4 - The Failure of Revolutionary Humanism: Reading Wannous with Fanon

Summary

This chapter focuses on The Rape, Sa’dallah Wannous’ 1989 play in which he broke his literal silence after almost a decade of not writing plays. It reads Wannous’ work in tandem with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of violence in postcolonial societies in The Wretched of the Earth--which appears in Arabic translation among the books in Wannous’ personal library housed at the American University of Beirut--as a means of assessing Wannous’ significance now, after the uprisings that began in 2011 in a number of Arab countries that led to violent state repression and war. The chapter argues that, like Fanon, Wannous warned that authoritarianism and “blind nationalism” would severely undermine the development of a self-critical and realistic national consciousness as a basis for a democratic postcolonial future.