Fanon praised DDT as liberation metaphor while Carson condemned it as poison

Evidence

Let me ground this point by referring, in conjunction, to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In 1962 Silent Spring jolted a broad international public into an awareness of the protracted, cryptic, and indiscriminate casualties inflicted by dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Yet, just one year earlier, Fanon, in the opening pages of Wretched of the Earth, had comfortably invoked DDT as an affirmative metaphor for anticolonial violence: he called for a DDT-filled spray gun to be wielded as a weapon against the “parasites” spread by the colonials’ Christian church. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 29

Categorization

• XREF: The Carson-Fanon juxtaposition shows how anticolonial frameworks and environmental frameworks can collide — both central to the settler-colonial/eco-justice strands.
• SEED: An essay angle: the missed rendezvous between the anticolonial liberation moment and the nascent environmental justice moment, and what it cost both movements.