Building the World of You

Although Ethnic Studies is the place for the study of social power relations by and for colonized and racialized people, its relevance as a distinct academic field is being challenged by the “diversification” of curricula across campuses and by those within related fields who assert that Ethnic Studies should be abandoned as an unfeasible project. This article offers an analysis of Frantz Fanon’s multiple works on building human relations in a colonial capitalist world to clarify the Ethnic Studies project as a place for building a culture that can counter dehumanization and intersubjective mistrust between racial/gendered groups. The article opens by situating Ethnic Studies in the history of Third World studies and Fanon’s central influence on the Third World Liberation Front, an often-forgotten point. The rest of the article is in five sections: The first section examines the national/transnational binary through Fanon’s extensive discussion of the relationship between national and international consciousness. The second section examines Fanon’s critique of the black/white binary in the colonial world and its bearing on Ethnic Studies praxis. The third explains Fanon’s critique of the economic/intersubjective binary as a necessary first step in the disalienation of colonial subjects. The fourth section outlines the victim/survivor binary as a colonial construct that binds liberatory epistemological efforts and points to a way through the binary for Ethnic Studies scholars. The fifth and final section addresses the reform/radical binary that often arises in Ethnic Studies assessments of the university as a colonial capitalist institution.