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Diaspora and Colonialism: Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and the Cosmopolitan Jew

Bryan Cheyette

in Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History

This chapter examines the haunting figure of the disembodied luftmensch, coupled with the overdetermined black body, in the resonant life and work of Frantz Fanon. It argues that the rootless ... More

This chapter examines the haunting figure of the disembodied luftmensch, coupled with the overdetermined black body, in the resonant life and work of Frantz Fanon. It argues that the rootless cosmopolitan was most obviously imbricated in a Semitic racial discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, not least in France, which was the optic through which Fanon, and other black writers, perceived the condition of diasporic rootlessness.Less

Situating Frantz Fanon’s Account of Black Experience

Robert Bernasconi

in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context

This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the ... More

This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the critical philosophy of race. Black Skin, White Masks is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The chapter explores what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications, as well as his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. It also traces the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” together with his effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom.Less

Fanon’s Muscles: (Black) Power Revisited

Darieck Scott

in Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

This chapter interprets the argument Frantz Fanon makes throughout his corpus that blackness (as well as nativity) is an invented racial category created by the enslavers of Africans. It unfolds the ... More

This chapter interprets the argument Frantz Fanon makes throughout his corpus that blackness (as well as nativity) is an invented racial category created by the enslavers of Africans. It unfolds the ramifications of Fanon's sociogenic understanding of blackness in order to uncover what, in the process of being made black, of being blackened, can be seen to evince the power, pleasures, and freedom that blackness was created to deny its bearers. Glimpses of that power begin from Fanon's “mirage of muscle power,” which appears in several of his texts as a recurring metaphor, “tensed muscle.” “Tensed muscles” represent a form of bodily (un)knowing that recognizes its existence in a history of defeat while instancing its unconscious preparation to meet and resist that defeat. The chapter then considers the possibilities latent in this stance by referencing the existentialist (Jean-Paul Sartre), phenomenological (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), and psychoanalytic (Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva) tenets that inform or parallel it: temporal dispersal, anonymous existence, double-bodiedness, vertigo, trauma, abjection. What each of these (anti)concepts share is a nonconscious, nonunified, and dispersed relation to selfhood, action, or change in which the ego is not defended. Thus, in reading the metaphor of tensed muscles of the black/native, it makes a set of conceptual moves, a number of which is enunciated in the terms of the existential philosophy and existential psychology with which Fanon is in conversation.Less

Frantz Fanon: Critique, with Knives

Robyn Marasco

in The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel

This chapter compares Hegel's notion of modern warfare with that of Frantz Fanon. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel considered how modern warfare differs from ancient forms and how the modern weapon ... More

This chapter compares Hegel's notion of modern warfare with that of Frantz Fanon. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel considered how modern warfare differs from ancient forms and how the modern weapon of choice—the gun—both reflects and reinforces these differences. Warfare for the moderns, he writes, means the depersonalization of conflict and the mechanization of killing, and the gun marks the shift from personal expression of bravery to a universal expression of courage. In contrast, Fanon likened the modern weapon to a knife, pointing to the immediate brutality and bloodletting of the colonial system, as well as something reflecting and reinforcing the specific order of violence viewed elemental to colonial power. The knife also suggests the forms of critique—or, for the Greeks, the art of cutting—that scratch away at a system where violence is at once direct and atmospheric.Less

Born Sneerers or Ironic Nationalists? Joyce, Tagore, Said, Fanon

Rahul Rao

in Third World Protest: Between Home and the World

The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently ... More

The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently for the success of national liberation movements. This ambiguous attitude towards nationalism was underpinned by complex spatial imaginaries of threat, in which the freedom of the political communities with which they identified was perceived to be threatened both from outside and within. As anti‐imperialists, they made the case for subaltern nationalism; but an anxiety about the oppressions inherent in nationalist mobilization also led them to a critique of nationalism. Tagore, Said, and Fanon attempted to square this circle by viewing nationalism as a transitory stage through which subaltern resistance must pass to recuperate the identity and sense of self that imperialism had trampled underfoot, but which must then subsume itself in postcolonial universality once this goal had been attained.Less

Frantz Fanon’s Decolonial Love: A New Humanism in Historical Struggle

Joseph Drexler-Dreis

in Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity

This chapter reads Frantz Fanon as a dialectical thinker who concretizes his orientation of decolonial love into a historical and intellective praxis. Fanon breaks open the ways ideology is contained ... More

This chapter reads Frantz Fanon as a dialectical thinker who concretizes his orientation of decolonial love into a historical and intellective praxis. Fanon breaks open the ways ideology is contained and hypostasized within the modern world-system, situates the human person in relation to a reality that transcends the confines of Western modernity, and catalyses a praxis of opening up ruptures in history. This historical praxis of love is perceived as violent from the side of Western modernity. The chapter begins by locating Fanon’s understanding of a new humanism within a dialectical perspective shaped by his Caribbean context, in which race functions as a medium of the universal. It then shifts to exploring how the movement of Fanon’s dialectics was shaped by his involvement in a nationalist movement while working and living in Algeria. In this context violence and national consciousness catalyse dialectical movement against ways relationships get frozen within colonial categories and structures.Less

Translating Fanon: Black and Yellow Power as American Anticolonialisms

Rychetta Watkins

in Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

This chapter focuses on the ideas put forth by Frantz Fanon. Fanon wrote a treatise in 1952 on the psyche of the colonized, a treatise that was intended as a doctoral thesis for his psychiatry ... More

This chapter focuses on the ideas put forth by Frantz Fanon. Fanon wrote a treatise in 1952 on the psyche of the colonized, a treatise that was intended as a doctoral thesis for his psychiatry degree. Fanon published the work as Peau noire, masques blancs or Black Skin, White Masks. Its contents grew out of his own depressing experiences as a black French colonial subject. The book has had, and continues to have, a lasting impact on academic studies of the formation of postcolonialism, racial and ethnic identity and subjectivity, and revolutionary movements and forms of protest. This chapter considers how the early publication history of Fanon’s works in America shaped how American activists and academics received him. The study of Fanon’s works is important as Fanon is regarded as an insightful commentator on the psychic toll of racism, an incisive critic of colonialism, and an advocate of violent revolutionary resistance.Less

Two Popular Theories of Caribbean Ideology and Race Relations: Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Liberating Violence and the Theory of Plantation Societies

Anthony P. Maingot

in Race, Ideology, and the Decline of Caribbean Marxism

Without specific reference to Haiti, two theories of regional ideology were widely held and circulated throughout the Caribbean: those of the Martinican Frantz Fanon on one hand ans those of the New ... More

Without specific reference to Haiti, two theories of regional ideology were widely held and circulated throughout the Caribbean: those of the Martinican Frantz Fanon on one hand ans those of the New World Group on the other. Both dealt with Marxist ideologies and race. Fanon, in his Algerian War of Liberation phase, argued that only by “liberating violence” against the white colonist could the colonial colored man be freed from his complexes. As a psychiatrist, Fanon had diagnosed an inferiority complex in the colonial, a phenomenon he compared to wearing a white mask over a black skin. The New World Group argued that only with the total elimination of the plantation system and the white elite which governed it could the islands begin the process of develoment. Both theories have proven mistaken.Less

Race and Culture

Jennifer Radden (ed.)

in The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion

This chapter discusses three attempts to theorize the philosophical and cultural issues relevant to raciation in psychiatry: the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and E. V. Wolfenstein. It also ... More

This chapter discusses three attempts to theorize the philosophical and cultural issues relevant to raciation in psychiatry: the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and E. V. Wolfenstein. It also discusses the development of a view that can build on the strengths of previous work and enable forward movement. It argues that the problems of the relations among inner and outer oppression and victim status cannot be understood unless the relation between individual and collectivity is encompassed within a perspective that is beyond psychoanalytic Marxism, for the latter construes individual and social praxis as two separate planes of liberatory praxis.Less

Masking Fanon

Angela Naimou

in Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood

This chapter reads John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as a novel whose ostensible failure to give voice to the historical Frantz Fanon generates experimental narrative modes for representing the human ... More

This chapter reads John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as a novel whose ostensible failure to give voice to the historical Frantz Fanon generates experimental narrative modes for representing the human personality as a literary and legal category. The novel disrupts narrative genres of personal development that define the normative subject of human rights and civil law by subjecting them to processes of fracture and incorporation adapted from Romare Bearden’s collage aesthetics. Using narrative collage, the novel reworks the historical Fanon’s metaphor of the mask as a distortion of psychological development. The chapter argues that the novel refashions the person as itself a mask, questioning both contemporary rights discourse and the potential for anti-colonial, anti-racist revolution. Masks of personhood salvage the revolutionary personality, amplifying a decolonial voice in a world defined by ongoing violence done to those caught within the legal framework of personhood, with its promise of human rights.Less

Césaire, Fanon, and Immediacy as a Project

Ben Etherington

in Literary Primitivism

Chapter 5 is the book’s central literary study. It “slow reads” Frantz Fanon’s epochal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black” as a critical dramatization of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au ... More

Chapter 5 is the book’s central literary study. It “slow reads” Frantz Fanon’s epochal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black” as a critical dramatization of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Reconstructing the full literary and philosophical context of the essay, the chapter argues that Fanon’s riposte to Jean-Paul Sartre’s misreading of the primitivism of the negritude poets consists of himself enacting Césaire’s primitivism. In Fanon reading Césaire, we observe literary primitivism achieving consciousness of itself as a historical phenomenon. The chapter argues for the centrality of Césaire’s achievement to literary primitivism, at the heart of which lies a poetics of passionate sarcasm.Less

Violence, Resistance, and the Poetics of Suffering: Colonial Madness between Frantz Fanon and Kateb Yacine

in Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa

Frantz Fanon, the Algiers School's most prominent detractor, was merely one voice in a cacophony of protest against colonial psychiatric racism in the twentieth century. This chapter argues that ... More

Frantz Fanon, the Algiers School's most prominent detractor, was merely one voice in a cacophony of protest against colonial psychiatric racism in the twentieth century. This chapter argues that Fanon must be placed in a wider context of resistance that included not only physicians, but also budding post-colonial theorists such as Albert Memmi and fiction writers such as Kateb Yacine. An analysis of works by Fanon's contemporaries—especially Kateb—reveals the extent to which colonized intellectuals inscribed their experiences of suffering and violence in a medicalized language. Central themes for Fanon, including the psychological effects of colonialism, the violence of the colonial encounter, and the regulatory function of colonial psychiatry, made lasting impressions on North African novelists, political theorists, and physicians who contested the colonial order. Borrowing from recent work in medical anthropology, this chapter charts the development of an intellectual culture of resistance that took aim at medical and psychiatric forms of knowledge while highlighting the experiences that shaped local imaginings of violence and suffering in the twentieth-century Maghreb.Less

Colonial Love in Fanon and Moffatt

Linnell Secomb

in Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture

This chapter explains Frantz Fanon's reflections on the risks of interracial love in colonial contexts of racial inequality. Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask reports the situation of the black and ... More

This chapter explains Frantz Fanon's reflections on the risks of interracial love in colonial contexts of racial inequality. Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask reports the situation of the black and elaborates the subjectivities and the neuroses that arise in colonial contexts. While Fanon remains oriented mainly toward the experience of black love of whiteness, Tracey Moffatt refines this story tracing the consequences of black-white colonial love. The different tone adopted in Fanon's reading of black women's and men's desires indicates a greater uneasiness about relations between black women and white men. Gayatri Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason reflect on the impacts of the operation of white humanist benevolent love in the colonial context. The ambiguities and the paradoxes, the dangers and the destructive potential, of love become apparent in the fraught engagements of colonial and postcolonial relations.Less

Subjectivity in MotionCaribbean Women’s (Dis)Articulations of Being

Myriam J. A. Chancy

in Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora

In this chapter, Caribbean texts are situated within a crossroads space of intracultural, diasporic exchange to engage a reading practice that uncovers the importance of understanding such texts ... More

In this chapter, Caribbean texts are situated within a crossroads space of intracultural, diasporic exchange to engage a reading practice that uncovers the importance of understanding such texts within the cultural, political, and transnational contexts of their production and dissemination. If, in the past, postcolonial practices focused on displacing, reshaping, or questioning the composition of literary canons, this chapter builds on the previous one to sidestep such questions, or rather to build upon them, by assuming that the utility of the text resides in what it can reveal best about human nature while engaging with the same care and advocacy the epistemes and gnosis of African Diasporic cultures. Texts analyzed include works by Frantz Fanon, Mayotte Capécia, and Mary Seacole.Less

Race under Representation

David Lloyd

in Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

Working from the aesthetic thought of Kant and Schiller, “Race under Representation” elaborates how metonymy and metaphor function in the formation of the stereotype. Racialization works through the ... More

Working from the aesthetic thought of Kant and Schiller, “Race under Representation” elaborates how metonymy and metaphor function in the formation of the stereotype. Racialization works through the organizing tropes of representation and those tropes embody an order of representation, framing a civilizational narrative for which inclusion always functions simultaneously as excision. The metaphorical place of whiteness, or the “Subject without properties,” is constitutively barred to the racialized subject, as the work of Tayeb Salih and Frantz Fanon illustrates. Inclusion always requires the effective but impossible erasure of race even as it repeatedly constitutes racial positions. The chapter critiques the notion of “under-representation” in its demographic usage, arguing that the goal of inclusion consolidates institutional claims to universality and reaffirms the violence of the racial regime of representation that relegates racial others to the exteriority of race “under representation.”Less

Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz and the Rejection of Négritude

Jeremy F. Lane

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

This chapter discusses Frantz Fanon's interest in jazz music, a prominent manifestation of creolized American culture. It argues that Fanon's biographer David Macey misunderstands and underestimates ... More

This chapter discusses Frantz Fanon's interest in jazz music, a prominent manifestation of creolized American culture. It argues that Fanon's biographer David Macey misunderstands and underestimates the importance of Fanon's allusions to jazz. It calls into question Françoise Vergès's critique of Fanon's ‘disavowal’ of the ‘reality’ of his Creole identity in favour of a reinvention of his ‘filiation’ and ‘symbolic ancestry in Algeria’. Fanon's allusions to jazz form an integral part of his critique of Léopold Sedar Senghor's conception of négritude. Senghor had presented jazz as an important expression of an essentialized négre identity rooted in the unchanging rhythms of an organic rural community.Less

Caribbean Masks: Frantz Fanon and Alejo Carpentier

Stephen Henighan

in Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa

This chapter examines Alejo Carpentier's Caribbean novel El siglo de las luces and Frantz Fanon's Caribbean treatise Peau noir, masques blancs. The work by Aimé Césaire laid the intellectual ... More

This chapter examines Alejo Carpentier's Caribbean novel El siglo de las luces and Frantz Fanon's Caribbean treatise Peau noir, masques blancs. The work by Aimé Césaire laid the intellectual foundations for both Fanon's and Carpentier's work. The juxtaposition of these works opens up the thorny question of the usefulness and consequences of meshing postcolonial discourse with Latin American cultural production. The oscillation between these two extremities makes up the central tension to be taken into account when observing the interplay of postcolonial theory and Latin American culture. This chapter shows that Carpentier's history of the French Caribbean warns the contradictions of the context which created Fanon.Less