In this chapter, I will argue that we need to return to African and Afro-Caribbean revolutionary thought if we are to reconsider the meaning of the human beyond what Sylvia Wynter has called the “episteme of man” that inevitably liminalizes the damned as beyond the reach of the hegemonic conception of the human. Even once we have made this return to African and Afro-Caribbean revolutionary thought, we still need to separate out its struggle for a radical mutation of the human from the dominant recent view of human rights which, as a number of thinkers have argued, is actually a rejection of this revolutionary intellectual heritage.

Frantz Fanon’s work is so significant to us today because it continues to give us an entirely different philosophical perspective on the ethical and political significance of a new way of being human together. Fanon both rejects traditional European narratives of why humans are unique and deserving of dignity and those anti- or post-humanists who argue that we are already beyond the human, either through evolution or in a political and ethical sense. To put it simply: the colonial situation is one of systematic dehumanization. The human, however, is not a set of attributes, whether real or ideal. Instead, what it means to be human together in a world beyond the terrifying brutalities of colonialism is only to be found in the revolutionary struggle itself.