Educators as decolonial intellectuals: revolutionary thought from Gramsci to Fanon

Abstract

ABSTRACT For several decades, the Gramscian notion of the intellectual has been a popular framework to view the potentiality of educators as counter-hegemonic cultural workers. While this was an invaluable contribution to the field of critical education, notions of the intellectual have largely focused on class conflict. For a deeper theorization of the intellectual and race, we turn to the work of decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. In his work, Fanon theorizes the role of the intellectual amid the struggle against colonialism. In this article, we examine Fanon’s intellectual work as well as his writing on the ‘colonized intellectual’ to articulate what we describe as a Fanonian decolonial intellectual. We conclude by highlighting the importance of Fanon’s contributions on the intellectual for educators of color, who presently find themselves compromised by a hegemony characterized by neoliberal multiculturalism in education.