A Black-Archipelago Anticolonial Canon Speaks Psychology

Abstract

In Euromodernity, the discipline of western psychology holds a unique place in the global knowledge order. It is the primary epistemic source, the authoritative voice of psychological knowledge. This essay explores epistemic problems with western psychological science and its canonical status. Epistemic selectivism—the failure to address phenomena which are detrimental to all human beings, not only those of concern to western subjects and their subjectivities—is identified as a problem to be solved in the discipline of western psychology. In order to address epistemic failures of western psychology I return to the knowledge that emerges from the geography where Europe launched its project of racial and racist modern life. I review the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon that speaks psychology. I follow this anticolonial canon because it pierces and penetrates epistemic silences about psychological experience in Euromodernity. Of the plenitude of theories and concepts developed by Black, Caribbean anticolonial thinkers which are of relevance to understanding the psychological effects of Euromodernity I focus in this review on two fundamental ideas—Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic principle and the emancipatory thrust of consciousness. An embrace of the principle of open epistemologies is proposed as a solution to the problem of epistemic selectivism.

Introduction

… relationships between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. That’s why it is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society. (René Depestre in Césaire & Kelley, 2000, p. 94)

It is now vital to dare to know oneself, to dare to confess to oneself what one is, to dare to ask oneself what one wants to be. (Suzanne Césaire, 2012a, 2012b, p. 9–10)

We belong to those who say no to darkness. (Aimé Césaire in Breton, 2001 p. xi)

In December 1967, in Havana, Cuba the Haitian poet and activist René Depestre interviewed the Martinican poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire ahead of the Cultural Congress of Havana. The subject of the Havana Congress was colonialism and neocolonialism. Participants gathered to address persistent problems produced by Euromodernity ¹ in the global South. One of the five themes that spoke to the priorities of the time, the ‘Integral Growth of Man’ (what I think of as the whole development of the human ² ), provided a venue for thinkers such as Depestre and Césaire to address ongoing problems with consciousness in Euromodernity.

Problems With Consciousness in Euromodernity: The Tangled Web of Alienation, Race, Dehumanisation and the Loss of Freedom

In the interview, Césaire and Depestre (in Césaire & Kelley, 2000) focus on the ignored problem of alienation, not so much on the social, political, and economic dimensions made available to us by Karl Marx & Davis (1994), but on the psychological or interior elements that W. E. B. Du Bois (2019) and Frantz Fanon (2008) had by then etched for us. When Césaire and Depestre sat down to talk they turned toward relationships between alienation, race, dehumanisation, and consciousness. They did so given their intimate knowledge of the effects of alienation on the consciousness of people produced as Black in Euromodernity. They understood alienation to be a loss of freedom to exist in the world of one’s cultural inheritance. The historical process of African people’s enslavement in the Caribbean resulted in not only physical distancing from their homeland but psychological estrangement from their history and culture—the sources from which a people’s ongoing development and sense of self arises. Depestre and Césaire understood the physical and metaphysical separations people in the African diaspora endure to be the source of alienated consciousness. They reasoned that enforced assimilation into Euromodernity’s White, western, philosophy, culture, rhetoric, and customs trap people into EuroAmerica’s racial and racist cosmovision of the world.

Césaire and Depestre (in Césaire & Kelley, 2000) were also concerned with the drift away from depth in understanding the human condition. They saw the necessity to move inward and downward, away from western epistemologies and discourses in order to grapple with the web of problems Euromodernity has created for the human. They plumbed the depths of their own consciousness searching for disalienated or decolonised understandings of the world and self, based on the belief “that beneath the [westernised] social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited” (Césaire, 2000, p. 84).

These two men were particularly focused on what has been done to the human racialised as Black in Euromodernity. They recognised that in modern time we ³ have come to know ourselves not by way of the fullness of our cultural identity but through Euromodernity; its epistemologies, racist system of social identification, and ensuing mode of consciousness. It is by living through the equation that Black is synonymous with inferiority that self-consciousness of one’s now ⁴ racialised identity becomes the site of evisceration from a human sense of self.

Césaire and Depestre (in Césaire & Kelley, 2000) examine the complex psychological consequences of assimilation into Euromodernity because separately and together their concern was with the totality of alienations the human experiences in modern time. They added race to existing analyses of the causes of alienation in the contemporary world because without its consideration movement toward liberation from the structures of Euromodernity is colourless. Race-free analysis of historical materialism treats problems of race as addenda, secondary to the struggle to overcome the alienations produced by classism and capitalism. Depestre, Césaire, and other Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinkers who interrogate methods through which consciousness can be freed from its entrapment in the metaphysics of Euromodernity understand that the imposition of race is a structural condition of the social world cum consciousness.

The meaning of race in Euromodernity is a sine qua non, an essential feature of colonised consciousness (Bell, 2024[Forthcoming]) operating between the foreground and background of awareness that serves to mystify understandings of a world built on the rule of race. Not least of the puzzles about the efficacy of race in modern consciousness is how the human and its sense of self has been transformed by a mode of awareness structured by racist meanings of physical difference. Without the power to muddy the waters of human consciousness, to make race appear as if it simply and merely describes biological differences, the West would not have been able to set in motion, solidify, and now stabilise its powerful fallacy and practice of White supremacy.

These two men also discussed disalienation of consciousness as a process and outcome of psychological decolonisation (in Césaire & Kelley, 2000). They were interested in procedures that enable the liberation of consciousness from the hold western ideologies have over our minds. They drew a throughline between problems of alienation, consciousness, and the dehumanising effects of race to possibilities for human freedom. In tandem with the Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonialist Frantz Fanon, they were not satisfied with remaining ‘locked in this suffocating reification’ (2008, p. 89) of race. They were restless. They sought to discover who they were, who we are, outside of the closed world of racial-capitalism which Europe and America have established in our most recent history. And they were thinking in terms of the difference time and times make. Depestre and Césaire were concerned with that which has been lost to humanity that pre-dated Euromodernity and possibilities inherent to a tomorrow that exceeds it.

In their dialogue Depestre and Césaire address the reality that rehumanisation projects that focus primarily on social, political, and economic transformations (as Marxist projects are critiqued of doing) are half measures; they do not go the full distance. They do not tackle a foundational alienating factor in coloniality ⁵ —that of race and its profound effects on lived experience and consciousness. Said another way, social transformation movements that ignore the effects of race on the lived experience of the human, including the unique conditions of dehumanisation that the idea stimulates derived from racist philosophies, rhetorics, culture, customs, and the ubiquitous practice of racialising the human body and mind (conceptualised as ‘race-ing’ ⁶ by Cornel West) contribute to the stabilisation of race and the erasure of a human sense of self.

For these Black diaspora anticolonial thinkers in the Caribbean archipelago they join in the struggle for social, economic, and political disalienation but they go beyond that horizon. They challenge us to recognise the idea of race as central to historical processes of alienation and dehumanisation. These Black-Achipelagists carve an intellectual path toward the reclamation of the human and a human sense of self by interrogating the totality of alienations experienced in Euromodernity. In so doing they illuminate ways to unravel how race, consciousness, alienation, and dehumanisation work together and have been made to appear as enigmas (not concrete realities) in modern time. They also point the way towards methods that detoxify or break the stranglehold western logic has over consciousness and the totality of our being (in Césaire & Kelley, 2000).

It is this line of thinking that leads me to four propositions for consideration with regard to unresolved problems with inner or psychological life in Euromodernity.

In order to address the lived realities of race, alienation, and resulting dehumanisation in modern time we are required to interrogate problems with consciousness in Euromodernity.

Engagement with knowledge that emerges from the analysed lived experience of race in Euromodernity is crucial if we are to understand what has become of the human in modern history.

Interrogating alienated consciousness and developing processes of becoming conscious about the effects of Euromodernity on the human are psychological cum political acts without which human existence will continue to be trapped in Euromodern conditions of unfreedom.

For us to go the full distance, for liberation of the world and human existence to become a reality, radical transformation of consciousness itself is required.

Epistemic Problems With Western Psychological Science and Its Canonical Status

Addressing relationships between Euromodernity, alienation, race, and consciousness is integral to understanding how the West has dehumanised life on earth. It also implicates western psychological science epistemically based on its relationship to psychological phenomena that lie at the heart of the experience of being assimilated into Euromodernity and processes of alienation and dehumanisation. It raises questions that the discipline of western psychology has yet to answer.

The discipline of western psychology holds a unique place in the global order of knowledge. It is the primary epistemic source, the authoritative voice of global psychological knowledge. This is because it occupies the space of canonical thought, of ‘received knowledge’ (Belenky et al., 1986) defined as a body of knowledge perceived to be omniscient and omnipotent based on the perception that its epistemology is complete and true. This mistaken perception explains how the western body of psychological knowledge is misperceived as unerring, factual, trustworthy, and representative of what is universally known about psychological life in Euromodernity. It has grave effects on human consciousness and what human beings believe psychological life to both include and exclude in modern time. The fallacy that western psychology represents the pinnacle of human thought about psychological phenomena has resulted in the closure of people’s minds to non-western epistemologies that produce thought distinctly different from EuroAmerican points of view.

The self-appointed role of the discipline of western psychology to determine the global psychology knowledge order is a problem for multiple reasons. It acts as a linchpin in the process of human beings becoming structurally unconscious of our own dehumanisation in the face of forces such as western, racial alienation. One of the ways it achieves this goal is through epistemic deprivation—the impoverishment and withholding of the plurality of knowledge available to human beings globally. Given the failure of the discipline of western psychology and the consequences of problems it has created by excluding psychological phenomena from the global psychology canon, questions need to be asked of the discipline of western psychological science and its adherents. Questions need to be asked of the western psychology canon and its scientists because throughout its centuries long history (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010), a period of time contemporaneous with Euromodernity, its speechlessness on the relationship between consciousness and the effects of coloniality is a problem yet to be solved.

In the context of what is known and knowable about psychological life in Euromodernity but which has been made absent from the study of psychology in its western configuration I pose the following questions to the discipline of western psychology and its scientists:

Why has the western discipline of psychology evaded interrogation of the lived experience of dehumanisation, both physically and metaphysically, in Euromodernity? There is a large body of empirical evidence of psychosocial suffering in Euromodernity. The horrors human beings are experiencing in Gaza, Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine, ⁷ to name only some of the visible atrocities taking place globally at the time of this writing, are ample evidence, extensive proof of the pattern and decimation of human life which elicits no meaningful response from western psychological science.

Why has the canon of western psychology failed to include thought that interrogates relationships between race, race-ing, and psychological life in Euromodernity?

How do western psychology scientists, as self-appointed keepers of the canon, rationalise the exclusion of epistemologies that exceed their parochial concerns while declaring the western psychology canon a universal body of thought?

These and other related questions raise problems with the structures of knowledge in the discipline of western psychology itself. Central among them is the discipline’s failure to address psychological phenomena which are detrimental to all human beings, not only those of concern to western subjects and their subjectivities. Given the reality of the West’s hegemonic control over knowledge, Anibal Quijano and Ennis (2000) call to reopen the social sciences epistemically is to be heeded if the western discipline of psychology is to break its symbiotic relationship with the colonial project of psychological alienation from reality and create a platform for anticolonial epistemologies to enter the global structure of psychological theory. This paper joins with Quijano’s call and advocates for the opening of the globalised psychology canon as a means through which myriad epistemic problems in the world and within the discipline of western psychology itself can be addressed. I say ‘opening’ and not reopening because the discipline of western psychology does not enjoy a history of being open to perspectives beyond White-western epistemologies. Opening the canon is therefore a task before the discipline of western psychological science and its functionaries.

This essay approaches the epistemic erasure of knowledge we have about human consciousness within the discipline of western psychology for multiple reasons. It addresses the failures because from a human point of view they are unnecessary. Knowledge exists that could aid people in understanding and working through psychological damage produced in the wake of coloniality. I engage with the thinking produced by Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinkers as a way to address myriad lacunae in the western psychology canon because the Black-Archipelago anticolonial body of thought offers a ‘unique mode of knowledge’ (Wynter, 2022, p. 9), one that provides understandings about what has become of the human and human consciousness as a consequence of the historical process of Euromodernity.

This paper also examines processes of concealment and disguise in Euromodernity, conceptualised by the Martinican born French writer, feminist, and anticolonial activist Suzanne Césaire as ‘the great camouflage’ (2012). Processes through which anticolonial knowledge has become obscured and in which intellectual darkness has descended in Euromodernity are insidious and in need of continuous interrogation. They are forms of power that seek to trap thought in repressed states of sterility. Because procedures to mislead are psychological in nature, this essay explores how anticolonial Black-Archipelago thinkers surpassed them. In doing so, emancipatory psychological processes that liberate or disalienate consciousness in Euromodernity is also under consideration.

The aim of this review of Black-Archipelagic anticolonial psychological knowledge is multifold. It is critical of what the West has failed to consider as valid knowledge about psychological experience in modern history. And it is critical to creating a body of thought invested in accelerating understandings of psychological life in unfettered ways.

It is also to introduce readers of only western psychology literature to ideas that exist in the further reaches of thought which go beyond understandings of psychological life in Euromodernity and which are at odds with White-western epistemology and its philosophical underpinnings. The form of thought uncovered in this review shows readers of psychology theory what has and is being ignored, regulated, tamed, and disciplined in order to limit awareness about psychological phenomena in Euromodernity itself.

Without a sense of historical, intellectual contributions of the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon, without awareness of the epochal phenomenology it uniquely addresses, a reasonable reader of only the western psychology canon might wonder why Black-Archipelagic anticolonial thought that emerges from this geographic reality has a place within a global knowledge order. I raise the issue of reasonableness because epistemic racism, sexism, and genderism make unreasonable—literally unable to be thought, therefore reasoned—the idea that knowledge outside of the framework of White, cisheteropatriarchal, western epistemology is valuable. An analysis of Euromodernity from the point of view of those who live as its historical targets allows us to see why anticolonial thought belongs within the body of global knowledge that informs readers of psychology. I raise Black radical Caribbean thought within the body of western psychology because without consideration of knowledge emerging from a different set of priorities, ones tied to the realities of the human, what is currently thought of as the discipline of psychology and described as a branch of global knowledge remains grossly inadequate.

Epistemic Selectivism in Western Psychological Science

Some of the most influential texts about the effects of Euromodernity on the human soul and consciousness have been written by Black, Caribbean anticolonial thinkers. It is in Aimé Césaire’s epic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (2013), Discourse on Colonialism (2000) and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008) that relationships between the material and psychologically traumatic consequences of modern history were documented in written form (Young, 2016). In these and other texts, written primarily in the mid-twentieth century, anticolonial understandings about the loss of human freedom in Euromodernity were made visible. Western conditions of alienation aimed not only at social, political, and economic structures but also human consciousness were analysed. An archive on the deterioration of humanity grew. For those who study seminal thought arising from the Black radical Caribbean archipelago the darkness that casts a shadow over how the West succeeds in deforming life on earth is dispelled.

In spite of this illumination about what has happened to psychological experience in modern life the discipline of psychology—the institution that has announced itself as a universal science—did not, and has not, included ideas produced from this geography into its canon. It has deflected ideas germane to psychological life from entering into the framework of what is considered to be the psychological branch of global knowledge. The reason for the rejection of these ideas is not because the analysis produced by Black anticolonial thinkers in the Caribbean fails to systematically study the effects and structures of coloniality on human psychological experience. The failure to include Black thought in what is designated the discipline of psychology was, and is, because of the presumed superiority of western thought, conceptualised by the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel as ‘epistemic racism’ (2013).

The knowledge gaps about the lived experience of colonialism and coloniality within the discipline of psychology render it, not a comprehensive collection of ideas about psychological life in Euromodernity, but an ethnocentric, monocultural story riddled with epistemic selectivism. I say ‘epistemic selectivism’ because in Euromodernity, despite the reality that all humans experience an interior life and all cultures generate understandings of consciousness, globalised psychology literature refers, primarily, to ideas promulgated by the West. The deselection of psychological knowledge generated by the world-beyond-the-West empties the globalised psychology order of knowledge of vital ideas. The voids in the canon do not however signify emptiness, in and of themselves. They represent ignorance that exists within a western academic discipline, not an all-encompassing body of thought.

Through the process of epistemic racism, its tandem practices of systematically deselecting women’s knowledge (conceptualised by Ramon Grosfoguel (2013) as epistemic sexism), and non-binary people’s knowledge (epistemic genderism), the discipline of western psychology has created the conditions for readers of an ostensibly global science to be deprived of knowledge about processes and states of consciousness—ubiquitous dimensions of human experience—in Euromodernity. Because psychological science has selectively chosen to eliminate knowledge about inner life that emanates from the perspectives of people produced as Black and people whose identify is other than male from entering into its body of thought it is complicit with procedures of Euromodernity which seek to stabilise alienation and dehumanisation of non-western, not male people. The discipline’s ongoing epistemic practices align with the western project of control over knowledge (Quijano, 2007) and being (Mignolo, 2003). The practice of epistemic darkness is a form of dehumanisation precisely because it deprives the human access to its full scope of consciousness and available epistemologies. Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinking is an epistemic tradition of saying no to this structured ignorance and darkness (Aimé Césaire in Breton, 2001).

A Return to the Geography where the West Embarked on Becoming Modern

In order to address the epistemic failures of western psychology I return to the knowledge that emerged from the geography where Europe launched its project of racial and racist modern life. I offer a critique of the discipline of western psychology from a human point of view. I engage Black, Caribbean (though not exclusively), decolonial thought because it meditates—thinks carefully, deeply and clearly—on human psychological life in Euromodernity from the point of view of human beings racialised as Black. I turn toward radical Caribbean thought because to do so is in alignment with the principle of ‘changing the geography of reason’, a proposition put forward by the Jamaican-born, American philosopher Lewis R. Gordon (2011) in recognition of critical knowledge that emerges about coloniality and decoloniality from the place where Europe introduced the world to historical colonialism and ongoing coloniality.

To return to the Caribbean archipelago is to consider questions and concerns of human beings denied the recognition and experience of their full humanness. It is to face up to an eminently inhuman, blood thirsty metaphysics. It is to see that the ideological ground from which Carib Indians, Taino, and Arawak peoples native to the region (Swaby, 2006), African peoples deported and scattered along the chain of islands (Beckles, 2012), Indian and Chinese people indentured to plantation economy in the archipelago to fill the salacious need for labour post the abolition of formal slavery (Look Lai, 2010), continues to function at the level of global human world making.

A return to this place needs to go via the initial routes taken. Without a sense of the consequences of what Europe did to amass unpaid and then underpaid labour in the Antilles (before spreading this template across the earth and through time) the epistemic responses of the anticolonial Black-Archipelago may seem to appear as if out of nowhere. The Martinican poet and critical theorist Édouard Glissant and Wing (1997) captures the experience of the abyss, the catastrophe unimaginable to exiled African peoples as they crossed over from freedom to Euromodernity in the Middle Passage. For these people, their crossing was not only physical. Their metaphysical descent into this New World was at least fourfold. The social parameters of the world they fell into bore no resemblance to what they knew in Africa; the nature and qualities of it affected their consciousness and mental experience of life. This new world was strange, debilitating, destabilising, degrading, and humiliating because it was in it that they were transformed epistemically, ontologically, and against their will from being known to themselves and others as human (Wynter, 2003). It was in this and no other conception of a social world that these African people became constructed as inferiorly human through the idea of race and meaning given to the signification of, first Negro, now Black (Bell, 2024 [Forthcoming]). It was through this crossing that these people became separated and severed from their intellectual powers that they would eventually need to emancipate themselves mentally from bondage to a world built on the rule of race.

Through Glissant and Wing (1997) allegorical poem, The Open Boat, we are thrown into the scene and birthplace of unprecedented hell in human history. Imagine, if you will…

The asceticism of crossing this way the land-sea that, unknown to you, is the planet Earth, feeling a language vanish, the word of the gods vanish, and the sealed image of even the most everyday object, of even the most familiar animal, vanish. The evanescent taste of what you ate. The hounded scent of ochre earth and savannas. (Glissant & Wing, 1997, p. 7)

Consider the reality that…

Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss. The torment of those who never escaped it: straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violet belly of the ocean depths they went. But their ordeal did not die; it quickened into this continuous/discontinuous thing: the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed.8 The unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for these metamorphoses. The populations that then formed, despite having forgotten the chasm, despite being unable to imagine the passion of those who foundered there, nonetheless wove this sail (a veil). (Glissant & Wing, 1997, p. 7)

And the knowledge that…

In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose times is marked by these balls and chains gone green ⁹ . (Glissant & Wing, 1997, p. 6)

From the point of view of those who lived this entry into a new world the abyss is not only an experience, it is also a method. It is a means and habit whose intention is to permanently yoke humans to the paradigm and imagination of White-western ‘civilisation’ ¹⁰ . It is also an explanation for the corrosion of the experience of oneself as human in Euromodernity. Into the darkness of the abyss fell (and falls) consciousness (westernised and colonised) about how to live as human among other humans in the world.

The new reality that rose out of this historic catastrophe signifies the loss and failure of connection to that which had previously constructed the human as itself—idioms; mutual exchange; the ability to directly communicate with one another through shared language and therefore meaning; the touch, both physical and affective of others with whom you share a world; self-consciousness of yourself as human—ways life itself is experienced in chosen form. What disintegrates in this darkness is endless. For some, the ways knowledge is mediated and accelerates has been eviscerated.

For those who were forced to travel to relinquish their labour and creative life-force in this way, the ordeal experienced in the abyss has become a permanent part of the self. It is the source of unique types of human suffering, imagined and inflicted, physical and metaphysical, as people were forced into this new arrangement of living in ways antithetical to themselves. It brings into being a repetition of relation with the interior of the abyss; the revolving experience of being swallowed up by a tribulation that seemingly has no end. It is remarkable therefore that a body of knowledge that has taken on the mantle of representing psychological thought on a global scale notices neither the abyss nor its consequences. The failure of the discipline of western psychology to see the imperative and impulse for emancipation from the conditions of this bottomless time is what makes it an irrelevant body of thought for those who seek a path out of the darkness of this chasm.

To seek to understand this unreconciled history that destroys the integrity of the human is to work to make sense of not only the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of Euromodernity but those too of a type of consciousness that is indifferent to historicity and its continuous sufferings. It is to interrogate profound changes in inner life experienced in the ‘longue durée’ (Braudel & Wallerstein, 2009), the slowly developed social structures that have eroded humanity in Euromodernity. It is to recognise urgent psychological problems to be solved on the levels of the individual, family, community, and society.

Because the abyss is a recurring statement of what is real and true ever since the West transformed the world into its current configuration, and because the abyss signifies the cataclysmic scale of disaster for the human and more than human life on earth, this essay returns to epistemologies that sustain a relation to it. This review of Black-Archipelagic anticolonial thought follows the thinking that pierces and penetrates the epistemic silences about psychological experience of this cruel, shared, ongoing history.

Coming to Consciousness: Psychology of and for the Human

The propositions laid out for consideration earlier in this review of the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon that speaks psychology have a teleological purpose. They are intended to engage readers of the western psychology canon in a point of view intent on overcoming the alienating conditions of Euromodernity. They necessarily and simultaneously speak of and with the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon of psychological ideas and praxes that address how human beings can begin the process of disalienation and become conscious of the conditions of alienation that shape modern psychological life.

Of the plenitude of theories and concepts developed by Black, Caribbean anticolonial thinkers which are of relevance to understanding the psychological effects of Euromodernity I focus in this review on two fundamental ideas—Frantz Fanon’s (2008) sociogenic principle and the emancipatory thrust of liberated or unfettered consciousness. I have chosen these principles to make prominent important ideas that surpass the myopia of the western psychology canon. I raise these ideas for a second reason, given that some readers of decolonial theory often overlook the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon in favour of studying thought emanating from other geographies of reason.

I draw readers attention to the vital ideas of sociogeny and the decolonisation of consciousness because they are crucial if we are to grapple with the urgent problem of alienation in Euromodernity. To hone in on problems with and solutions to alienated consciousness in modern time is of historic significance to our struggle to liberate ourselves from multiple modes of alienation. The stakes for this approach are clear; they speak to the existential struggle for freedom from the conditions of Euromodernity. If we, as a species, are to move beyond and outside of the psychological conditions of Euromodernity, developing unfettered consciousness about concrete realities experienced by all human beings is an urgent task for the sake of our humanity.

There Is No Human Psyche Separate from Social Reality: Fanon’s Sociogenic Principle

As far back as 1952, when Frantz Fanon first published Black Skin, White Masks, he addressed complex, interconnected problems to be solved with Euromodernity from the point of view of the human racialised as Black. In his blistering critique of the conditions of Euromodernity Fanon raised myriad epistemic, ontological, and ethical issues simultaneously. He offered not only empirical evidence of the psychological damage inflicted by race in coloniality, he opened the door to a critique of the structures of consciousness in Euromodernity which necessarily implicates knowledge ordering practices of the discipline of western psychology itself.

Fanon (2008) tied what we know and understand, or more accurately what we are barred from interrogating and grasping about consciousness, to western epistemology. He revealed epistemic obstructions that stand in the way of generating knowledge and understanding of realities unique to Euromodernity imposed by western psychological science and its philosophy. Through his critique of the hold the discipline of western psychology has over what is considered to be psychological phenomena, Fanon demonstrates how western logic limits the study of psychological realities. He illuminates how western psychological science remains indifferent to psychological realities experienced in Euromodernity that are not of concern to disciples of western philosophy cum psychology.

Fanon (2008) unlocked the closed door of the western psychology framework of knowledge and inquiry. Because, in Euromodernity, the discipline of western psychology has chosen as its primary object of inquiry issues related to individual, biocentric psychological experience it has deselected multiple lines of intellectual discovery. Through this insight and his conceptualisation of psychological phenomena that exceeds western thought Fanon opened the door toward ‘a new object of knowledge’ (Wynter, 1995, p. 31), and with it a ‘new conception of the human’ (p. 31) was born.

Fanon’s (2008) new epistemic category introduces the facticity that there is no human psyche separate from social and cultural reality. He writes,

Reacting against the constitutionalizing trend at the end of the 19th century, Freud demanded that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He replaced the phylogenetic theory by an ontogenetic approach. We shall see that the alienation of the black man is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny. ¹¹ (Fanon, 2008, p. xv)

Fanon’s (2008) intervention, to place the factors of race, coloniality, and alienation together under psychological analysis was and remains radical. It is fundamental to our ability to understand the conditions and depth to which the human has lost its freedom to exist as itself in the modern world. Through the idea of sociogeny what is submerged in consciousness—relations between psychological, social, and historical forces—become available for interrogation as a complex whole. The value of the sociogenic approach is not solely psychological, it is crucial for political purposes as well. It was through Fanon’s psychological analysis of the effects of Euromodernity on the human that he was then able to make radical contributions to the global, political, anticolonial project (Greedharry, 2008).

The Jamaican philosopher and anticolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter, in the seminal paper, Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of ‘Identity’ and What It Is Like to be ‘Black’ (1999) develops the concept of sociogeny into the ‘sociogenic principle’. Wynter’s theory, that the Euromodern definition of the human in biological terms is only part of the truth of our identity leads to the reconceptualisation of the human as both ‘bios and logos’ (Wynter in Proud Flesh, 2006, p. 13)—physical and metaphysical in nature. Our existence, as humans, is constituted of lived biological, social, historical, cultural, and psychological experience.

Taken together, Fanon (2008) and Wynter’s (1995) radical and self-evident proposition of sociogeny opens the way for us to become conscious of human existence from an anticolonial point of view. By reconceptualising what it means to be human, outside of the biocentric, hyper individualistic parameters of western science, questions can be asked about myriad social determinants of the human condition in Euromodernity. And answers can be sought for how to address the totality of alienations humans face in modern time. In the hands of these Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinkers problems Euromodernity has created for human existence, which includes how we have been separated, through consciousness, from the social and cultural sources of our being, is equal not subordinate, to problems produced by historical materialism.

The Emancipatory Thrust of Consciousness

The task before the human, the starting point for dismantling the conditions of Euromodernity from which alienation arises, is not first to change political and economic structures out in the social world. The first step toward disalienation is the transformation of human consciousness. The way forward, as Aimé Césaire described in 1967 when he and René Depestre sat down to talk is first ‘to create a new language…a new means of expression…a weapon that exploded the French language…[that] shook up absolutely everything…because the traditional forms—burdensome, overused forms—were crushing me’. (Aimé Césaire, 2000, p 83). The fountain of radical social transformation is the development of unfettered consciousness cum speech, liberated from the dead weight western reasoning places on our minds.

Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinkers in the mid-20th century were concerned with relationships between alienation, consciousness, and expression because for people produced as Black in Euromodernity we have been alienated from knowing and speaking from our own sources of knowledge and understanding. We have been compelled to think and speak through the ideas, rhetoric, discourses, language, idioms, and consciousness of the West.

During the interwar period in Europe White anticolonial activists who recognised impediments to consciousness and freedom created the surrealist movement. In an essay titled 1943: Surrealism and Us, Suzanne Césaire (2012a, 2012b) makes explicit common ground shared between European surrealists and Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinkers who enjoyed a mutual understanding of what has become of consciousness, speech, and political action in Euromodernity.

Surrealist philosophy and praxes are vital to the emancipation of the human in Euromodernity because they offer a means of addressing alienation of consciousness. Suzanne Césaire saw that ‘…the most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called Western reason’ (Suzanne Césaire, 2012a, 2012b, p 35). Surrealist activity…the only one that can liberate humankind by revealing to it the unconscious, one of the activities that will aid in liberating people by illuminating the blind myths that have led them to this point’ (p. 37).

Anticolonialists, restless for liberation from Euromodernity, excavate thought submerged under western rationale in search of knowledge and understanding of the meaning of human existence in modernity. They understand liberated consciousness to be an emancipatory weapon; a method through which human beings can awaken from internalised, anesthetising deceptions fomented by western ideology. Surrealism is an anticolonial praxis,

…which assigns itself the goal of exploring and expressing systematically the forbidden zones of the human mind, in order to neutralize them; an activity which desperately seeks to give humankind the means of reducing the ancient antimonies that are ‘the true alembic of suffering’; a power, the only one, that allows us to reconnect with ‘this original, unique faculty [of mind], that the primitive and child still retain traces of, that lifts the spell of the impassable barrier between the inner world and the outer world’. (Suzanne Césaire, 2012a, 2012b, pp. 34-35).

Without the ‘practice of abandoning control and allowing the unconscious to speak’ (Young, 2022, p. 16) initially experienced as ‘a strange, unrecognizable universe’ (p. 17) liberation from the stranglehold western logic has over our awareness is out of reach. Unshackling consciousness, liberating thought is ‘the prelude to the act’ (Joby Fanon in Khalfa & Young, 2022, p. 19) of social and political emancipation from the Euromodern abyss.

An Embrace of the Principle of Open Epistemologies: Concluding Thoughts

In this review of Black-Archipelago anticolonial thinking I have positioned authors of its canon as subjects who speak psychological theory. I have done so despite the fact that within the western psychology canon Black-Archipelago subjects have been summarily excluded from contributing to the global knowledge order of psychological science. The idea that people of the Black-Archipelago speak reflects empirical reality. Yet, impediments exist to Black-Archipelago anticolonial knowledge from entering into the global knowledge order.

In the seminal postcolonial essay titled Can the Subaltern Speak?, published in 1968 by the Indian literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she addresses the experience of people produced as subaltern (vs. western) who are declared ahistorical and mute. Not because this is an empirical truth, but because of the power of western epistemology to define, deselect and therefore exclude women ¹² from membership in the category of those who speak.

I raise Spivak’s (1988) theory on conditions of speakability here because the loss of being heard to speak, while doing so, is a structural condition of alienation experienced by subaltern people in Euromodernity. It is used to undermine the non-western human’s sense of self as a knower and speaker of knowledge that emerges from geographies beyond western reason.

This essay argues for liberation from Euromodern forms of alienation and epistemic silencing. It promotes an embrace of the principle and praxis of open epistemologies within globalised canons of thought. Given the history of Euromodern epistemic silencing and knowledge we now have about its consequences, it is up to adherents of western psychological science—the people who stand guard at the gate of the canon of imperious psychological theory—to begin the process of evaluating their relationship to psychological knowledge derived from geographies cum epistemologies beyond the West. As this paper reasons, opening the epistemically racist, sexist, and gendered universalised psychology canon to thought that has been subalternised is a problem to be solved by western psychologists who hold the keys to unlock access to the globalised psychology canon.

Ways to open the gates of knowledge toward thought that has interrogated our shared history from the point of view of the human are available, should agents of western psychological science wish to participate in a truly global psychology epistemology project. In the meantime, the Black-Archipelago anticolonial canon is available for those who wish to study psychological phenomena in Euromodernity from the point of view of the human.