This dissertation reconstructs the receptions of Marxism within a strand of twentieth-century anti-colonial thought, which was particularly influenced by the humanist concern in Karl Marx’s writings and the subsequent French engagements with Marxist humanism. The seminal thinkers of this global humanist tradition of anti-colonial Marxism, I argue, were the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, his one-time student and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and the Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati, who was profoundly influenced by both Césaire and Fanon. These thinkers’ humanist approach to Marxism was informed by their uptake of the concept of alienation as a rich theoretical resource to critique colonialism.

The concept of alienation within Marx is a Hegelian inheritance, grounded in a view of humans as actional beings, who humanize themselves and their world through their self-externalization, such as, through work and art. Under conditions of capitalist modernity, human activity loses this humanizing role: subsumed under the logic of capital accumulation and untethered from the concrete individual, it becomes a means of human alienation. This historical understanding of alienation is taken up by thinkers from the colonized world to theorize the alienating quality immanent to capital in the colonized world. The dissertation charts how this particular Marxist concept becomes a powerful heuristic of anticolonial critique, bringing to light the ways in which colonial and neocolonial economic structures, which are accompanied by racial and cultural formations, turn human beings into passive things or tools and preclude them from partaking in a social universe of their own making. By emphasizing the human ability to act of one's own accord, the dissertation shows, the concept of alienation also served to revitalize Marxism in the colonized world by prompting original and critical adaptations of Marxist theory in the Third World; this is encapsulated by Aimé Césaire’s idea of “tropical Marxism”—a Marxism that is creatively reinvented by colonized peoples so that it speaks to the specific conditions of economic underdevelopment that they inhabit within the global system of capital.

The dissertation shows how the concept of “alienation” acquired, for various historical reasons, a more political and revolutionary valence in the colonial world compared to its trajectory in the annals of twentieth century Western critical theory. At the same time, this strand of anticolonial critique was engaged with, and drew upon, French critical discourses, from existential Marxism to left Catholicism, which were themselves influenced by the Marxist theory of alienation. To bring these intellectual threads to light, the dissertation situates Césaire, Fanon, and Shariati within the twentieth century French intellectual context, highlighting the intellectual links forged during Césaire’s stay in Paris during the 1930s, Fanon’s in late 1940s and early 1950s, and Shariati’s in late 1950s and early1960s. The project thus interweaves close readings of primary sources in Persian, French, and English with a historical study of intellectual traditions within France and their trajectory in the colonial conditions of Martinique, Algeria and Iran. By tracing the shifting meanings and movements of the Marxist concept of alienation within the Western and the colonized world, the dissertation illuminates a distinct chapter of the Marxist tradition and makes further contributions to ongoing debates in critical theory and postcolonial theory.