Frantz Fanon on Violence and Religion

Posted on June 3, 2026 by PLT Staff

On April 2, 2026, Professor Vincent Lloyd of Villanova University paid a virtual visit to my undergraduate course Religion 3730, “Conversations in Religion”

In his lecture, Professor Lloyd focused on Fanon’s ideas about religion, violence, and the tradition of Black atheism – and pressed the question of how religious languages of reconciliation and more radical, abolitionist gestures of uprooting domination collide in Fanon’s account of decolonization.

Lloyd shows how Fanon’s account of colonialism across different discourses – through the psychological, political, spatial, moral, and theological –depicts two incommensurable worlds, that of the colonizer and the colonized, for which ordinary frameworks of dialogue, reform, and reconciliation no longer suffice.

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