I bring these two together (Fanon’s critique of a narrow nationalism, and Glissant’s vision for a composite community) because they ground themselves on alternative ways of thinking about human relationality. In these alternatives, I find a meaning of national community (and nationalism, more generally) that merits the attention of not only scholars of the human condition, but of citizens of a world that is, in the words of Paul Gilroy, “increasingly divided but also convergent”.

The Composite Community -Thinking Through Fanon's Critique of a Narrow Nationalism
Critical Philosophy of Race
VOL 6, NO. I, 2018
Copyright© 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
by Kris Sealey, 2018
Abstract This article presents Édouard Glissant’s account of a composite community as an articulation of Frantz Fanon’s alternative, de-colonial conception of the nation. It shows that, subsequent to Fanon’s critique of the xenophobia and racism of a narrow nationalism (found in The Wretched of theE arth), we are left with a conception of a national consciousness that registers with what Glissant names, in Poetics of Relation, a composite community in relation. Both accounts ground community in a foundation of difference, process and dynamism, all of which is carried into a collective identity, without the reductive homogenizing practices of most nation building endeavors. As such, the article argues that Glissant’s work is positioned to underscore what, in Fanon’s understanding of national culture, is meant to protect the living dynamism of a people from a chauvinistic ultra-nationalism. Similarly, the work of The Wretched of the Earth can be used to take Glissant’s alternative political ontology into the arena of thinking the nation otherwise.