Epistemic Decolonization by D. A. Wood

Author:D. A. Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030499624
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3 On the Dynamics of Truth and Falsity

How is it that, for Fanon, it is possible that “Consciousness stumbles upon partial, finite, and shifting truths” on both sides of the colonial divide while at the same time colonialism’s “everyday reality is a tissue of lies” in which even medical objectivity is nearly always-already vitiated?44 In this section, I give an account of this seeming contradiction in order to demonstrate what a Fanonian sociodiagnostics of the dynamics of truth and falsity entails. Truth, falsity, and other epistemological concepts that share a family resemblance to these terms (e.g., lies, objectivity, honesty, and justification) occur throughout Fanon’s oeuvre. In what follows, I briefly focus on the dynamics of truth and falsity considered in their propositional, scientific-theoretical, gestural, behavioral, and sociopolitical domains. Such analyses allow one not only to understand the third paradoxical question, but also to glimpse an approach to decolonizing knowledge that avoids epistemic relativism. The argument contributes to an ongoing discussion of the politics of truth in Fanon’s work.45

For Fanon, descriptive propositions constitute one form of signification with true or false dimensions. In the context of analyzing the role of the radio in revolutionary Algeria, he writes,Under these conditions, claiming to have heard the Voice of Algeria was, in a certain sense, distorting the truth, but it was above all the occasion to proclaim one’s clandestine participation in the essence of the Revolution. It meant making a deliberate choice, though it was not explicit during the first months, between the enemy’s congenital lie and the people’s own lie, which suddenly acquired a dimension of truth.”46

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