A Geography Animated with Intentions: Reclaiming Indigenous Vitality through Land-Based Decolonial Struggles in Frantz Fanon’s Algeria Writings
Nanya Jhingran
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 4
Abstract
The paper reads Wretched of the Earth alongside Toward the African Revolution and A Dying Colonialism, and meditates on Fanon’s attention to the dynamics of geology, geography, and infrastructure in colonial and
revolutionary Algeria. Across his work(s), Fanon can be read as charting the matrix of fixity/mobility, arrest/frenzy, and death/vitality to demonstrate how colonial logics of progress and innovation depend on the production of social death and fractured temporalities, the annihilation of geographically-specific indigenous infrastructure, and the death of the colonized body as the necessary condition for colonial advancement. Anticolonial violence therefore emerges as the privileged form of revolutionary struggle because it remobilizes the indigenous population and engages the peasantry in the reclamation of land through the destruction of colonial infrastructure. Through this relational focus on the indigenous land, body, and infrastructure the paper seeks to understand how the neocolonial infrastructures of our present, that exhaust our revolutionary capacities, must needs be destroyed and replaced with geographically and indigenously responsive institutions in order to revitalize decolonial revolutions.
Keywords: Indigeneity, Anticolonial Nationalism, Infrastructure, Geography, Land, Algeria, Frantz Fanon
Nanya Jhingran (nanyaj@uw.edu) is a graduate student, Teaching Fellow, and Assistant Director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, where she is currently working on her PhD in English Literature and Culture. Her research explores the poetics of survival and belonging in spaces of war and
occupation across the Global South with a particular focus on genderbased violence. She received her M.A. in English Literature at the University of Washington in 2019.