Combative, Insurgent, and Guerrilla Intellectuals

Decolonisation...is a historical process....it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. —Frantz Fanon

…the practice of theory is informed by struggle… —Cedric Robinson

When Fanon (1963) stated that movements provide the historical form and content of decolonization, he was referring to the intimate relationship between material and symbolic modes of resistance and liberation. The political no longer simply referred to seizing power by occupying the modern/colonial nation-state, as orthodox Marxists would have it. More than anything, Fanon’s pithy statement underscores liberation movements’ epistemological and political dimensions—an insurgent politico-epistemological project. As Fanon (1963, p. 255) expressed at the end of the Wretched of the Earth, “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man”. As I interpret this statement, Fanon believed it was urgent to set afoot a new mode of knowing, being, and co-existing. Cedric Robinson (2021, p. 307) echoes Fanon by stating that “the practice of theory is informed by struggle”. Decolonial modes of theorizing the world therefore contribute to a praxis of liberation insofar as theorizing is intimately linked to and informed by struggles.

What then is the role of the committed, organic, guerrilla, and decolonial intellectual? From Marx (2012) we have learned that it is insufficient to solely contemplate and interpret reality and that we must do what we can to change it. Gramsci (1971) also advanced the notion of the organic intellectual who could be aligned to dominant political-economic and sociocultural interests or conversely with what he referred to as the subaltern who opposes the symbolic and material hegemony of a particular social structure. His understanding of the intellectual was broad and inclusive of non-academics, but he was aware that not everyone took on the role of the intellectual in any given society. Today, anyone who participates in the production and diffusion of knowledge can be considered an intellectual whose work either upholds or unsettles said interests. Fanon (1963) also wrote about the anticolonial intellectual’s role in shattering “the whole material and moral universe” of colonialism. However, for intellectuals “permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking” (45), it does not come easy to recognize how they, too, reproduce coloniality even after political/administration decolonization or “independence.” For those countries that did not experience what Fanon referred to as hasty decolonization,

“the intellectual is grounded in the struggle of their people. In the colonial countries where a real struggle for freedom has taken place, where the blood of the people has flowed and where the length of the period of armed warfare has favored the backward surge of intellectuals toward bases grounded in the people, we can observe a genuine eradication of the superstructure built by these intellectuals from the bourgeois colonialist environment. The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course.” (46)

Fanon also addressed the importance of shedding the individualism^[1] of intellectual work in order to radically situate oneself in the collective struggles taking place outside of the ivory tower. In the Representation of the Intellectual, Edward Said (1994) explicates the primary concern at hand: what is the role of the intellectual? The intellectual, according to Said, “is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going her/his business” (11). In this sense, the intellectual should not dwell in the ivory tower to solipsistically contemplate, interpret, and theorize the world. This detached knowledge practice reproduces the Cartesian subject whose interiority is all that matters, whereby exteriority (Dussel, 1980), concrete historical and social contexts, and everyday existence are rendered philosophically insignificant, especially those who dwell on the underside of modernity. For Said (1994), the intellectual has the responsibility of “representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion” that challenges rather than reproduces the order of things (11). In another text, Said (2002) suggests that "The intellectual’s role...is dialectically, oppositionally, to uncover and elucidate...to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible” (31). In other words, the intellectual seeks to unsettle normalized silence and complicity within and beyond academia.

Along a similar yet more radical vein, Walter Rodney (1990, 2019) had already proposed the notion of the guerilla intellectual. Adeleke (2000) believes Rodney’s guerilla intellectualism is a combative countervailing historiography that sought to disrupt what the latter referred to as “European cultural egocentricity” (Rodney 1969, 56). As Fanon also proposed in relation individualist knowledge production, this European cultural egocentricity can be challenged insofar as the guerilla intellectual is committed to co-creating knowledge of liberation. This ethical commitment to knowledge production seeks to unsettle, in material and symbolic terms, the Eurocentric knowledge wielded for centuries as a weapon of domination to subjugate colonized and negatively racialized peoples who, under colonial occupation and ongoing coloniality, receive a distorted history that simultaneously obscures the colonial present. Broadening our historiographic horizon, as Vincent Harding (1981) suggested, requires 'breaking beyond past western traditional understandings to some new understanding of our identity, our history, and our destiny as human beings’ (Adeleke, 2016, p. 121). This necessarily requires a different type of education, curriculum, pedagogy, theories, and methodologies since it is through the miseducation of colonized peoples that the distortion of history is made possible (Woodson, 1933), and thus the distortion of the present and future.

Critiquing dominant regimes of truth is key but critique alone will not dismantle coloniality. In other words, theorizing for theorizing’s sake or producing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is insufficient and indeed may fall into the academicist trap designed to exclude praxis. As Adeleke (2000) notes, “Knowledge is useful only to the degree that it is used to advance the cause of liberation. It is the ability and willingness to use knowledge to advance the cause of freedom that distinguishes a GI [guerilla intellectual] from an armchair philosopher” (44). This demands going beyond intellectual posturing by taking collective action. Similar to Freire (1970), thought, action, and reflection are necessary to realize a liberatory praxis that transcends the ivory tower’s mode of theorizing, debating, and critiquing texts that are too often disembodied from their geopolitical, sociocultural, and economic contexts. Or, as Walsh (forthcoming) puts it, a decolonial praxis is more than resistance; it is about re-existing against the incredible odds to so. It is about fighting for other worlds and not simply fighting against the modern/colonial world. A decolonial praxis resists coloniality’s project of death and plants and cultivates life (Lozano Lerma, 2019). It is open, relational, and radically situated since it would otherwise contradict the historical, political, and dialectical/analectical dimensions of praxis (Dussel, 1980). A decolonial praxis is opens precisely because defining what decolonial praxis is or is not would fix it in time and space as an abstract universal.

Contributing to decolonial praxis, Mireille Fanon Mendès France and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2021) advance what they call combative decoloniality. By building upon Fanon’s work, they argue that “the struggle against coloniality demands first and foremost a combative attitude” (2021, para. 6). Paralleling Rodney’s contributions, they distinguish combative decolonial thought from academicist decolonial critique. As they observe, “critique and criticism are often praised as the counter-liberal attitudes or actions par excellence, [but] they are often mobilized to take attention away from coloniality” (ibid). Critique for critique’s sake, once again, is insufficient when critique is predicated on textualist analyses that downplay the importance of reading and interrogating the material contexts of coloniality or, worse yet, conceive of social reality or social totality as overdetermined symbolically^[2] or discursively. 

Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres (2021) assert that “Critique is as necessary as insufficient, and it can easily align itself with conservative attitudes if it is not deployed in a combative decolonial direction” (para. 6). It is imperative, therefore, to engage in praxis (thought-action-reflection) within material contexts or sites of struggle as much as we like to critique texts, theories, and knowledge systems. It is apropos to cite Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres (2021, para. 7) at length to fully understand what they are proposing:

“Different from critique, combativity emerges when racialized subjects start to address other racialized subjects in the effort to generate the sense of a collective struggle. While critique draws its power from crisis, decolonial combativity addresses the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. Combativity goes beyond cries of protests, laments, and appeals, even as these may be necessary moments of the struggle. Combativity is about the path from individual to collective responsibility, and it requires the will and ability to connect with others and to engage in collective movement against coloniality. The combative attitude is, like combative literature, “resolve situated in historical time” (Fanon, The Wretched) and it is dedicated to the effort of building “the world of you” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks).

The combative decolonial intellectual is someone who is committed ethically and politically to unsettling both modern/colonial symbolic and material structures of domination and exploitation, while making evident the equiprimordiality of discourse and structure, as Wynter (1992) put it. As a new science of the word (Césaire, 1982), Wynter offers a combative decolonial approach by contributing to the transgressive and insurgent politico-epistemological project initiated by Césaire (2000), Fanon (1963), and Glissant (1997). Her work serves as a counter-cartography (or decolonial sociography as I call it) that conceives human and nonhuman life, material and symbolic, structures and discourses, as relationally entangled on a planetary scope^[3]. It makes evident the equiprimordiality of power and knowledge (Wynter (1992). As a craft, Wynter’s decolonial approach gestures toward other modes of being human, which departs from “Man” and moves toward a mode of human existence that is “made to the measure of the world” (Cesaire 2000, 73) rather than Western Europe. This task demands relational and heterogeneous modes of reading the world. A new science of the word complements Fanon’s and Wynter’s sociogenesis with Glissant’s (1997) poeisis and relationality, which enables us to think about relations and assemblages beyond colonial modes of being and modern ontologies of separation dividing the social from the natural (El-Malik, 2023). Glissant’s work is not only focused on social interactions between people but also on the heterogeneous ways in which the relations of memory, place, and sensory affections assist in constituting new worlds. 

Building new worlds thus requires a decolonial praxis and poeisis. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon teaches us that racism’s sociogenesis and governing fiction is social, structural, and historical. In this text, he expresses with clarity that negatively racialized people who are “exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonial, capitalist society” must take action to set afoot a new mode of existence (Fanon 1967, 157). The historical-structural-racial-colonial-capitalist order Fanon unveils is meant to be understood and unsettled materially and discursively. More importantly, our interrogations must create the conditions to become self-determined actional and sociopoetic beings that work toward building other worlds. 

By thinking from a position of exteriority and alterity, “Wynter uncovers….the conditions of possibility—the context of emergence of the refiguring of the ‘discourse of race’” (Silva, 2015, p. 99). By privileging exteriority, Wynter makes more visible the material conditions of possibility that generate alternative onto-epistemological positions to be constituted, ones that counteract the dominant mode of being human–Man. She thus seeks to amplify subjugated knowledges to critique coloniality from the darker side of modernity (Mignolo 2011)—that is, from the exteriority modernity hides to naturalize its emergence, misrepresented as an endogenous process (Dussel, 1994). This ethical and geopolitical standpoint to ethically think with and from systematically excluded places challenges the onto-epistemological primacy of the Cartesian subject whose epistemological hubris denies other vantage points to interpret and act upon reality. Wynter’s work, in this case, serves as “a critique of ideology that targets the symbolic itself and returning to a serious consideration of the juridical-economic dimensions of the political existence” (Silva, 2015, 99). She makes these material and symbolic connections with her conceptualization of the sociogenesis of race, coloniality, and decoloniality as an entangled discursive and material process. As Wynter (1992) cogently expressed, ‘To be effective, systems of power must be discursively legitimated. This is not to say that power is originally a set of institutional structures that are subsequently legitimated. On the contrary, it is to suggest the equiprimordiality of structure and cultural conceptions in the genesis of power’ (Wynter 1992, 65). The equiprimordiality of the symbolic and material is key in situating decolonial thought in sites of struggle, avoiding the tendency to empty radical concepts from their political and ethical content. Wynter’s contributions to combative decolonial thought is neither post-structural in the discursive Foucauldian sense nor structural in the Marxian-Althusserian sense.  If combative decolonial thought is to contribute to these transgressive efforts, it must situate its interpretive methodological craft within sites of struggle that create the possibility of reconstituting new worlds.

Similarly, Stuart Hall draws on Fanon^[4] (1967) to suggest that it is imperative to “consider the conditions for the production of a new kind of subject and the decolonisation of the mind as the necessary subjective conditions for the decolonisation of the world” (19). The politics of decolonization necessarily demands unsettling modern/colonial representation and subjectivity.

The principal counter-strategy here has been to bring to the surface - into representation - that which has sustained the regimes of representation unacknowledged: to subvert the structures of 'othering' in language and representation, image, sound and discourse, and thus to turn the mechanisms of fixed racial signification against themselves, in order to begin to constitute new subjectivities, new positions of enunciation and identification, without which the most 'revolutionary' moments of national liberation quickly slide into their post-colonial reverse gear

By unveiling the equiprimordiality of knowledge and power, as well as dominant modes of representation, the combative decolonial intellectual thus critiques dominant discursive practices and refuses to “remain isolated and disconnected from collective movements and struggles” (Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres 2021, para. 8). A combative decolonial intellectual committed to material and symbolic acts of transgression do not conform to academia’s complicit knowledge practices and meritocratic standards, nor do they aspire for recognition and multicultural representation. Rather, their aim is to find points of convergence “between the condemned of the earth and between their various struggles” without flattening their geopolitical and colonial differences.

A necessary step to unlearn and relearn is to engage the thought and action that is systematically excluded from academia. This includes the epistemologies and radical traditions that do not make their way inside the white halls of the ivory tower. While it is an ethical responsibility to think with others rather than to do research on them, one must still be aware of power imbalances. Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres posit several questions to consider when thinking alongside sites of struggle:

How do we support, work with, and learn from those who do not count with institutional resources? How can we effectively counter the extraction of ideas from social movements, community organizers, and social movements’ leaders? How do we transform medical, artistic, and scholarly training and direct them to oppose extractivism in all its forms? How do we transition to more relational forms of engagement, communication, and collaboration in support of movements that combat systemic racism, coloniality, and antiblackness? What can everyone learn from existing combative movements, and what combative movements do we consider particularly critical from our own situated position and point of view?

Within the context of the state-sanctioned colonial violence, as we are seeing in Palestine, we must not only challenge the “cooptation, mistranslation, and ensuing domestication” of decolonial thought but also modestly ask what we can do to contribute to emerging social, territorial, and liberation movements. What must be done within a violent reactionary contexts that aims “to contain the impact of these movements” by silencing dissenting voices. Why should we speak out and organize in the midst of a genocide, no matter the consequences? If decolonization and decoloniality have been reduced to what privileged individuals in academia write and textually analyze, it is correct to assume that they both risk becoming commodifiable ideas, as opposed to what was initially intended—that is, a radically situated praxis committed to liberation. Maldonado-Torres (2023b) makes this point clear in terms of challenging the commodification of decolonial thought that has solely focuses on engaging texts to produce more theory on coloniality at the expense of engaging the material contexts from which thought emerges. As he asserts, decolonial theory is also a double-edged sword insofar as it can underscore systematically excluded histories, knowledges, and experiences, while reproducing “the hegemonic liberal ethos” within academia that tends to result in the “elite capture” (Táíwò, 2022) of radically situated concepts by emptying them of their combative or insurgent content. The neoliberal academy not only commodifies knowledge, but it also leads to forming the professional class of intellectuals “who lack organic connections with those who inhabit the underside of history and who are working to build an-other world” (Maldonado-Torres, 2023a, p. 258).

Even those who have said “organic connections,” however, are not immune to critique, since they, too, can fall into the aforementioned traps of producing knowledge that is more aligned with dominant interests. Important to seriously consider within the multicultural neoliberal academy is to question those “racialized intellectuals who are sometimes conveniently positioned as brokers in discussions about racism and colonialism by state leaders of the north while sidelining combative social movements in the north and south” (Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres, para. 10). This double critique, as Khatibi (2019) invites, disrupts the essentialism of knowledge production while unsettling Eurocentrism, no matter who is doing the enunciation. As it is colloquially articulated by Black scholars and activists, “skin folk aren’t always kin folk,” which implies, as Ruha Benjamin expressed during a commencement speech, “Black [and Brown] faces in high places are not going to save us,” revealing that one’s mode of identifying culturally and racially is not in and of itself trustworthy nor somehow radically situated epistemically, ethically, and politically.

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^[1] Fanon wrote the following: “Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend—these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on. The native intellectual takes part, in a sort of auto-da-fe, in the destruction of all his idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people's committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved. The motto "look out for yourself," the atheist's method of salvation, is in this context forbidden. (47)

^[2] C. Wright Mill wrote in the Sociological Imagination that symbols, concepts, and grand theories are fetishized in such a way that it they overdetermine social reality. No theory, including decolonial theory, is exempt from this fetishization. Mills discusses the distortion of “master symbols of legitimation”, which he considered salient subject (37). As he put it, “The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science. Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it.” Mills also pointed to symbols of opposition that justify and inform insurgent movements that question the symbolic and material authority of those who dominate through consensus, manipulation, and/or coercion. The power of a nation-state, for instance, is not mechanistically determined or constituted by a symbolic system. “To believe that government does is to confuse its legitimations with its causes”, ignoring the fact that those who rule “successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols” to legitimate authority. Mills also addresses the following, which is relevant to the overemphasis of the symbolic at the expense of the material: It is a mistake to believe that the symbolic sphere is [1]“self-determining, and that such ‘values' may indeed dominate history: [2] The symbols that justify some authority are separated from the actual persons or strata that exercise the authority. [3]The ‘ideas’ not the strata or the persons using the ideas, are then thought to rule. In order to lend continuity to the sequence of these symbols, they are presented as in some way connected with one another. The symbols are thus seen as 'self-determining.’ To make more plausible this curious notion, the symbols are often 'personalized' or given 'self-consciousness.' They may then be conceived of as The Concepts of History or as a sequence of 'philosophers' whose thinking determines institutional dynamics. (38).

^[3] Although this article is not focused on Palestine, I do want to take the opportunity to state that what unfolds in Gaza and in historic Palestine helps us think about systems of domination and exploitation in relational terms, that is, as always already entangled historically and geographically, as well as politically. Palestine makes visible the connections between the settler colonial state of Israel and the crucial role it has played and continues to play in reproducing coloniality, not only in Palestine, but across the world through the exportation of technologies of colonial violence. Israel can be understood as a central pillar of coloniality and exemplar case of how various (sub)systems and modes of domination and exploitation overlap (settler colonialism, neocolonialism, formal/administrative colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism) and are linked to modern/colonial world system. With the systematic destruction of knowledge and history (bombing of schools, universities, and Mosques), displacement and dispossession of millions, ecological devastation (e.g., cutting of olive trees in the West Bank), we are witnessing in real time how genocide is accompanied by epistemicide, scholasticide, memoricide, femicide, and ecocide, inter alia. Israel's colonial project of death reveals the destructive tendency of ethnonationalist states and, most importantly, the imperial designs of a dying Occidentalism that refuses to relinquish power as it inflicts incalculable violence on those at the receiving end of coloniality who dare to resist it. Zionism is one of the most militant expressions of modernity/coloniality, whereby once a racialized, dehumanized, and frequently expelled peoples can nourish themselves ideologically with modern/colonial discourses and practices to colonize and displace the Indigenous people of Palestine.

^[4]Fanon suggested that “Racism's very rigidity. . . is the clue to its complexity. Its capacity to punctuate the universe into two great opposite masks . . . the complexes of feelings and attitudes . . . that are always refusing to be so neatly stabilised and fixed . . . All that symbolic and narrative energy . . . is directed to securing us "over here" and them "over ·there", to fix each in its appointed species place.