Frantz Fanon, Grace Lee Boggs, and the Ethics of Revolution in the 20th Century

This project examines the intellectual and activist genealogies of Frantz Fanon and Grace Lee Boggs to explore how theories of decolonization, revolution, and social change emerged from specific political movements in the mid-twentieth century. By coupling two geographically disparate but intellectually linked liberation struggles—the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962) and labor and racial justice movements in Detroit (1950s–1970s)—this project traces how ideas about liberation and transformation circulated and evolved transnationally. I specifically situate Frantz Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth (1960) for the oppressed to enact revolutionary violence to liberate themselves in conversation with the work of Grace Lee Boggs, whose thinking on love ethics, internal transformation, and practices of care offered a crucial framework for understanding the relationship between external struggle and internal transformation, both within Detroit and globally. This topic’s significance lies in its extension of decolonization as a state beyond solely political or national conceptions. By reading Boggs’ thinking on internal and institutional transformation as a site that complicated Fanon’s call for the oppressed to enact revolutionary violence, this paper illuminates how ideas about violence and liberation evolved dialectically across the globe, placing activists in Detroit’s freedom movement in dialogue with anti-colonial struggle.

Methodologically, this project draws from a close reading of the authors’ core texts: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks and Boggs’ The Next American Revolution and Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (co-authored with James Boggs). I analyze these central texts alongside archival sources, including oral histories on the 1967 Detroit Uprising from the Detroit Historical Society, documents from Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), and speeches and correspondences from Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs. In doing so, I trace the evolution of each thinker’s ideas regarding violence and practices of care in response to their specific political contexts.

This project ultimately argues that justice and liberation in the twentieth century must be understood not only in terms of formal decolonization but also in the modeling of practices of care within revolutions themselves; only through a dual transformation—of material conditions and of the inner lives of the oppressed—can revolutionary struggle avoid reproducing the hierarchies and systems of domination it seeks to destroy. Through this framework, the study contributes to the broader historiography of decolonization and movements for liberation by connecting global anticolonial thought to American struggles against racial capitalism.

This project’s poster design will incorporate timelines of intellectual and movement history for both Fanon and Boggs, illustrating the evolution of their ideas alongside major developments in the liberation movements situated in Algeria and Detroit. I will organize my analysis according to central themes, including dialectics, disalienation, and revolution. Finally, I will utilize a map to demonstrate the overlapping transnational influences in both authors’ works (e.g. Negritude, Marxism, existentialism) and visually contextualize the genealogies of both thinkers by including photographs alongside quotes pulled from primary sources.