Patrick D. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central State University and a recipient of a 2025 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) HBCU Faculty Grant. He is the author of Cypherpunk Ethics: A Radical Ethics for the Digital Age (2022) and a contributor to The Rhetoric of Fascism (2022). His research focuses on the history of Africana philosophy, applied ethics, and digital technologies. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, he discusses his newest work, Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics: A Cinematic Exploration (2026), which develops an anticolonial methodology for political philosophy and fleshes it out using Hollywood cinema.
What is your work about? And why did you feel the need to write it?
Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics draws upon Africana anticolonial philosophy—especially the work of Frantz Fanon and two of his most influential interpreters, Eldridge Cleaver and Sylvia Wynter—to develop a basic analytical model for doing anticolonial political theory. I wanted to show that there is something distinctive, something special, to be found in this tradition of thought that has not been fully appreciated by philosophers and theorists in other fields. I also wanted to approach the topic and the argument in a way that has perhaps not been seen before, an original, eclectic approach that takes readers out of their comfort zones and moves conversations in new directions.
The book is original and eclectic in a few ways. First, it relies on Hollywood films rather than historical and contemporary events for the “content” of the analysis. This approach offers both the reader and me some critical distance from our assumptions about society and our affective attachments to prevailing theories. Second, it draws upon Algirdas Greimas’ semiotic square, a once-prominent semiotic method of analysis in literary criticism that has fallen out of favor in recent decades. The semiotic square works in tandem with the anticolonial methodology I develop to help highlight the relational implications of the terms of analysis and to emphasize the polysemic nature of those terms. Third, the book reaches many conclusions that are simply incommensurable with the kinds of conclusions we arrive at when using predominant approaches, like Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism. While these conclusions may seem surprising or even shocking, my aim is to suggest a path toward new ways of thinking.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
My aims in the book are rooted in an earlier project in which I argued that Fanon’s anticolonialism cannot be and should not be assimilated into what is broadly known as postcolonial theory. In my view, anticolonialism enables us to reimagine philosophical anthropology and social ontology in ways that postcolonialism does not. As my work has evolved over the years, I have extended this critique of postcolonial theory to other schools of thought, arguing that neither Fanon nor anticolonialism more broadly can be reduced to something else. It was also not my first venture into film criticism, so it was exciting to return to the kind of culturally engaged writing that I love.
This book makes two contributions to my larger project. First, it revises and updates an earlier articulation of what I call the colonial ontology of Empire, a world in which homo sapiens are divided into colonizer and colonized, being and nonbeing, the human and the non-human, the ontological and the nontological. Within this colonial ontology, it becomes necessary to rethink all the categories of thought that have dominated social and political thought since the 1970s: race, class, sex, gender, sexuality. By adopting the sociogenic principle offered by Fanon and developed by Cleaver and Wynter, I hope to contribute to the ongoing study of dehumanization.
Second, the book illustrates the interpretive power of my anticolonial approach using Hollywood cinema instead of the “real world.” In the past, I have found that if I start using anticolonialism to explain some historical or contemporary social phenomena, I am told that “intersectionality already does that,” or “Marxism answers that,” or “that’s what postcolonialism has been saying.” In other words, most people think that their preferred theory already has the answer, and it becomes difficult to challenge those theories by merely appealing to “facts.” However, I have had much better luck demonstrating the originality of anticolonial thought when discussing films, because most people are less guarded about how they understand the meaning of movies. So, I curated a set of films that, when viewed in a particular arrangement, help guide readers through the basic insights of anticolonial thinking as I understand it. By demonstrating how this Fanonian anticolonialism offers far more powerful and dynamic interpretations of films than existing postcolonial, feminist, and Afro-pessimist readings, I hope to make at least a few readers more open to new methodologies.
How is your work relevant to historical ideas?
The history of philosophy is rich with material to work with, but I do not feel compelled to be a disciple of any thinker or school of thought. I believe it is incumbent upon philosophers to play with ideas and, in a sense, purposefully and actively violate or contradict orthodoxies in the hope of discovering something new. But rather than confront historical ideas head-on, I do so indirectly through alternative interpretations of films.
For example, in the book, I challenge feminist interpretations of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and Quintin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015). In both films, the main female characters—Gwen Stacy and Daisy Domergue—die in the end. Feminist critics have argued that these characters are subjected to patriarchal domination or even outright misogynistic violence. I argue, however, that these characters both adopt an anthropology of white womanhood and that each film tells a different story about that anthropological genre.
In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Gwen Stacy takes on the role of a white woman vigilante, assisting the white male vigilante, Spiderman, in confronting Electro and Green Goblin, who are together coded as the Black-Jewish threat to white civilization. Gwen dies while defending colonial society, portending a lesson for white supremacy—white colonial domination is impossible without the help of white women, but white women’s participation in such domination risks their safety.
In The Hateful Eight, by contrast, a southern, white male Confederate outlaw, Chris Mannix, rejects an alliance with the white woman Daisy Domergue, ultimately siding with a northern, Black male union officer, Marquis Warren. Mannix and Warren hang Domergue at the film’s climax, inspiring the denunciations mentioned above. But when we reject the essentialist reading of Domergue-as-woman and adopt the semiotic reading of Domergue-as-white-womanhood, we understand that Mannix’s character arc is made possible because he abandons the basic tenets of white supremacist culture, including the belief that pure white women must be defended from Black rapists. Mannix overcomes his attachment to basic genres of colonial anthropology and thereby makes possible what Fanon calls a new humanity.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
If you had asked me this question in my early years of studying philosophy, I would have said that I hoped to disprove every competing theory and finally set the world on the right track to solve humanity’s problems. But the latent romanticism of my younger philosophical self has been tempered by my study of Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science. In his embrace of epistemic pluralism, Feyerabend argues that the best way to advance scientific thinking—and to that I would add philosophical thinking—is to have as many viable theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches as possible, for theories are truly tested not against “the facts” but against other theories.
Following this line of thinking, my preferred way to advance philosophy is not to “debunk” theories with empirical evidence—perhaps an ultimately impossible task—but to offer alternative theories that bring to the surface the basic assumptions of accepted schools of thought. Once those assumptions are brought to the surface, they can be examined, critiqued, challenged, and abandoned if necessary. By articulating a distinctly anticolonial method, I hope to denaturalize the presuppositions of Marxism, feminism, intersectionality, Afro-pessimism, and the like. For me, it is when we subject assumptions rather than conclusions to critical examination that we get to the root of what philosophy is all about. And I think partisans of other theories ought to welcome a rival theory like the one I offer, for it opens new space for conversation and provides new ways to refine existing theories for those who do not accept my position.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
Well, Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics represents the future of my past, for I conceived of the book more than a decade ago, when I was a graduate student teaching a summer section of Introduction to Philosophy. The idea stuck with me for years; it felt like something I had to work through rather than around. I think of the book as a sort of prolegomena to any future anticolonialism, at least in my own work.
Now that the book is finished, I am moving on to two other projects. First, I have been researching Eldridge Cleaver for almost a decade, and I found that philosophers have not seriously grappled with his anticolonial social and political philosophy. I am working on an edited collection of his rare and unpublished works; I am also working on a manuscript that examines his views on philosophical anthropology, political theory, social change, technology, and communication.
Second, I have also been working on developing new approaches to the internal colonialism thesis and to methods for neocolonial analysis. These projects, extensions of the method I outline in the book, facilitate the adaptation of anticolonialism to the domestic political scene in the United States and to the so-called “postcolonial” (neoliberal, postmodern, etc.) area. Many commentators have claimed internal colonialism has been debunked, and even those who embrace it have not developed a sufficient model of its use. Similarly, there is still some talk of neocolonialism in the academy today, but few scholars identify it as an alternative to the criticism of “neoliberalism” that had swept academia in recent decades.
And of course, the cinephile in me would love to make time for more film criticism.
Patrick Anderson
Patrick D. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central State University and editor of the WikiLeaks Bibliography. His research focuses on the history of Africana philosophy and applied ethics and technology. He is the author of Cypherpunk Ethics: A Radical Ethics for the Digital Age (2022) and Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics: A Cinematic Exploration (2026).
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
