“Satan is Black” – Frantz Fanon’s Juridico-Theology of Racialisation and Damnation

Abstract

Recent critical legal scholarship has shown the significance of colonialism for emergence of modern international law.¹ Paralleling, sometimes interweaving, with this post-colonial/decolonial reading has been a “religious turn” in which scholars highlight the persistence of the theological-political within the ostensible secularity of law.² Frantz Fanon has much to offer both lines of scholarship. This article revisits the work of Fanon so as to illuminate the significance of his understanding of colonized/racialized identities as “damned” for contemporary juridical scholarship. Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, when read alongside the canonical literary account of the “fall,” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, offers an account of the juridico-theological process constructing an ideal of “humanity” through turning particular subjects into deific surrogates and others into the “damned.” This article develops understandings of postcolonial/decolonial international law, international law and political/juridical theology as well as critiquing the “humanitarianism” of contemporary international legal discourse. Moreover, it helps to establish the necessity of reading Fanon as a thinker of cross-disciplinary significance.