Atmospheric violence: Fanon and postcolonial subjectivity

Abstract Despite Fanon’s recent popularity, his work on violence is portrayed as controversial, particularly regarding revolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence in anti-colonial movements is either glorified as a liberating force or vilified as terrorism. However, this portrayal misses one of the main contributions of Fanon’s thought on violence, that is, violence cannot be separated into direct and structural, physical and epistemic, or revolutionary and colonial violence. I theorise what Fanon calls ‘atmospheric violence’ – violence that is, like the air, pervasive within the colonial system and its totality is reflected not only in the apparatus, structure, and meaning, but also in the felt, visceral, and embodied. In this sense, atmospheric violence cannot be compartmentalised but is layered, dynamic, and able, which is particularly useful in investigating the revolutionary violence of the colonised being. This paper theorises atmospheric violence through three points of engagement: first, atmospheric violence shows that colonial violence is violence of abjection rather than of social domination and subordination; second, atmospheric violence indicates that revolutionary violence reveals the complex relationship to agency and postcolonial subjectivity; third, atmospheric violence shows how revolutionary violence poses a potential for and a limitation to decolonisation due to its nature of non-compartmentalisation.