law garnered strong support among Ugandan nationals. To understand this discrepansy my thesis sets out to comprehend the reasoning behind the bill’s national popularity. Is it possible to make sense of a law that from a liberal western perspective could be considered nonsensical? To develop an understanding of the motivations behind the bill, this paper aims to identify and analyze frequently used arguments in support of the ”anti-gay law”. This analysis is primarily achieved through the implementation of a postcolonial perspective containing terminology inspired by Frantz Fanon, and Kristen Cheneys discussions regarding ”postcolonial amnesia”. More general aspects associated with postcolonial theory are also included and a ”liberal western perspective” is additionally implemented to empahasize the contribution of the postcolonial perspective. The study identified four different types of arguments that were commonly used in support of the bill. The first stated that homosexuality is a western phenomenon contrary to African values, the second claimed that homosexuality is a threat to the family, the third that it’s a sin in conflict with religious values, and it was lastly argued that homosexuality doesn’t qualify as one of the human rights. All of the aforementioned arguments were shown to be more comprehensible through the implementation of a postcolonial perspective. The branding of homosexuality as western and ”un-African” was for example demonstrated as explainable when viewed as a reaction to western hegemony and historical colonial exploitation, as well as a drive to create and uphold an independent national identity. A similar pattern is also identified in connection with the other arguments, and is primarily established through the reasonings of Frantz Fanon. Kristen Cheneys use of ”postcolonial amnesia” is also implemented to make sense of glaring paradoxes in the arguments supporting the law.

Le présent mémoire interroge le conditionnement exercé par la violence sur la capacité d’action humaine à travers les pensées des philosophes Hannah Arendt et Frantz Fanon. Nous entendons approfondir l’étude de ces deux concepts centraux en philosophie politique ainsi qu’en phénoménologie en vue de futures recherches. Si ces deux penseurs majeurs du 20e siècle ont souvent été mis en dialogue sur le concept de la violence, leurs philosophies de l’action respectives n’ont presque jamais fait l’objet d’une discussion. Notre objectif est donc de combler ce manque et de démontrer que, malgré des divergences flagrantes, qui s’expliquent, entre autres, par un rapport au corps et à la subjectivité politique différent, leurs pensées peuvent interagir et se rencontrer lorsque les bons outils analytiques sont mobilisés. Il s’agira d’abord de dégager deux formes d’action en tant que déterminant de la condition humaine, ainsi que comme moteur de la construction d’un monde commun et condition à la liberté chez Hannah Arendt et Frantz Fanon. Ensuite, parce que l’action humaine possède un pouvoir en face de la violence, il sera question de révéler les potentiels de libération et de liberté de l’action dans des contextes violents, tels qu’envisagés par les deux philosophes. Nous souhaitons en somme illustrer comment Hannah Arendt et Frantz Fanon fournissent ensemble les clés d’utilisation de l’action contre la violence, pour la liberté et et la construction d’un monde commun. / This Master’s thesis explores the conditioning exercised by violence on the human capacity for action through the writings of two major philosophers of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. Often placed in dialogue for the differences between their thought on the concept on violence, Arendt and Fanon have however rarely seen their philosophy of action been the object of a discussion in political philosophy. We thus aim at bridging this gap for further research in political thought and phenomenology, two fields in philosophy to which they have both hugely contributed. In the following chapters, we will first define in detail two forms of action, as well as different incarnations of violence in the major works of Arendt and Fanon. Even though important conceptual discrepancies can be identified between their respective lines of thought, it will appear that their conclusions can interact and share common grounds when the right analytical lenses are taken. We will then move on to prove that with both thinkers, human action holds a power against violence, and possesses potentials for liberation from oppressive political contexts. In the end, we wish to illustrate how Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon can provide together, by the means of their distinct yet complementary philosophies, the keys for human action to fight violence in the goal of establishing new communities and attaining radical forms of freedom.

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A false presence of the colonized female arises within Frantz Fanon's books Peau noire, masques blancs, L'an V de la révolution algérienne, and Les damnés de la terre. Through a close reading of these texts, this thesis aims to locate where these blind spots exist and how they are facilitated by Fanon, while also acknowledging the potential for these exclusions to be accidental. The introduction provides a brief synopsis of Fanon's life and the colonial relations of his time, namely the Algerian revolution. The first chapter deals with how Fanon's language reinforces the female subaltern through silencing, effacement, and stereotypical language. The second chapter concerns the similarities between racial and gendered power relations within his books. In the third chapter, I discuss hierarchies of power and their establishment through gendered binaries. Finally, my concluding chapter posits how addressing these false presences can lead to deeper understanding and interaction with the female subaltern in Fanon's books. / Master of Arts

This study uses Frantz Fanon‟s thoughts on race and blackness, the black elite and black public intellectuals as the theoretical framework and examines the positionality of Sipho Seepe, Xolela Mangcu and Andile Mngxitama as black public intellectuals in order to understand how they view the post-1994 political discourse. Seepe, Mangcu and Mngxitama‟s views are studied by analysing themes emerging from newspaper columns they have written. This study reveals that the three black public intellectuals examined have been radical and forthright, though they display different understandings of race and blackness, the black elite and black public intellectuals. However, the study reveals that only Mngxitama‟s postionality has been consistently radical, whereas Seepe and Mangcu‟s views have been fluid and are now considered moderate. This study concludes by highlighting the relevance of Fanon‟s thoughts in enabling a new reading of post-1994 South Africa. Of central importance is the creation of the „new being‟, who is informed by the process of liberation, which is the antithesis of the black condition. / Political Sciences / M. A. (Politics)

This study uses Frantz Fanon‟s thoughts on race and blackness, the black elite and black public intellectuals as the theoretical framework and examines the positionality of Sipho Seepe, Xolela Mangcu and Andile Mngxitama as black public intellectuals in order to understand how they view the post-1994 political discourse. Seepe, Mangcu and Mngxitama‟s views are studied by analysing themes emerging from newspaper columns they have written. This study reveals that the three black public intellectuals examined have been radical and forthright, though they display different understandings of race and blackness, the black elite and black public intellectuals. However, the study reveals that only Mngxitama‟s postionality has been consistently radical, whereas Seepe and Mangcu‟s views have been fluid and are now considered moderate. This study concludes by highlighting the relevance of Fanon‟s thoughts in enabling a new reading of post-1994 South Africa. Of central importance is the creation of the „new being‟, who is informed by the process of liberation, which is the antithesis of the black condition. / Political Sciences / M. A. (Politics)