Body-Territory: Fanon’s Phenomenology and the Rediscovery of Africa through Literature and Corporality

Abstract

The split between body, territory, and race stems from the fragmentation inherent in the logical-formal horizon of modern Western and Eurocentric science. This results in the dispossession of the body in favor of the mind (reason), producing dissociations that hinder the understanding of everyday racial experiences from the standpoint of corporeality. In this sense, African philosophies and literature—operating beyond the formal limits imposed by Western science—are capable of provoking and rediscovering powerful literary images that converge toward the ontological dimensions of Black diasporic bodies, thus reshaping ancestral reconnections with Africa. Drawing on phenomenological elements found in the works of Frantz Fanon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and considering literature as a shared space of reflection for both thinkers, this study seeks to foreground corporeality itself as the genesis of distinct territorialities, which we evoke here as body-territory.