Who can lead the revolution? Re-thinking anticolonial revolutionary consciousness through Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu

While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria, comparatively less work has examined the shared perspectives on colonialism from which they both draw and where the discontinuities emerge. This paper explores the differences between these two thinkers, namely in their conceptualizing of the potential for a revolutionary consciousness to emerge from colonial populations during anticolonial actions. I argue in this article that where Bourdieu conceives of the horror of colonialism as a violent clash of cultures producing ‘hysteresis’ and a level of socio-political alienation from the most dispossessed sectors of society, Fanon conceives of a revolutionary consciousness emerging from the threat of racialized violence genocide and colonial subjection. Bourdieu however suggests that anticolonial revolutionary fervor cannot emerge from populations most dispossessed by the violence of colonization. While Bourdieu’s analysis drew solely from the Algerian case, Fanon recognized anticolonial struggle to be a fundamental type of revolution that could be theorized. In this, Fanon analyzed the Algerian revolution in the context of other anticolonial actions taking place across Africa and the world. Fanon thereby lays out a theory of the role of racism in structuring colonialism and fostering a revolutionary consciousness that is distinct. This cleavage of perspectives from two seemingly similarly inclined theorists emerges from a divergent view of the role of racism in dehumanizing and structuring colonial subjectivities and the effects of colonialism on those most aggrieved by it to spur political action.