Critical Reading: FROM DACHAU WITH LOVE: How to read George Jackson … w/Frantz Fanon?

Critical Reading Series: Part IV 

FROM DACHAU WITH LOVE: How to read George Jackson … w/Frantz Fanon?

Led by Greg Thomas

Are we “literate” in George Jackson and Frantz Fanon?  Even the most devoted readers of Comrade George would be shocked at what they don’t know about Soledad Brother, his first collection of prison writings published in 1970.  There he wrote, for its opening autobiographical letter (which was cut up and censored by white liberal editors without his knowledge or permission), “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.”  He also “met” Fanon, of course, who has himself been grossly misread and misappropriated by academic criticism that continues to avoid George Jackson altogether by contrast.  Quiet as it’s kept, Fanon wrote at length of the “brotherhood of the prison’s quicklime,” especially in The Wretched of the Earth. while Comrade George would declare himself a diehard “Fanonist” in his incarcerated revolutionary practice.  So how do we read these two titans of Black Radical Tradition, one half century later, against all historical falsifications?  And, indeed, what lessons lie in such considerations for Black texts, Black politics, and Black readings in general?