Fanon’s Ship’s Journals: The Logbook of Decolonisation

Cuming, E ORCID: 0000-0003-0378-1474 and Menozzi, F Fanon’s Ship’s Journals: The Logbook of Decolonisation. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 48 (4). pp. 45-55. ISSN 0252-8169 (Accepted)

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Abstract

This essay adopts the image of the ship’s logbook (“journal de bord”) to reinterpret anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s writings from a blue humanities perspective. This image was important to Fanon, as he wrote a form of logbook in the summer of 1960 during a trip to Mali. In 1953, the image of the ship’s logbook was adopted by Fanon for his weekly ward journal during his work at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria. The logbook can be seen as an important formal and stylistic choice that resonates across Fanon’s oeuvre. Fanon redefines the “journal de bord” as a decolonising genre, countering the central role of these textual forms in the economics of colonialism and the slave trade. This essay hence reimagines and resituates Fanon’s work in the tradition of logbook writing while at the same time reconsidering the logbook within the history of a colonial and capitalist modernity.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	2005 Literary Studies; 4705 Literary studies
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions:	Humanities and Social Science
Date of acceptance:	19 August 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	2 September 2025
Date Deposited:	02 Sep 2025 09:47
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2025 10:00
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27068

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