‘I am not a prisoner of history’: Frantz Fanon, temporal defiance, and the critique of colonial time

Reflecting on the revolutionary life and legacy of Frantz Fanon a century since his birth, this article explores Fanon’s critique of colonial time and the alternative temporal registers he identified in struggles for decolonisation and black liberation. The article outlines a Fanonian critique of colonial temporality while simultaneously exploring practices of freedom dreaming and attempts at conceptualising anti-colonial theories of time and history through Fanon’s writings. Finally, it discusses the novel ways in which Fanon (re)conceptualised the relation between the past, present and future while engendering a praxis herein termed temporal defiance.