Fanonian Art Practices: Toward A Decolonial Grammar of Being

Introduction: Fanonian Art Practices

This article applies Frantz Fanon’s thoughts and decolonial epistemic perspectives as theoretical scaffolding that will allow us to situate Fanonian art practices. Fanonian art practices can be defined as a decolonial art terrain that is generative from the ruins of blackness, by excavating deeper into the abyss of blackness to escape the colonial containment westernized modernity and build a new “world to recognize, with me, the open door” (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 181) decolonial creative practices. Fanonian art practices originate in the echoes of the “black radical imagination” (Crenshaw, 1991; Robinson, 2000), “Black Consciousness” (Biko, 2004), and in the ontological pits of the hellish existence of the black colonized subject who engages in creativity and imagination as they descend from Euro-North-American modernity and the consciousness of the “empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 3; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 21). It is relevant for assessing the effects of Western modernity, the inherited peracetic residues of the apartheid system in South Africa, and the colonial representation of the black body as represented in arts and music. South African art history is a history of prohibition, misrepresentation, and silencing of arts and music that is non-Eurocentric. Most black artists suffered under Westernized art history as a trope of erasure, as only white people were mostly allowed to study and practice art in South Africa during the apartheid era. The history of South Africa describes how black people were segregated at many different levels of coloniality. This is at the level of knowledge, being, and power that became Eurocentric.

This article examines them concerning negative representation to locate the Fanonian art practices as decolonial poetics of blackness. It will foreground the Fanonian grammar of being through the following themes namely, the decolonial grammar of being, the pitfalls of representation, the human subject, and representation, the politics of naming and representation, and the issue of presence and representation. This article will answer the following questions: what are we to make of blackness and art, or art in blackness? And how can Fanon’s ideas help us to understand art created from blackness by the black artist? How does the decolonial grammar of being allow us to read Fanonian art practices as decolonial representations?

The Decolonial Grammar of Being: A Theoretical Framework

The foregrounded theoretical framework this article applies is the decolonial grammar of being to situate and conceptualize the decolonial intervention with artworks that are created out of the blackness. This theoretical framework and intervention are necessitated by the fact that the Western canon borders on the “forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger, 1962) in which the black person is overlooked as a human being to the point where he/she is whitewashed to forget the self as a human being and to perceive himself/herself only as an object of the colonial imagination. Suspended in between the subject-object, exploration, and exploitation dichotomy, the black subject is simply reduced to a body, a flesh, a figure, and an object of European desire where “language falls apart” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 69). It becomes replaced by a set of laws, police brutality, rebukes, premature deaths, unjust arrests, and commands. This lack of grammar of self-articulation in blackness resulted in the long-misunderstood position of the black person concerning modernity and capitalism. As such, black people continued to resist the colonial system by using the tools of the same system.

The decolonial grammar of being constitutes a deep assemblage of conceptual theoretical frameworks that originate in blackness to dismantle the colonial system by creating modes of self-articulation. It is a grammar that allows even the ghosts to speak, objects to speak, memories to speak, scars to speak, dreams to speak, body fluids to speak, human waste to speak, pain to speak, sound to speak, silence to speak, pinholes to speak, light beams to speak, and black bodies to speak because “we inhabit and are inhabited by the hold” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 69). A decolonial grammar of being is a grammar from the ruins. As the inhabitants in the ruins of blackness, it is clear that language and imagination that originate in blackness will produce a language of blackness and grammar that is eons old. Blackness has been regarded as a place for non-humans, for those who have been dehumanized and exploited, epistemologically erased, and ontologically distorted. Originally blackness was created as a dumpsite for black bodies to be packed and stored until they are deployed for any kind of cheap and hard labor. Blackness is what overshadowed the values of indigenous cultures and traditional knowledge systems including Africa as a continent. Blackness became a veil that conceals anyone who is not recognized as a European or Cartesian by the colonial modern system. This article is deeply rooted in the idea of the Fanonian art practices to foreground a decolonial grammar of being.

Many scholars have contributed to the field of Fanonian art practices, following the lead of Gibson (2011), and many have located Fanon’s thought within the postcolonial framework, while others have epitomized him as the agent of violence against the colonial system. Decolonial grammar of being as a Fanonian conception makes us think about what it means to make art in blackness. To answer the aforementioned questions, this article examines the phenomenology of art rather than the genealogy. The Western approach to art is superficial; it does not penetrate the black subject. In contrast, by considering the Africana phenomenological side of art, this article will examine art and its relation to the lived experiences of the black condition.

Decolonial Art-Based Methodology: Centering Marginalized Voices and Perspectives

Decolonial art-based methodology is a new approach to research and analysis that seeks to challenge and subvert dominant Western epistemologies and colonial ways of thinking. It aims to provide alternative frameworks for understanding and addressing social, political, and cultural issues that have been historically shaped by colonialism and imperialism. The characteristics of decolonial art-based methodology include a focus on centering marginalized voices and perspectives, challenging established power structures, engaging with and learning from non-Western and indigenous knowledge systems, and promoting social justice and equity. It seeks to go beyond simply acknowledging the impact of colonialism and imperialism, and instead actively works toward undoing their legacies. In the context of the paper, the decolonial art-based methodology is relevant in providing a framework for analyzing the attempted erasure of Blackness and indigeneity under colonialism through visual art. By centering marginalized voices and perspectives, and challenging established power structures, the paper illuminates how colonialism has shaped perceptions of Blackness and indigeneity, and provides alternative perspectives for understanding and addressing these issues.

Literature Review: Pitfalls of Representation

When engaging in Fanonian art practices it becomes evident that the coloniality of vision operates under an “atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 83). This certain uncertainty sees something that is certain and makes it uncertain by assuming it is a new representation. The black figure is positioned in the position of uncertainty where it is unsure of its real self. The self that the black figure as a colonized figure is fighting for and clinging to is the “white man’s artifact” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 6). This idea of the black colonized subject as an artifact of the white subject was supported by the “various negative representations” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 80) that were intentionally positioned and deployed as strategies for dividing and conquering the world. It is in “[t]his negative representation of the African subject by the ‘Other’ as constituted by deficits lies at the root of African struggles that sought to reverse negative discourses and representations rooted in colonialism” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 104) and the apartheid logic that the coloniality of vision is grounded and founded upon. Colonial discourse and coloniality of vision are the main reason the black body is reduced to the property of the empire and seen as just an object of desire and pleasure.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s definition of negative representation solidifies the coloniality of vision that promoted the colonial myth of black bodies as soulless beings or having one equivalent to the soul of an animal. As noted in the “nineteenth and twentieth centuries, negative representations of Africans were propagated by travelers, missionaries, colonialists, and anthropologists, and today the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the media do the same job. Both discourses of identity and development continue to provoke some sensitive reactions as they touch on the supposedly ‘absent centre of ontology’ of the African subject, to borrow a term from Zizek” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 105). Negative representation created an image of the place that lacked the center of ontology, they called it home for the black people, which is township and ghettos, and pushed them inside as natural habitats of the zone of the nonhuman. Even in this digital age called the fourth Industrial Revolution negative representations of the black figure are still being preserved. For instance, South Africa presents itself as a country that is ready to compete and be in conversation with the world according to the terms and standards of the world. This illusion is grounded on the mentality of the slave seeking validation from the colonial master whose presence and symbolic ideology are still kept represented and intact in the South African landscape, hence, the eruption of the #RhodesMustFall Movement. #RhodesMustFall Movement was motivated by the recognition of the negative representation that has been embedded in the land of the African ancestors representing the story of the conquer and thievery. I would like to argue, that if one would walk in the streets of any city in South Africa today, one can still tell easily who the colonial ancestor of that place was or is. This haunting presence of the colonial ancestry ghost is supposed to act as a weaving national threat in the face of the rainbow nation, that connects and disconnects the colonized and colonizer through the representation of a colonial/racist/sexist and fabricated version of the world.

An anti-black death world “divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. The native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits” (Fanon, [1961] 1990) p. 40). Post-apartheid South Africa is the embodiment of this place with its fabricated representation under the myth of the Madiba magic and Rainbow Nation which is a postcolonial ANC thematic representation that was designed to pretentiously link different cultures of South Africa and the colonial statues with the future narrative of the country. However, the myth of the rainbow nation was an illusion, nothing but a political sanitizer that disguised as political correctness to act as a soft cushion during the ride back to apartheid days memory lane. It was a concept that only metaphorically marked the moment of a pitfall in the national consciousness, the moment South Africa embraced a term that suggested apartheid is over, we can wine, work and dine together, but we are not equal according to the register of the colonial world. The colonial world is still operational under the mask of modernity, hence in decoloniality, we say modernity/colonial. We realize the hidden traps of negative representation of coloniality as the modernity of modernity as the development of development as a weaponised project that is designed to keep the developing undeveloped. Unmasking the mask of modernity, we get to see modernity and capitalism cannot afford to be self-destructive by allowing everyone to be equal by being completely developed and completely rich. This is because by allowing everyone to be equal some cogs of the machinery of modernity and capitalism will stop working properly and this might create holes in the walls of the system.

The performance that was geared toward achieving a new African renaissance by removing the statues of apartheid ancestors such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall solidifies decolonial representation to poke some holes in the walls of racist divisions. In the blackness, things are not visible in the same way as in the zone of whiteness, because even in the “white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 83). His bodily schema cannot be developed because the black body is living in a world that does not see him or her but sees it. The black figure can see the world, but it cannot be seen by the world because it is constantly on the run, its “consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 83). Under the spell of coloniality of vision, the bodily schema of the black figure is a consistent wrestle between being human and being nonhuman. This ontological wrestling of the black figure creates a conceptual impasse between the human and the human being. Where the notion of the human is “rather, a definitive structuring of the self and the world-definitive because it creates a real dialectic between. . .[the black] body and the world” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 83). However, the history of blackness is proof that the dialectic is closed and holds some elements of the colonial monolog. This colonial monolog does not allow the black figure to participate in the conversations about human rights and the human condition because it does not see the black figure as a human with the suffix of being because in the eyes of negative representation the only human being is the white subject.

The human with being as a suffix is the absolute and sovereign being. The human can easily be a nonhuman, a black body, and a figure (who can be named anything and used as a tool, maid, gardening boy, and security guard at will) who is “sealed into a crushing objecthood” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 82). The state of objecthood encourages a negative representation of the black figure in the anti-black world from the “world-view” (Oyewumi, 1997, p. 1) which is a perspective based only on sight or vision. Oyewumi’s notion of the world-view allows for a better understanding of how modernity as a veil of coloniality works concerning blackness and art. As a veil of modernity, it rejects the notion of multiplicity, plurivesality, trans-modernity, multiculturalism, and interdisciplinary while embracing the idea of the universal world which is based on European colonial philosophies. Existential philosophies of apartheid, colonization, and dehumanization turn a blind eye to the black body. This existential separation is the Manichean separation that is grounded and created to justify the category of existence which is supported by negative representation. This representation is grounded on the ontological dichotomy of being in ontological limbo as a black figure. Being in limbo as the black figure is something that is grounded on negative representation as to the “phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its limitations to a deontologised or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world” (Gordon, 2014, p. 86). A world in which blackness is a constant state of ontological negation. Black negation comes from the limits of being on the periphery of modernity from the dark side of representation. Many thinkers and scholars have challenged the notion of “global coloniality” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013) and modernity as only the project of exclusion. Nevertheless, their contestation of modernization has to do with knocking on the doors of the shrine of modernity to be allowed to step inside.

From most pan-African thinkers to postcolonial scholars and creative thinkers who have challenged modernity from this angle of wanting to be inside for the sake of benefits while trying to retain their being. This means critiquing the center while located in the center. Launching a critique from center to center is simply an act of soft critique which only mirrors modernity to place an emphasis on a “series of aberrations of affect” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 2) that keep haunting the black body back to its ontological prone position. It is from this instant that the black figure remains in a permanent state of being a child, a child of the white subject, a child of the empire, a child of Europe, a child of capitalism, a child of underdevelopment, a child of poverty of reason, history, and absence of the soul. As a permanent child, the black figure never realizes authenticity from negative representations. It is clear through negative representations that the black figure is the unwanted child of the empire. The attempt of the black figure to grow out of a childhood of modernity and gravitate toward their own authentic identity that which is his or hers, free from colonial aberrations of effects, to reconstruct themselves from the ruins of blackness and spell of modernity/coloniality that continues to hide while reinventing or mutating itself. Fanon points this out as the pitfalls of national consciousness and the dilemma of mimicry or repetition without any change (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 104). This dilemma of representation brings a curios question of how one chooses to represent the self: through mimicry, which is a repetition without change (Fanon, [1961] 1990; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013), or through a decolonial representation, which is representation from the locus of enunciation, which is open to other’s location while it is aware of its limits?

This notion is supported by the thoughts of the following authors. G. Anzaldúa’s (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture, arguing that embracing diversity and hybridity is essential for a just society. hooks (1994) Teaching to Transgress emphasizes challenging traditional power structures in education and valuing diverse perspectives for more inclusive learning. Said’s (1979) Orientalism critiques Western representations of the “Orient” that have been used to justify imperialism and colonialism, encouraging critical examination of dominant narratives. Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989) highlights the ways different forms of oppression intersect and interact, advocating for more inclusive and complex understandings of identity and social justice. Lorde’s (1984) Sister Outsider is a collection of essays and speeches that address issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Lorde emphasizes the importance of personal and political empowerment, as well as the need for intersectional approaches to social justice.

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a classic work of postcolonial theory that analyzes the psychological and social effects of colonialism on the colonized. Davis’s (1981) Women, Race, and Class examines the intersectional experiences of women of color in the United States, emphasizing the ways in which racism, sexism, and classism intersect to produce systems of oppression. Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a foundational text in critical pedagogy that emphasizes the importance of dialog, critical thinking, and praxis (the integration of theory and practice) in education. Mohanty’s (1984) Under Western Eyes critiques the ways in which Western feminism has often failed to take into account the experiences and perspectives of women from the global South. G. E. Anzaldúa’s & Moraga (1983) This Bridge Called My Back is a collection of essays and poems by feminist writers of color, exploring issues of race, gender, sexuality, and identity. The book emphasizes the importance of intersectionality and coalition-building in feminist activism.

Decolonial representation is a representation of the decolonized colonial image that has been created through negative and colonial representation which is reproductive in itself. According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, p. 105), “negative representations of Africans as ‘people without souls’, ‘people without intelligence’, ‘people without history’, ‘people without civilization’, ‘people without writing’, ‘people without development’, ‘people without democracy’, and ‘people without human rights’ amount to consistent attempts to deny humanity to Africans” by keeping them in the zone of dehumanization and exploitation. This recurring denial of the humanity for the black figure is fundamentally the reason in “most cases, that the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 2) which becomes the world. In the modern world, it is difficult for the black figure to face both the question of blackness and whiteness. Both can be personified as the colonial tools that position the black body in the space of being constantly in between. In between blackness and whiteness, the black body juggles with existence and the question of being. During this juggling with what is reality and what is invented reality. Invented reality is the reality that separated the black figure from the white subject, it is a Manicheanism world that keeps that black jumping over the abyss. The black figure is constantly attempting to jump over the abyss to get to whiteness. This is the existential crisis of being black-in-the-anti-black world. Blackness in this sense is a condition of being temporary-permanent. Blackness as the condition of being temporary-permanent means blackness is a point of departure, a tabular larasa of the black figure. Blackness can be a starting point for the black figure to whether submit to subordination and dehumanization by whiteness or blackness can be approached as a starting point for a newly transformed, plurivesal, and decolonial new world. A world that is built on blackness but from the terms and standards of the people who are placed within the limits of being.

Discussion I: The Complex Relationship Between the Human Subject and Presentation

Understanding the impact of negative representations on the definition of the human subject leads us to the notion of the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). It is clear from the grammar of the negative representation that the black figure suffers under the wrath of the look of colonial difference. As such the black figure is absent in the philosophical and existential registers. According to Mignolo (2007, p. 157) the “coloniality of being’ as unfolded by Maldonado-Torres brings forward what has been silenced beyond Heidegger and Levinas: the ‘being’ of Frantz Fanon ‘damne ́s de la terre’”. Coloniality of being is influenced by the logic of negative representation from the aspect of looking and the colonial look of difference. The look of the white subject is the look of death, the look of destruction, the look that claims to give life, and yet it destroys life wherever it goes. Fanon expresses the return of the colonial look when he states, “leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all the cones of the globe” (Fanon, 1963, p. 251). Europe has been represented as the center and standard of the colonial world in all fields of life. It does not matter where one is standing, traces of Euro-North-American modernity are always finding their way almost to all the corners of the earth. Everywhere modernity is to be found, coloniality is the software that installs modernity. Therefore, Fanon is asking the black colonized subject to debunk this colonial representation of portraying Europe-North-America as an Omni-messiah of the world.

What Fanon is suggesting is that until the black figure resigns from seeking standards from European values the human register will remain closed and tools of representation will be deceitful. Resignation from seeking validation from whiteness is necessary because according to the colonial look of whiteness the black figure will keep existing within the predicament of negative perception and bad faith. According to Sartre, [1957] 2003, p. 71), “one determined attitude which is essential to human reality and which is such that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).” The look of bad faith is the one that gives and takes life at will. The conception of the Fanonian look, however, is a very special kind of look that can be understood only from the position of the black figure. The Fanonian look is a look of returning the racist look to the white subject of which it is a scandalous crime for the black figure to look back at the white subject.

Therefore, the Fanonian look borders on self-doubt, fear, alienation, and aspiring to be like the white subject or seeking recognition from the white subject. It is writing from the position of the look of the black figure which made Fanon state “as long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others” (Fanon, [1952] 2008, p. 82). This look is reactional, one that wants to claim life back, questioning the look of the subject and the look of objection. The Fanonian look comes from the position of being looked at but not seen. It is clear then, that the positionality of the black figure is created by the racist look of the subject which is not just a normal look but a certain kind of look. The look that made Sartre catch shocked as he states in Black Orpheus. From the positionality of the subject that which is located within the Sartrean look the black body is reduced to a state of visible invisibility Where the black body seems to appear disappear and reappear. According to the Sartrean look, the black figure is something that should be kept silent with no language or speech. It is something that is not expected and allowed to speak for its existence let alone to possess the grammar of being.

For the Sartrean look, the black figure cannot do things on its own, it always needs to be done. The white subject looks at the black figure with no expectation of the black figure to look back. This colonial impediment is what Sartre calls a “gag” (Sartre & McCombie, 1951, p. 13) did not fall off the mouth of the black figure through the white subject but by the return of the look of the black figure trying to speak itself into existence. The arrogance of the white supremacy that operates from the Sartrean look can be seen in Sartre himself. The Sartrean look is framed by three questions that Sartre chooses to open his article the Black Orpheus with. Speaking from the positionality of the Sartrean look Sartre as the subject poses the following question; “when you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing you praises? did you think that when they raised themselves again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?” (Sartre & McCombie, 1951, p. 13). It is clear from the positionality of the Sartrean look that the black body as the black figure is looked at from the position of speechlessness, adoration for the white subject, and exploitation. According to the look of whiteness, the black subject should remain looked at and made inferior, meaning the black subject is already “degraded, polluted, diseased” (Gibson, 1999, p. 345). The language that Sartre uses reveals how the Sartrean look is looking at the black figure. Sartre uses words such as “the gag,” “these black mouth shut,” “these heads,” and “forced to bend down” which shows how the black figure is seen and undermined under the colonial representation. Sartre thinks like this because the “colonialist ideology is designated to confine the native in a confused and subservient position” (JanMohamed, 1983, p. 5). The questions that Sartre poses reveal the ontological expectations that the Sartrean look fixates the black figure within the process of subjection grounded on “[s]ocial pathology [that] is produced by the fact of domination and race” (JanMohamed, 1983, p. 3). By the virtue of pushing the black figure to the level of nonhuman, the white subject takes the positionality of being the only human subject that is close to God. The white subject exists outside the realm of the black figure, it is in this position that the black figure seeks to arrive. This positions the black figure where the Fanonian look is ontologically positioned as a black figure of subjection.

Sartre’s ontology remains intact and untampered with, it is not at the virtue of disappearance because as a white subject, “the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth” (Sartre & McCombie, 1951, p. 13) and represents it the way European colonial logic wanted. Between Sartre the white subject and Fanon the black figure, there is an object with better ontological infrastructure compared to the black figure. Writing from the position of the white subject Sartre as the human subject has the power to write things to life or death. That is, the power the white subject holds as close to God who can create and provide for people. Fanon writes from this position of being doomed and absent as the black figure his being is for others as he writes from the position of the unseen outside the register of the human subject as the construction of the Sartrean look. Therefore, his writing becomes a mystery because what is unseen cannot just appear or speak. This justifies the power of the Euro-North-American pen that holds the power to create myths and mythic realities. For instance, the notion of the black figure as an inferior being who was created by God to be a slave for others is a colonial myth. A myth that was supported and invested to justify the colonial enterprise. A myth that the Western canon is feeding as its foundation to solidify and legalize the Western canon as the factual canon that discovered everything. Therefore, it can be only right to suggest that the Western canon and its offspring is a scholarship based on myths yet in itself it is a myth.

But Fanon sees the unseen as the unseen that speaks to the point that pushed Sartre to say, “our gaze comes back to our own eyes” (Sartre & McCombie, 1951, p. 13). The ontological disruption of the black figure and its subjection by the white “objective gaze” (McLoughlin, 1999, pp. 76–77) is something Fanon has been wrestling with within his work, engaging the notion of the human subject. It exposes the white subject’s ontological position of being constructed from the subjection of the black figure from the perspective of the white subject. Subjection under the name of humanization is an irony and a scandalous argument when it comes to the black figure subject, the black figure is a figure outside the language of articulation, a form of justification that is beyond justice because its justice is unjust. This eliminates any form of potential to pose any trace of ontological infrastructure to be a human subject. Inevitably the violence that is practiced in the formation of coloniality of being is naturalized and does not warrant any form of morality and justice.

Discussion II: Mohau Modisakeng and Kara Walker

Mohau Modisakeng and Kara Walker are two contemporary artists whose artwork often engages with the decolonial grammar of being and reflects Fanonian art practice. Both artists use their work to explore issues of identity, history, and power dynamics, particularly within the context of colonialism, racism, and postcolonial societies. Modisakeng, a South African artist, often employs video installations and performances to interrogate the impact of apartheid on black South Africans and the complex processes of decolonization. His work often addresses the trauma, displacement, and violence experienced by black bodies in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, as well as the ongoing effects of these systems in the present day. Modisakeng’s artwork often features his own body as a symbolic representation of the black body, and he employs powerful visual imagery, such as body markings, traditional weapons, and landscapes, to explore the layered meanings of identity, memory, and history.

One of Modisakeng’s well-known works that illustrates the decolonial grammar of being and Fanonian art practice is his video installation titled “Inzilo” (2013), which features a ritualistic performance of the artist wrapped in a white cloth, invoking mourning and loss. The work evokes the experience of grief and trauma resulting from apartheid’s violent history and addresses the process of mourning and healing in the aftermath of colonization. Through his embodiment of blackness and the exploration of ancestral and personal memory, Modisakeng’s “Inzilo” challenges the oppressive legacies of colonialism and apartheid, while reclaiming black bodies and voices.

On the other hand, Kara Walker, an African American artist, is known for her provocative and critically acclaimed artwork that employs black silhouettes to create complex narratives that challenge racial stereotypes and explore issues of power, gender, and sexuality. Walker’s artwork often references the history of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the United States, and she uses the silhouette format to subvert traditional notions of representation and engage viewers in a critical dialog about race and identity. One of Walker’s notable works that exemplifies the decolonial grammar of being and Fanonian art practice is her large-scale installation titled “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014). The installation features a massive sphinx-like sculpture made of sugar, depicting a black woman with exaggerated features, referencing the exploitation of black bodies in the sugar industry and the history of slavery. The work invites viewers to confront the painful legacy of slavery, racism, and objectification of black bodies, while challenging conventional representations of blackness in art and history.

Both Modisakeng and Walker use their artwork to disrupt dominant narratives, challenge oppressive systems, and confront the legacies of colonialism, racism, and slavery. Their visual decolonial grammar of being and Fanonian art practice involve engaging with the complexities of identity, history, memory, and power dynamics, while reclaiming black bodies and voices, and provoking critical reflections on the human condition and the socio-political issues that continue to shape our world today.

Findings: Presence and Representation in the Human Subject Presentation

The presence of the black figure seems to cause ontological disruption in the debate of what it means to be present as a human in the postcolonial anti-black world. This is because, “in the last days of apartheid, we failed to imagine the fundamental difference between the worker and the Black” (Wilderson, 2008, p. 95) therefore, the presence of the black figure encounters Manichean delirium, it encounters difficulty and absence. From the socio-political point of view, engagement with the presence of the body might appear different but on the ontological level, they are racial inscriptions that cannot articulate the grammar of the suffering of the black figure but rather glosses over it. The black figure “experience a transcendence impossibility: A moment of Blackness-as-Presence in a world overdetermined by Blackness-as-Absence” (Wilderson, 2008, p. 97). What is described by Wilderson does not only end in the last days of apartheid, but it continues to the post colony. However, according to Atkinson and Breitz (1999, p. 16), “it is clear that the stakes have shifted, and the country’s reintegration into ‘international art’, culture, and politics, has given fuel to – and perhaps even made possible – greater critical openness around the politics of identity and representation.” Fanonian art practice is one aspect of the black figure that cannot be underestimated. Through art, the black figure seems to continue to evoke an unsettling position for the white gaze.

Conclusion

The Fanonian art practice and decolonial grammar of being provides a language of viewing, interpreting, and relating to African art and black art from the African and black perspective, allowing for the unknown to be known, the primitive to be modern, and the negatively represented to be positively represented. It is important to acknowledge and embrace the decolonial grammar of being to ensure a proper and fair interpretation of African art and black art, which would result in a better understanding of the black lived experience and its representation in art. The Eurocentric power of westernized interpretation has influenced almost everything and every field of study, including art, and has resulted in formulation of decolonial creative practices. It is through creative practices that the black lived experience can also be properly interrogated and decolonial situated.