In his 2003 address to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria), ‘Fanon and the Possibility of Postcolonial Critical Imagination’, Ato Sekyi-Otu draws attention to the ‘demonstrable differences in situations of reading, alternative hermeneutic circumstances, always the province of finite histories and particular spaces of political existence’. No ‘situations of reading’ better illuminate such historically and geographically situated differences than Jean-Paul Sartre's ([1961] 2004b) and Homi K. Bhabha's (2004) readings of Frantz Fanon's iconic text, The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004). Both penned prefatory texts to it, Sartre a Preface to the original French edition, Les Damnés de la Terre (Sartre 1961), and Bhabha a Foreword to the English edition of 2004 (Bhabha 2004). Shards of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977) perforate both paratexts; they are plain to see in Sartre's Hegel-inflected encounters, but difficult to spot in Bhabha's text with its avoidance of such inflections. Sartre reads Fanon in an international Cold War setting, anxiously grappling with the politics of decolonisation in Africa and East Asia in the late 1950s. Bhabha (re)reads Sartre and Fanon from a very different time and place, defined by the economic globalisation of the new millennium. Sartre's dramatically combative tone forces the reader to recognise in Fanon's call for Algeria's liberation, uttered on the brink of independence, the moment in which the ‘Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice’ (Sartre [1961] 2004b, p. xlvi). More than a generation later, Bhabha, citing an interview with Stuart Hall (Bhabha 2004, p. viii) reappraises with hindsight what had become, in Hall's words, the ‘Bible of decolonisation’; he considers The Wretched of the Earth to be a handbook that still speaks to the ‘dispossessed’ (2004, p. xl). In his Foreword, ‘Framing Fanon’, and leaning heavily on David Macey's magisterial biography (Macey 2001), he presents Fanon's life and legacy as driven by ‘the fraught and fervent desire for freedom’ (Bhabha 2004, p. xli).