Description
In his conclusion to Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon called for a “new humanism” that would transcend the limits of a European humanism distorted by colonial violence. This paper considers Fanon alongside two other advocates of a “new humanism,” namely Karl Marx, whose early writings offer a materialist critique of Hegelian humanism, and the revolutionary Indian philosopher M.N. Roy, who played a key role in the Communist International of the 1920s, but gradually abandoned Marxism to champion what he called a “radical humanism” in the 1930s and 1940s. In a comparative study, this paper considers what the call for a “new humanism” meant to these different thinkers. By engaging the promise and limits of their respective humanistic politics, the paper considers what "humanism" represents for anticolonial intellectual history.
