Frantz Fanon and the Politicization of the Third World as a Collective Subject

During the postwar conjuncture of the twentieth century, decolonization movements across the world made it possible to imagine collective politics anew. In this essay I center Frantz Fanon as an important theorist who can help us think about the collective dynamics of the Third World project. I argue Fanon articulates the Third World as a collective subject that was not bound to the confines of the nation-state, but based on a conception of intercontinental populism. He conceives of the Third World as a collective subject that stretched between Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In doing so, he shifts the locus of political action and mobilization around postwar transnationalism and internationalism to the masses of the Third World, and thus decenters the exclusive focus on political elites as the main protagonists who struggled to unseat imperialism and institute a more democratic and egalitarian global order. I give more concrete shape to how Fanon is conceptualizing intercontinentalism as a form of political community that emerges out of dialectical tension and conflict, which was crucial to ensuring that intercontinentalism does not ossify into exclusionary forms of political affiliation.