Notes about an intellectual relationship: Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon

Abstract

In this writing I analyze the intellectual relationship that Paulo Freire establishes with Frantz Fanon. I consider three key works: Education as a practice of freedom (FREIRE, 1967), Pedagogy of the oppressed (FREIRE, 1970) and The condemned of the earth (FANON, 1961). I take postcolonial criticism as an exercise of suspicion (HALL, 2008; CATELLI and DE OTO, 2018), as a way of talking about the mark that colonialism imposed on our subjectivities, in our ways of knowing, educating, doing, playing and feeling, and that last beyond the initial moment of conquest. Many of our contemporary questions and responses are marked by the silence of a colonial past (AÑON and RUFER, 2018) that insists and runs through our memories and corporeality. A specific historical moment (complex and differentiated) linked to the conquest and colonization of territories and their people, but also, a way of orchestrating or narrating a story, and a description framed within a Eurocentric theoretical paradigm, which defines truths and pretends to produce unique identities. A modern history, a knowledge and a power that became universal and designates a complex web of practices, from symbolic to material, destined to guarantee the subordination of various social groups. Its face denied coloniality shows us how in these processes of production of subjectivity specific combinations of race, patriarchy, gender, and class are presented (GÜIMARAES, 2009; QUIJANO, 2000; TROUILLOT, 2011; MBEMBE, 2016).