A Critique of European Humanity: A Dialogue With Fanon

 

“The West wanted to be an adventure of the Spirit. It was in the name of the Spirit – the European spirit, that is – that Europe justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it kept four-fifths of humanity.” 

“The colonized intellectual will try to make European culture his own.”

— Frantz Fanon , in The Wretched of the Earth

The idea that promoting modernity involves a process of modernization has historically implied in Brazil the destruction and exploitation of what represents the anti-modern, the primitive, or the savage. Thus, where it was said there was nothing, in the vast national territory, there was a vibrant life whose political organization differed from European civilizational models. It is precisely this idea of modernization associated with the notion of progress that is the object of the forceful criticism of a significant part of Indigenous and Black thought. After all, these peoples were and still are the greatest victims of modernization projects in Brazil. 

It is in this context that, for the national debate, decolonization, inscribed in the so-called decolonial turn, is less important than what is retained in Brazil from a counter-colonial or anti-colonial position – an argument developed by Jardim (2018). That is, a position against colonial modernity. The meaning of the word, we know, depends on the context. Therefore, there is no anachronism in recognizing that counter-colonial struggles precede the very formulation of the decolonial turn, because what is at the center is a critique of European modernity in what it produced of exclusion or, in the words of Paulo Arantes: “Modernity can thus be summarized as a civil war of citizens against non-citizens: the price of progress is the sacrifice of the poor, blacks, indigenous people, peasants and women, necessary for the enrichment of a few” (Arantes, 2024). This critique, which has a vast history in our territory, also finds solid foundations in the thought of Fanon. 

The effort of some critical Brazilian thinkers, especially Black and Indigenous ones, has been to denounce the erasure, in the highest instance of regulation of scientific knowledge—the university—of various traditions developed in Brazil, in the name of a modernization that, like European modernity, is marked by an imposition of European culture as a center of reference, especially in philosophy. 

It is in this sense that texts like Vladimir Safatle's "The University IMF" clash with reality. The curricula of philosophy and the authors studied in postgraduate philosophy programs are overwhelmingly European, male, and white. All studies in the field of philosophy that map philosophical production in Brazil empirically refute the existence of any university agenda that is not the same as the one from which philosophy was institutionalized in Brazil. European thought reigns supreme. 

Thus, although there are, of course, European thinkers critical of European modernity, it is noteworthy that most of them are unwilling to relativize the centrality of Europe, and the mention of non-European cultures, when not marginal, is simply to marginalize what is not an expression of European culture. In other words, even a critique of European modernity made by European philosophers is a conversation, as Ailton Krenak states, from white to white, in which other cultures do not participate and at most can be the object of study. 

Perhaps it is in this sense that, once, in conversation with Krenak , he told me that academia, and more specifically philosophy, was "shit" and that, for him, most philosophers belonged to what he calls the "little club of humanity," since some philosophers were responsible for establishing a racial and spiritual hierarchy among peoples, relegating indigenous people, along with black people, to the lowest depths of the underworld. It is for this reason that, for Krenak: "The history of philosophy and all this immense construction, since the Greeks, does not interest me. I am interested in the worldview, I am interested in the insurgency of a thought that, throughout historical time, has been despised, marginalized, stigmatized." The history of philosophy was constructed by Europeans for the consolidation of European thought itself, so that any thought that is not framed within this European matrix has remained far from philosophy curricula and philosophical productions in general (articles, dissertations, doctoral theses, etc.).

Thus, people who witnessed the death of their territories in the name of a modernization they did not choose, and people who were decimated so that colonization could happen, could not have a relationship with modernization that was not critical. In other words, the point is that the colonization that stole the lives of countless people whose traces (Sharpe, 2023) were lost at sea—people who, when they did not die on the way to America, were killed by America, by a violence that only Europe was capable of producing on a large scale—is now denounced in universities so that the cultures that formed Brazil can have epistemic protagonism. We are talking here about the survival of Black and Indigenous knowledge within the institution that was created, at most, to take Black and Indigenous people as objects of study. As I wrote in Blackness without Identity, our bodies enter the university initially as corpses for anatomy and criminology classes (Andrade, 2023). And this denunciation is often made by resorting to ancestry, in the sense of recovering epistemologies and histories that were systematically erased so that European thinkers could occupy the entire philosophy curriculum in Brazil. We have more to do, as Fanon would say in The Wretched of the Earth , than to “follow this Europe” (Fanon, 2022, p. 83).  

It is in this context that what Black and Indigenous people in Brazil have understood as decolonial or anticolonial is not a denial of the deplorable material conditions of the working class and the need, in some sense, to overthrow capitalism, but rather a point out that without considering issues of gender, race, and territory, a Brazilian revolution risks not being radically effective for various social groups—groups that have often been decimated in the name of certain ideals of modernity. Far from being paralyzed in a kind of mystical lethargy, these groups have been organizing to promote public policies and to ensure that Brazilian universities are not merely extensions of Europe. Without the Black movement, we would not have affirmative action policies, and this debate on decolonial theory would not have had such an impact.

It is a state of perpetuating colonization to believe that decolonization is an agenda that came into effect because of the so-called decolonial turn, when we have a vast tradition of Brazilian thought that wrote about and questioned colonization before the academic work of Quijano or Dussel. What is being attempted, with great difficulty and in the face of strong resistance, is to break the institutional monopoly of European thought. It is in this sense that we can align ourselves with Fanon when she points to the need for us to “decide not to imitate Europe and to direct our muscles and brains in a new direction” (Fanon, 2022, p. 83). 

By Érico Andrade — Boitempo