Coping with Epistemic Trauma: The Africana Pursuit of New Humanism

Abstract

This article discusses how Frantz Fanon diagnoses the epistemic trauma that African people have experienced, resulting from Eurocentric epistemic violence, while prescribing the pursuit of new humanism as a coping mechanism. In the last five centuries, European modernity’s racialized ideals of humanity have mapped the world by excluding African people, disrupting their sense of humanism, and throwing them into existential downward spiral. In fact, Western modernity questioned whether African people are “humans”, and it concluded that they are not. This assumption has justified various interventions to deliver African people from objecthood. The consequences have been colonialism, enslavement, and apartheid, which have attempted to remove Africans from the realm of humanity. The epistemic trauma persists today as African people continue to search for new humanism. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) diagnoses epistemic trauma in African people while prescribing “decolonization” as an act that “triggers a . . . psycho-effective equilibrium” in the pursuit of new humanism and humanity. His Africana critical theory—envisioning philosophy in relation to humanities and social sciences as a means to social transformation—proposes new humanism and humanity founded on decolonization, thus moving beyond Eurocentric ideals of humanity. Abstract