Abstract

I show how the concept of horizon, understood with resources from hermeneutics and phenomenology, can account for the fluid meaning of race and adaptative mechanisms of racism. I do so by examining how the horizon concept informs Frantz Fanon’s understanding of race and racism in his critical descriptions of the lived, oppressive experiences of them. Fanon reveals that a racial horizon structures racial experience by shaping the world around us that affects our experience. For Fanon, the racial horizon as a structure of experience is neither natural nor interpretively or epistemologically neutral, but it is saturated with power (horizonpower), developed in the history of colonialism. First, I discuss the horizon concept via a provisional method of ‘critical phenomenology,’ in light of Fanon’s distinctive phenomenological- psychiatric diagnosis of the horizon of human experience. Second, to clarify the role of horizon in constituting non-essentialized and anti-naturalized racial identities, I turn to Linda Martín Alcoff’s notion of race as an ‘interpretive hermeneutic horizon.’ Finally, I examine Fanon’s notion of racial horizons in Black Skin, White Masks, in critical dialogue with both: 1) Alia Al-Saji’s reading of the colonial horizon as a temporal longue durée, and 2) the philosophical context of Fanon’s ‘racial horizon.’ This includes Sartre’s diagnosis of antisemitism through the blocked horizon of the racialized, as well as Beauvoir’s transformation of horizon into an ethics of ambiguity. Fanon radically transforms these understandings of horizon and pushes the boundary of this concept to overflow itself at its limit towards a decolonial horizon of freedom.