The Affective Politics of Racial Mis-interpellation

Abstract

This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon's writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon's attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a 'new universality' as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon's search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I analyse how this difference between an affective 'anti' and an intellectual 'alter' arises in Fanon's analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpella..