Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and colonialism

We must first delineate the concept cosmopolitanism. Of course, a multiplicity of meanings and related terms can be found: ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’, etc. (Holton, 2009: 29–56; Knowles, 2007). Scholars also examine cosmopolitanism at various registers, namely, cosmopolitanism as a philosophical worldview, as a political project, as an orientation to the world, as an analytic method, etc. (Ventrovec and Cohen, 2002). Nonetheless, there are shared underlying currents that enable us to speak of cosmopolitanism as a singular concept (however, with familial variations).

The derivation of the word cosmopolitanism itself speaks of the underlying shared meaning: cosmos, i.e. the world, and polis, a political community. Cosmopolitanism thus refers to a world political community. Beck (2012: 12) accordingly insists on cosmopolitanism as involving ‘world-building’ – an interest in and loyalty to worldwide humanity – rather than ‘nation-building’. Holton (2009: 9) suggests that cosmopolitanism includes identification by people of a ‘world beyond their immediate origins.’ Hannerz (1996) thinks of cosmopolitanism as involving an openness to others. Delanty and He (2008: 235) define the ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ as entailing ‘global principles of justice and the need to take into account the perspective of the other’ (see also Delanty, 2009: 7). Nussbaum (1996: 4) defines cosmopolitanism as ‘allegiance … to the worldwide community of human beings’. Appiah (2007) defines it as a worldwide community that takes individuals rather than nations, tribes, or races as the guiding principle.

In keeping with these shared meanings, the baseline definition I use should be non-controversial. Cosmopolitanism refers to a world political community based upon the identity of humanity. It is a form of global citizenship; a membership in and identification with a world community that transcends locality – whether that locality be tribe, culture, race or nation – and which respects differences nonetheless. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, is a ‘new humanism’, as Fine and Boon (2007) put it, that ‘involves a recognition of the essential humanity we all share – not so much despite our differences but by virtue of our differences’ (see also Fine, 2007).

This definition is just for starters. At play in the present article is the idea that there are variants of cosmopolitanism that require excavation. As Pollock et al. (2000: 577) put it, cosmopolitanism’s ‘various embodiments, including past embodiments, await discovery and explication.’ So while cosmopolitanism is a form of humanism that looks beyond provincial identities (including national ones) and emphasizes the shared humanity of individuals, there might be different modalities, types, forms or articulations of these – either in the present or past. Below I unearth one such kind of cosmopolitanism produced amidst colonialism: postcolonial cosmopolitanism, evident in Frantz Fanon’s thought.

But why would we think that colonialism – with all of its exclusions, exploitation, and violence – could be productive of cosmopolitanism, when cosmopolitanism is about shared humanity? Two features of colonialism are worth noting here. One has to do with cultural crossings and interaction. According to existing studies, globalization has been important for cosmopolitanism because it creates the conditions for individuals around the world to experience multiple Others; to be exposed to and confront diversity from afar; and thus arrive at reflexive understandings of self that pave the way beyond provincial and national identities. But colonial empires offered similar possibilities (Vergés, 2001). It put people of different ethnicities, races, and religions into sustained interaction. Empires also facilitated the flow of ideas, not least as European colonizers touted terms like ‘civilization’, ‘rights of man’, ‘reason’ and ‘liberty’ – however, as they appeared in their imperial variants of racial uplift, the ‘white man’s burden’, or the mission civilisatrice. In these ways, contemporary globalization has been preceded by colonialism’s cultural crossings (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Go, 2008; Holton, 2002: 162; Osterhammel, 1999).

Yet, second, there is a profound specificity to colonialism that is relevant: contradiction. While cultures interacted via colonialism, and while ideas like ‘civilization’ or ‘rights’ were tossed around, they were also kept apart from colonized subjects. Hence the contradiction: on the one hand, the very essence of colonialism was exclusion, operating according to what Chatterjee (1993) calls ‘the rule of colonial difference’. Colonial subjects were declared inferior, often based upon their race, and hence unworthy of full rights and privileges which metropolitan citizens enjoyed. On the other hand, colonialism’s insistence on exclusion and particularity entailed a discourse of inclusion and universality. In order to deny rights, the notion of rights had to be articulated in the first place. The idea that everyone could partake of these rights and privileges had to be posited – even if, in practice, racial or cultural difference was used to restrict those rights and withhold the privileges. Ideas like citizenship, justice, humanity and rights were introduced but kept away; freedom and democracy were pronounced but proscribed only for those at the top of the imperial hierarchy; and all of the imperial rhetoric about ‘civilizing’ came with colonial coercion, economic exploitation, and often violence (Mamdani, 1996). The universal and the particular; citizen and subject; assimilation and exclusion; equality and hierarchy – all of these oppositions were endemic to colonial rule and vital for it.

Below, the article shows, first, that colonialism, because of its contradictory cultures, carried its own distinct logic of cosmopolitanization. For as Fanon’s life and writings disclose, colonialism’s very victims were not deaf to its contradictions. Colonialism was generative of cosmopolitanism as colonialism’s own victims ably seized upon the contradictions and envisioned their transcendence. In this sense, the very exclusions of colonialism that upended Europe’s practice of cosmopolitanism nonetheless served as a condition for a new different type of cosmopolitanism; one that exceeded its European incarnation but which was mounted upon it.

Colonial cosmopolitanization

A look at Fanon’s early personal experiences – reflected in Black Skin, White Masks – is one way to better understand the postcolonial cosmopolitanism that emerged from colonialism’s contradictions. Fanon, from his youth, identified with the French Empire and its ideological pronouncements of assimilation and liberty (Alessandrini, 1999: 2; Bell, 2010: 8). But his initial idealization was shattered by the realities of empire. He fought for France in the war but the racial hierarchies established among troops within the French army disillusioned him (Bulhan, 1985: 28). Then, after moving to Paris to study, his disillusionment was deepened through quotidian encounters with whites and interactions with others from around the French Empire. Disciplined into French ideologies but then excluded from them on the grounds of race, Fanon soon saw French liberty as an ‘obsolete ideal’ (Macey, 2000: 104; see also Bell, 2002: 253).

Hage (2010) refers to such a process as ‘racial mis-interpellation’: the racialized person is ‘hailed by the cultural group or the nation, or even by modernity which claims to be addressing “everyone”’, but ‘no sooner do they answer the call and claim their spot than the symbolic order brutally reminds them that they are not part of everyone’ (Hage, 2010: 122). This manifests colonialism’s contradictions precisely: colonialism’s universal proclamations about equality and the rights of man are undercut by its exclusions. As such, racial mis-interpellation represents one key part of colonial cosmopolitanization: colonized subjects are inculcated with the desire for the universal – they are ‘hailed’ by the white West – but they are then excluded from it by being particularized on racial grounds. Fanon speaks of this in Black Skin, White Masks, when discussing how in France he was particularized as a ‘Negro’: ‘I was expected to stay in line and make myself scarce’ (Fanon, [1952] 1967: 94). The ‘black man aims for the universal,’ Fanon notes ‘but on-screen his black essence, his black “nature” is kept intact’ (Fanon, [1952] 1967: 163).

In short, under modern colonialism, one of the characteristic features of cosmopolitanism – an openness to humanity and thus a striving for the universal – is inscribed onto the colonized’s lifescape but is then put out of reach. This in turn registers a sense of historical incompleteness. Mis-interpellation under colonialism hails and then excludes the colonized, and by this very experience colonized subjects are instilled with a sense of universal rights and human liberty but only as ideals that are as yet unrealized.

We see this further in Fanon’s later work, not least The Wretched of the Earth. While Black Skin, White Masks was largely about Fanon’s experience as a colonial subject in the metropole, The Wretched of the Earth and related works incorporated his analysis of French colonialism in Algeria. In this analysis, Fanon shows more clearly how colonialism contradicted the universal ideals espoused by the West. He found this contradiction at three registers.

The first had to do with the brutality of colonialism and its dehumanizing effects. The French ‘civilizing’ mission had taken on an especially violent form in Algeria, not least as the French state repressed the rising anti-colonial movement in the 1950s with heightened aggression. Working as chef de service at the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria (the Blida-Joinville Hospital), Fanon saw the results of the repression first-hand, treating both Algerian fighters and French police officers in the hospital. It was a horrifying and disillusioning experience (Fanon, [1967] 1970: 62). And it was a stark reminder of colonialism’s contradictions.

The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 43)

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is replete with these charges of hypocrisy:

That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind … When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 312)

The third register of contradiction was economic exploitation which in turn impeded human interaction and exchange. Colonialism not only produced citizens opposed to subjects, it also served the extraction and monopolization of value. The practice of ‘cantonment’ after the final conquest of Kabylia in 1857, the successful repression of the Kabyle insurrection in 1871, and subsequent legal codifications such as the 1873 Warnier law had all facilitated the confiscation of some of the best Algerian lands (Weil, 2008: 215). Fanon, bearing witness to the tragic results of this long history of exploitation and division, thus bemoaned how ‘Western bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab’ went hand in hand with the fact that the ‘Western bourgeoisie has prepared enough fences and railings to have no real fear of … those whom it exploits and holds in contempt’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 163). This contradicted Europe’s pronouncements of justice and rights. Economic exploitation was justified by ‘Bourgeois ideology’, which ‘is the proclamation of an essential equality between men’ but which only ‘manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to become human and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 163).

We can now begin to understand Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism. For while colonialism instilled the ideal of humanity, its contradictions revealed to Fanon the limits of European agency. ‘All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to them’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 314). The European ideal of humanity appeared as merely a particularism – applying only to whites – masked as a universal. Hence the true universal ideal of humanity emerged for Fanon as something that had to be constructed by the colonized rather than adopted from their colonizers; something that had to be sought, created, cultivated, crafted and nurtured on other grounds. Fanon thus called for decolonization, but decolonization in order to transcend the foregoing contradictions of colonialism and realize a new humanism; one that would finally overcome the limitations Europe imposed upon itself by its imperial exploitation, bifurcations, and violence. In short, Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism was a form of cosmopolitanism that aimed to negate colonialism’s contradictions and thus realize the ideals which Europe had pronounced but failed to realize.

Towards a postcolonial cosmopolitanism

Something of this postcolonial cosmopolitanism is seen in Fanon’s passionate concluding chapter to The Wretched of the Earth:

Today we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually the dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized. (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 314).

If, as Fine (2007: xvii) submits, ‘cosmopolitan social theory understands social relations through a universalistic conception of humanity’ to insist ‘that, despite all our differences, humankind is effectively one’, then Fanon’s discourse here of ‘mankind’ and ‘humanity’ very closely articulates a type of cosmopolitanism. Fanon’s reference to the ‘mass of all humanity’ transcends particularistic identities or attachments; it does not ground itself in region, race, religion nor even identities like colonizer and colonized. It is about ‘humanity’ as a whole; a humanity whose ‘connections’ rather than differences ‘must be increased’. Relatedly, his reference to Europe’s enslavement of ‘four-fifths of humanity’ does not divide up the globe into nations or races but sees it as an entire whole, a singular entity encompassing all of humanity. It is as if Fanon heralds the universal rather than the particular, in exact contradistinction to, if not dialectical transcendence of, the racial exclusions of empire and its ‘systematized de-humanization’ (Fanon, [1967] 1970: 63); as if, while empire has cut humanity into slices of race, Fanon seeks to transcend racial particularisms entirely, burying them within the overriding ‘mass of humanity’. In this sense, unlike the European colonizers he faced – and who had upended cosmopolitanism by insisting upon racial attachments (deployed to exclude the colonized) – Fanon promotes a true cosmopolitanism, insisting upon rather than bifurcating or exploding into particulars ‘the essential humanity we all share’ (as Nussbaum, 1996, puts it).

To better understand this type of cosmopolitanism, below I discuss two related aspects of it: (1) its idea of decolonization as involving a cultural revolution heralding true human relations and exchange in opposition to colonialism’s bifurcations and exploitation; and (2) its emphasis upon human identity as opposed to local attachments like race or nation. After discussing these aspects of Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism, we can then also understand why this is a post-colonial cosmopolitanism.

Consider first the question of violence. Many critics have observed that Fanon’s fiery writings seem to endorse violence. How can this be reconciled with his purported cosmopolitanism and humanism? Yet, as Edward Said (1999: 209) notes, much of the existing characterizations of Fanon as an ‘apostle of violence’ tend towards a ‘caricatural reduction’ which does not adequately capture the nuances of Fanon’s views on violence. ⁴ Pithouse (2003) finds that Fanon was in fact horrified by violence and any endorsement of it was always ‘given within the context of an ethical commitment to existential good faith that requires the person who has decided to resist armed domination with counter liberatory force to recognise the full humanity of the enemy before acting’ (Pithouse, 2003: 109). Fanon’s views on violence, therefore, do not so much betray his new humanism as manifest it. This is why Fanon does not exclude the colonizer from his category of humanity. Unlike the colonizer, who made grand proclamations on the Rights of Man while excluding subjugated groups from the category ‘Man’, Fanon insists that humanity includes the oppressor as well as the oppressed. This is also why Fanon does not charge whites or Europeans with being intrinsically brutal and inhumane. He blames colonialism. The colonizers’ violence and exploitation result from the institution of colonialism, not from the colonizers’ essential being. Accordingly, in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon suggests that the postcolonial state will not involve ‘one barbarism replacing another’. It will instead transform both colonizer and colonized, enabling the humanity of both to flower:

The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man. What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the colonizer; this man who is both the organizer and the victim of a system that has choked him and reduced him to silence. (Fanon, 1965: 32, my italics)

Fanon’s vision of postcolonial culture here suggests a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ in Delanty’s (2009) sense; a cosmopolitanism involving a self-transformation arising from encounters with others ‘in the context of global concerns’ (Delanty, 2009; Delanty and He, 2008: 324). Decolonization, in Fanon’s view, is exactly such a process. Rearticulating the Sartrean premise that man, rather than being consigned to an essence, makes and remakes himself in action, Fanon prefaces his discussion of the colonizer’s and colonized’s joint humanity by asserting:

The thesis that men change at the same time that they change the world has never been so manifest as it is now in Algeria. This trial of strength not only remodels the consciousness that man has of himself, and of his former dominators or of the world, at last within his reach. (Fanon, 1965: 30)

Something more of Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism is seen in his discussion of colonial exploitation. Just as the Manichean order of colonialism was to be replaced with a cosmopolitan order based upon openness, so too would colonialism’s exploitative economic structures be overcome in a postcolonial cosmopolitan state. Again, colonialism’s structure would be negated. Overcoming colonialism would enable economic production to be redirected towards the fulfillment of human needs rather than the needs of particular classes, ethnicities or races. This was a socialist vision, to be sure. But his economic proscriptions for the postcolonial state were guided by broader cosmopolitan imperatives than political party or platform. While Fanon had joined the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN), and though he admired Maoism (while remaining staunchly anti-Stalinist), he prioritized the pressing needs of humanity before blind proscriptions of economic ideology or ideological attachment:

The fundamental duel which seemed to be that between colonialism and anticolonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it. (Fanon [1961] 1968: 98)

Beyond parochialism and the postcoloniality of postcolonial cosmopolitanism

But if Fanon’s vision of a postcolonial state constitutes a type of cosmopolitanism, why has it been overlooked in existing scholarship? Part of the issue may lie in Fanon’s emphases on parochial identities. On the one hand, at the heart of cosmopolitanism is a notion of world citizenship – an allegiance ‘to the worldwide community of human beings’ (Nussbaum, 1996: 4). The ‘normative horizon’ is ‘world-building’ not ‘nation-building’. On the other hand, Fanon often articulated his anti-colonialism with anti-colonial nationalism; on ‘nation-building’ exactly. Fanon’s own anti-colonial activities with the FLN and his political writings since Black Skin, White Masks in the FLN’s organ El Moudjahid were clearly guided by an anti-colonialism nationalism; his fight against French domination was a project to liberate the Algerian nation. We also find in Fanon the traces of multiple other particularistic attachments, i.e. the colonized, the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘African’ continent (Fanon, [1952] 1967: 201; [1967] 1970: 160–2). These dimensions of Fanon’s politics are what may have impeded our full appreciation of Fanon’s cosmopolitanism before. They render Fanon’s vision parochial rather than global.

But Fanon was highly critical of parochial loyalties even as he seemingly adhered to them. Take négritude and associated discourses of African ‘culture’. One might argue that, in his early days, Fanon was not averse to the négritude of Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire (whom he praised) (Macey, 2010: 38). ⁵ But even then, Fanon’s support for négritude was at best ‘ambiguous and ambivalent’ (Macey, 2010: 38). ‘In the absolute,’ Fanon insists ‘the black is no more to be loved than the Czech, and truly what is to be done is to set man free’ (Fanon, [1952] 1967: xiii). ‘My black skin is not the repository of specific values’ (Fanon, [1952] 1967: 202). He later refers to négritude as a ‘black mirage’ that reproduces in reverse the white myths to which it is opposed (Fanon, [1967] 1970: 3). In any case, by the time he pens ‘On National Culture’ for the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers held in Rome in 1959 (under the auspices of the pro-négritude journal Présence africaine), his stance on racial essentialism is unequivocal. He warns that négritude simply represents a ‘racialization of thought’ first inaugurated by white racism (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 211–12; see also Gibson, 2003: 80–3; Haddour, 2005). Race is a fetter, not a foundation.

What of his nationalism? Fanon referred to different types of nationalism (Gibson, 2003). The one he is most critical of is the nationalism of the colonial bourgeoisie and its working-class allies. This nationalism, Fanon argues, merely meets the interests of the kleptocratic native elite (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 148–205). It is also articulated with another particularism: racism. For amidst their populist ploys, the nationalist bourgeoisie of Africa tie racial categories to nationalist rhetoric. ‘[U]ltra-nationalism’ devolves into ‘chauvinism, and finally to racism’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 156, 161–2). This kind of parochial attachment is full of danger. The nationalist bourgeoisie ‘come to power in the name of a narrow nationalism and representing a race; they will prove themselves incapable of triumphantly putting into practice a program with even a minimum humanist content’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 163). In contrast to this type of nationalism, Fanon speaks of another type wherein nationalism is merely a basis for its own supersession. Fanon is clear that national independence is not an end in itself; it is merely meant to mobilize the population against colonialism. Fanon insists that the postcolonial state, ‘before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 205). Nationalism is not the end; humanity is. Hence the difference between Fanon’s nationalism and the nationalism of the bourgeoisie:

A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley … It is only when men and women are included on a vast scale in enlightened and fruitful work that form and body are given to that consciousness. (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 204)

We can now see how Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism is post-colonial. It is post-colonial in that it is a transcendent alternative to colonialism’s exclusions, bifurcations, and exploitation. Emerging in the space of colonialism’s contradictions, Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism speaks of a shared inclusive humanity. As opposed to a hierarchy based on race or other identities, he envisions a global community of equals. In place of bifurcation, he proposes a unity and fruitful exchange; and in place of exploitation, he envisions a worldwide community that fulfills human needs and offers political, economic, and social rights to all. It is therefore post-colonial because it is post-European. While it emerges from earlier ideas of the Western Enlightenment, it is not a bland imitation. Fanon is clear: ‘Let us decide not to imitate Europe, let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing triumphant birth’ (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 313). In other words, postcolonial cosmopolitanism adopts the European legacy of humanism but surmounts it with newness:

If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans … But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make new discoveries. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man (Fanon, [1961] 1968:  316).

Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism, finally, is ‘post’ not in the sense that it means to forget the past that the ‘post’ marks but rather to remember it. Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism emerges from colonialism’s contradictions. Exactly because of rather than in spite of this, it seeks to remember the conditions of its creation, to always keep in view the violence and exploitation that gave it its birth. Fanon writes defiantly, in response to the idea of ‘catching up with the West’, that:

No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men … It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes. (Fanon, [1961] 1968: 315)

Conclusion

In excavating Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism and the colonial history that helped create it, this article has two general goals. The first is to contribute to the ongoing project of crafting new historical sociologies of cosmopolitanism by taking colonialisms seriously. The second is to sketch out the form of cosmopolitanism that is recovered by this approach.

Existing work already aims to specify the conditions under which the cosmopolitan imagination has been produced (Holton, 2002). Delanty astutely observes that ‘it is possible to speak of cosmopolitanism as an outcome when two more societies interact and undergo change in their model of modernity as a result’ (2006: 41). But where most existing scholarship would pinpoint globalization as the defining moment of such interactions, I have suggested that colonialism might be considered as well. While historical sociologies of cosmopolitanism either overlook colonialism or treat it as a deviation from an otherwise linear path towards a cosmopolitan future, this article argues that colonialism was also productive. Colonialism, however repressive, created interactions that engendered different possibilities; its bifurcations, exploitation and violence made for contradictions constitutive of alternative cosmopolitan visions. As seen, it showed to the rest of the world that others besides Europeans would have to take up the mantle of humanity.

By illuminating the role of colonialism in the production of cosmopolitan thought, this approach can contribute to the project of recovering non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanisms, but not by focusing upon ‘Southern’ or ‘Non-Western’ cosmopolitanisms seemingly opposed to ‘Northern’ or ‘Western’ ones. Rather, by examining colonialism, we remain alerted to the connections, crossings, and relations between and across peoples, spaces, and places (of which colonialism was one form). The spatial and geopolitical complexity to social relations – either through colonialism or contemporary globalization – means that we should consider these interactions rather than try to isolate ostensibly pure spaces of production that we might want to identify as ‘non-western’. As Shilliam (2010: 18) suggests, reckoning colonialism means problematizing any assumed ‘authenticity, essentialist nature and pristine character of the non-Western archive’. After all, when colonial subjects adopted European discourses and proclaim the ‘Rights of Man’ to oppose European colonialism, is this part of European or non-European history? Was Fanon a product of Martinique, Algeria, France, or all at the same time? He wrote from the geographical location of Algeria, but Algeria was officially ‘French’: so is his cosmopolitanism French or African?

Accordingly, the historical sociology of postcolonial cosmopolitanism offered in this article is not about a European or non-European space but rather about the variety of places in and processes by which ‘Europe’ and ‘the Rest’ have met and interacted (whether in conflict or cooperation) (Bhambra, 2007). ⁷ This invites us to recognize that Europe and the Rest have not been autonomous but are interconnected, and that colonialism was one of the modalities marking entangled histories (however wrought with conflict and contradiction). In short, an exploration of how colonialism might have been generative of cosmopolitanism contributes to sociologies that avoid both Eurocentrism or its opposite: reverse Eurocentrism. This, after all, is exactly what Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism was about. Rather than arising from a presumed position of pure exteriority (Mignolo, 2000), it emerged from and then critiqued relations between Europeans and colonized subjects.

Hence the second related goal of this article: to explore the type of cosmopolitanism that might emerge from the colonial (rather than a supposed ‘non-Western’) standpoint. We have seen this type with Fanon: a postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This is a cosmopolitanism that engages with the West rather than ignores it or stands outside it. Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitan embraces and advocates a worldwide citizenship, a global humanity, in dialogue with the fact that European imperialism and its associated exploitations and dominations have so long repressed such humanity. It was in the spaces that colonialism left behind that postcolonial cosmopolitan emerges. For this reason, therefore, postcolonial cosmopolitanism should not be relegated to a ‘non-European’ history or a presumably pristine ‘non-European’ standpoint, thereby justifying the West’s occlusion of it or relegating it to the margins. Postcolonial cosmopolitanism – exactly because it emerges from colonialism’s contradictions – should be seen as a part of Europe’s history as much as to the history of the colonized. It is something Europe should engage and learn from rather than dismiss as irrelevant to its own. ⁸