Dr. Ronnie Yearwood is a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies (Cave Hill). He is the convenor of the Caribbean Public Law and Policy Research Group (CPLP Research Group) at UWI (CH), Faculty of Law.
This paper will be published in the Palgrave Handbook on Frantz Fanon.
Frantz Fanon is a foundational radical decolonial philosopher. Yet despite his Caribbean origins and his work calling for a radical dismantling of colonialism, Fanon remains marginal within legal scholarship. Law is often taught and practised as the application of precedent, functioning as a “juridical technology” that stabilises inherited orders and reproduces authority favouring continuity, but can limit political and legal imagination. Law as juridical technology can lock in the past and lock out the future. Fanon asks us to radically disrupt this approach by revealing law’s coloniality and violence that creates and sustains hierarchy, exclusion, and the denial of humanity.
This paper argues that contemporary Caribbean constitutional reform fails as decolonisation because decolonisation is treated as institutional adjustment of existing systems rather than as epistemological and ontological rupture. Republican transitions and constitutional reform commissions may modify constitutional structures, while leaving intact the Westminster constitutionalism.
Drawing on Fanon’s concept of the people as demiurge (their own agents of liberation and transformation) and Charles W. Mills’ notion of smadditizin’ (the struggle to be “recognized as somebody (smaddy) in a world where, primarily because of race, it is denied), the paper advances a Caribbean‑rooted framework of decolonial constitutionalism. On this account, decolonial constitutionalism is not merely reform of colonial juridical technology and systems, but a collective re‑founding of political community that confronts law’s role in (re)producing coloniality and centres the people as constituent power.
