In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

This article will continue Jose Medina's work on “resistant imaginations” by developing the concepts of “internal resistant imagination” and “external resistant imagination” through readings of Assata Shakur's and Mamphela Ramphele's autobiographies. By introducing the problem of location and its relation to race it will show that one's geographical location affects their location in relation to hegemonic imaginations. This in turn requires different strategies of resistance. Using Medina's work this article will argue that Shakur and Ramphele explore these two different avenues (...) for undoing harmful truths within racist and sexist hegemonic imaginaries. (shrink)

One of the most pertinent sites of investigation in Fanon studies is the question of how Fanon theorizes the imbrication of gender with that of race and colonialism. For many, his silence or disavowals, whether explicit or implicit, allow an uncritical masculinism to slip into his theories of subjectivity, subjugation, and revolution. This article contributes to these discussions by arguing that for Fanon, gender and race are colonial technologies rather than natural sites of experience. Bringing together Fanon's recently translated clinical (...) writings and his political essay on the revolutionary roles of Algerian women in the war against French colonization, it is possible to see how Fanon theorizes the French imposition of gender norms as attempts to engineer the social reproduction of a marginalized and racialized population. In short, gender is an implicitly racialized technology in French colonial society whose aim is the naturalization of political and sexual arrangements of power that justify the continuation of French occupation. Fanon works to demystify gender and race as technologies so that the colonized may seize them in the interest of their own liberatory invention. (shrink)