Ebook: Rethinking Fanon : the continuing dialogue

The consciousness of self is not the closing of the door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee.

Fanon

Fanon was at the center: to the left, Sekyi-Otu’s Dialectic of Experi- ence; to the right, Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture; and below Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White’s Fanon: A Critical Reader. This was the window of my local bookstore this past summer— with the African-style multicolored covers of the new editions of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Toward the African Revolution on one level, and Black Skin, White Masks on another. Though it only stayed that way for a couple of weeks, and the bookstore later closed down, it was long enough to give notice of Fanon’s status in the late 1990s.

Reading Edward W. Said’s essay “Travelling Theory,” and his essay in this volume “Travelling Theory Revisited,” might lead one to ask what has been lost now that Fanon, removed from his own cultural context, is heard mainly in English and in the uni- versity setting. Does Fanon have relevance beyond the Anglo- American academy? Whereas Fanon’s own traveling from Martinique to France to Algeria and abandonment of his French citizenship were marks of his development as a revolutionary, and his trip to Washington marked his death, it is in the United States that the most vocal rebirth of Fanonism is evident. The twenty-five or so years of the discussion about Fanon in the English-speaking world represented in this volume should be contrasted with the relative lack of discus- sion of Fanon in French.’ Yet, wherever studied, Fanon demands an active engagement, and as Edouard Glissant put it in Caribbean Dis- course, this is perhaps his enduring quality and challenge, and per- haps also one reason why he has been forgotten closer to “home”:

It is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, the friend, or simply the associate of a fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas .. . to take full responsibility for a complete break.

Rethinking Fanon represents different ways this responsibility has been manifested across various fields of inquiry and the ways in which a complete break has been interpreted and resisted. The first essays of part one represent a period of Fanon studies close to Fanon’s life and provide an important basis for understanding Fanon. Emmanuel Hansen (chapter 1) and Tony Martin (chapter 2) are concerned with setting the record straight and correcting falla- cious assertions about Fanon’s life. Readers interested in a political biography of Fanon’s fascinating but short life will find Hansen's chapter particularly illuminating. Both chapters also situate Fanon in Marxism, négritude, Pan-Africanism, and the historical context of postwar decolonization, specifically the Algerian revolution. Placing Fanon in these contexts helps provide a framework for better understanding the questions Fanon was asking in the decade of the 1950s. Whether considered a revolutionary humanist (Hansen), a revolutionary psychiatrist (Bulhan, whose Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression helped widen the field), or a radical democrat (Adam, chapter 4), Fanon’s originality depends on a grasp of his historical and intellectual contexts.

The character of Fanon’s Marxism is questioned in a number of essays in part one.’ The critique of Fanon 1960s and 1970s by an array of Trotskyists, Stalinists, and Maoists as well as the debates about the orthodoxy of his class concepts might be less compelling today, yet Fanon’s engagement with Marx remains important for Fanon’‘s analysis of racism and colonialism. Not merely phenome- nological, racism has a material structure, and from Fanon’s point of view is a product of a specific conjuncture, which requires uprooting (Fanon 1967a, 82).* In “Racism and Culture” (presented at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, 1956), Fanon insists on a dialectical approach. He reminds us that it is not simply the material base but the relation of “stages” of production and subjective resistance which forces bourgeois society to evolve more and more subtle and sophisticated forms of racism. The old “material basis of the doctrine,” biologism, is replaced by a more “democratic and humane” system of culturalism: The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence forms of racism. ... In the very heart of the “civilized nations” the workers finally discover that the exploitation of man, at the root of a system,.assumes different faces. At this stage racism no longer dares appear without disguise. (Fanon 1967b, 35-36)

“True liberation” puts an end to racism because it “puts into the people’s hands all the material means which make possible the radical transformation of society” (1968, 310). This redevelopment of a subject- object dialectic entails “rethinking” Marx’s categories in the colonial context and “working out new concepts” for period of independence.

*Complete publication information for all references can be found in the bib- liography located at the end of this volume.

Like Marx, who famously said that he was “not a Marxist,” Fanon was critical of the parties associated with Marxism, which paid little serious attention to the “National Question.” “His con- cern [was] with what the masses do and say and think,” argued Adolfo Gilly. Gilly caught something of Fanon’s Marxism in his introduction to the American edition of A Dying Colonialism when he wrote Fanon’s “belief [was] that it is the masses, and not leaders nor systems, who in the final analysis make and determine his- tory” (Fanon 1967c, 2). Sensitivity to Fanon’s Marxism is ably demonstrated in Tony Martin’s essay “Rescuing Fanon from the Critics.” Martin grounds Fanon’s thought in Marx’s famous phrase from The Eighteenth Brumaire that people make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Martin calls it the “leitmotif” of Fanon’s philosophy.

Lou Turner and John Alan (chapter 3) also recognize that an affinity between Fanon and their Marxist-Humanist philosophy requires a “complete break” with much of what is considered Marxism. For Turner and Alan, Fanon’s philosophy came alive again in the revolutionary movement of Black Consciousness in South Africa. According to Tumer and Alan philosophies of liber- ation “travel” subterraneously and along noninstitutional lines: Just as the white rulers “denuded a continent via the infamous tri- angular trade in slave, rum, and molasses, the [Africans, Afro- Caribbeans, and Black-Americans}] were exchanging ideas—the ideas of freedom, the experiences of Black masses in action, and their aspirations for a new world.”

Fanon was essentially out of print in early 1970s Britain. In fact, one port of entry for Fanon’s ideas was the post-Soweto (1976) arrival of South African exiles, especially the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), who set up office in London in the late 1970s and published the journal Solidarity. The BCM community engen- dered a new interest in Fanon that had also been displayed in Steve Biko’s book I Write What I Like.