“Cops, the harbingers of the enemy”
Discussing the Relevance of Fanon’s Literatures of Combat in N.K. Jemisin’s “The City Born Great.”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/spectrum98Abstract
Frantz Fanon’s rebound book Wretched of the Earth discusses his theories and understandings of decolonization, specifically the role of art and culture and how it is affected by a colonizer. In this essay, I analyze whether his theories can be applied to N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great,” from her collection of short stories How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, which considers the diaspora, not the colonized nations that Fanon considers in his own writings. Through her reflection of the realities of a people, and her portrayal of an “awakener” of the people, I conclude that although Jemisin does write literature of combat, a term coined by Fanon to include anti-colonial writing and art, she does so in a way that uniquely reflects the African-American diaspora that “The City Born Great” considers and reflects.
Downloads
Published
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Madeleine Beaulieu
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Spectrum encourages authors to publish their work under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the Author(s) for the original creation. Authors may, however, choose to have their work distributed under any of the Creative Commons licenses currently available by specifying their preferred licence in the publication agreement. The applicable Creative Commons license icon will appear on the title page of each published submission. A description of the Creative Commons licences is available here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
