Frantz Fanon

Critical Perspectives

Anthony C. Alessandrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134656561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Frantz Fanon was a fearless critic of colonialism and a key figure in Algeria's struggle for independence. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives addresses Fanon's extraordinary, often contraversial writings, and examines the ways in which his work can shed light on contemporary issues in cultural politics. Embracing feminist theory, cultural studies and postcolonialism, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives offers new directions for cultural and political thought in the postcolonial era.

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INTRODUCTION

Fanon studies, cultural studies, cultural politics

Anthony C.Alessandrini

What is the prognosis?… The prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different…we must grow a new skin, we must develop new thinking, and try to set afoot a new man.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In December 1997, I chaired a panel with the title “Frantz Fanon and/as Cultural Studies” at the Modern Language Association in Toronto, where versions of several of the essays in this collection were first presented. In the question and answer period that followed, a member of the audience asked the panelists to address the way Fanon’s work had been “appropriated” by contemporary theorists. This question continued to haunt me long after the session had ended. The word “appropriation” was obviously meant to carry a negative connotation, as it does, for example, in Cedric Robinson’s essay “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon” (1993). But, I wondered, must we assume that every appropriation is a misappropriation? To put the case in the strongest possible terms: can there today be anything other than various kinds of appropriations of Fanon’s work, appropriations which would need to be judged individually to determine their accuracy, their usefulness, and their political valences? This question is at the heart of this book.

I am, of course, intentionally overstating the case. I certainly do not want to be understood as suggesting that any and all interpretations and uses of Fanon’s work are equal or interchangeable. This is not an invitation to an easy, unthinking pluralism. What I am suggesting is that if Fanon’s legacy, which I consider to be absolutely crucial, is to have any meaning for us today, it will be only insofar as we are able to apply his work—with all of its insights and all of its limitations—to the pressing issues of contemporary cultural politics.

Not all of the contributors to this volume would agree with this suggestion. In his essay, for example, Nigel Gibson declares that he will “use Fanon to polemicize against invented ‘Fanons,’” and that he is “neither embarrassed at declaring my Fanon to be more authentic than others, nor concerned that ‘my Fanon’ radically disturbs the political claims of cultural studies in the US.” This is not the only disagreement that will be found in these pages. The field of Fanon studies, whose contours I will attempt to map in this introduction, has been the site of a variety of theoretical, methodological, and political disagreements. By attempting to contain several diverse sets of arguments about Fanon’s work— arguments that critique the limitations of Fanon’s work as well as attempting to extend his legacy—this volume attempts to generate the kinds of critical conversations that will allow these debates to move forward in a more productive manner.

For those readers encountering Fanon for the first time, some biographical information may be in order.¹ Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique on July 20, 1925, and grew up in Fort-de-France, the island’s capital. The Fanons were a middle-class family who belonged to the island’s emerging black bourgeoisie: Fanon’s father worked as a government official while his mother kept a shop. Because of this, the Fanon children were among the very small percentage of blacks who were able to be educated at the lycée.

The experience of receiving a French colonial education affected Fanon deeply: his teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire, described his own experience of Martinican education as one which “associated in our minds the word France and the word liberty, and that bound us to France by every fiber of our hearts and every power of our minds” (quoted in Hall 1995:10). Fanon himself later wrote: “The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about ‘our ancestors, the Gauls,’ identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages—an all-white truth” (1967:147). Spurred by such feelings, Fanon in 1944 joined the Free French Army and left for the European front. Two years later, having been wounded in battle and having received the Croix de Guerre for bravery, Fanon returned to Martinique. But his first experience of French racism, which he would later chronicle so eloquently in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), had changed him irrevocably.

Fanon wrote the essays that constituted that book while studying medicine at the University of Lyons (he had returned to France, with the original intention of studying dentistry on a scholarship for veterans, in 1947). He defended his medical thesis in 1951, and was admitted to a residence program in psychiatry at the Hôpital de Saint-Alban.² After completing his examinations, Fanon wrote to Léopold Sédar Senghor to enquire about the possibility of working in Senegal. But since he received no response, Fanon eventually accepted the opportunity to work in Algeria. In November 1953 he arrived in Algiers as the chef de service of the Blida-Joinville Hospital, the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria.

While working at Blida-Joinville, Fanon introduced a number of innovative programs, many of which bore the influence of François Tosquelles, his mentor at the Hôpital de Saint-Alban; he also wrote and co-wrote many articles on the practice and theory of psychiatry (see bibliography). While stories of Fanon arriving in Algiers as a mythic liberator, “unchaining men and women” who had been tied to their beds (Gendzier 1973:76), have come to be challenged by those who worked with Fanon at Blida-Joinville (see Vergès 1996a:48–9; Julien 1995), he was undoubtedly responsible for initiating radical changes in the practice of colonial psychiatry in Algeria.

But it was precisely the problem of practicing psychiatry in a colonial situation that began to have its effect upon Fanon. The struggle for national liberation in Algeria had become more conspicuous, partly because French repression had become more brutal since the end of World War II. Fanon had, of course, already experienced the effects of French racism, but in Algeria this experience took on new kinds of meanings. After a period of treating both Algerians fighting for independence and French police officers, the tortured and the torturers (documented in the case studies collected in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963:249–310)³), Fanon came to the realization that “[i]t was an absurd gamble to undertake…to bring into existence a certain number of values, when the lawlessness, the inequality, the multi-daily murder of man were raised to the status of legislative principles.” “The social structure in Algeria,” he concluded, “was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged” (1988:53).

In the summer of 1956 Fanon resigned from his post at Blida-Joinville, writing in his “Letter to the Resident Minister” (later published in Pour la Révolution Africaine):

For nearly three years I have placed myself wholly at the service of this country and of the men who inhabit it. I have spared neither my efforts nor my enthusiasm.

But what can a man’s enthusiasm and devotion achieve if everyday reality is a tissue of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man?… If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization….

For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And their conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself.

(1988:52–4) ⁴

In January 1957, Fanon, who by this time was working with the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), received a letter of expulsion from the French government and a warning to leave Algeria within forty-eight hours. As Fanon’s reputation as a revolutionary theorist grew over the next four years, he would become the target of assassination attempts by French Algerian settlers and one of the most wanted persons of the French secret police. He survived several attempts on his life, including one in which his jeep was blown up by a land mine near the border of Algeria and Tunisia, leaving him with twelve fractured spinal vertebrae.

After being expelled from Algeria, Fanon arrived at the FLN headquarters in Tunis and served in a number of capacities, becoming editor of the movement’s newspaper, El Moudjahid, working as a doctor in FLN health centers, and acting as ambassador to several African nations. He also lectured at the University of Tunis. It was during this time that Fanon wrote L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne (translated as A Dying Colonialism), a sociological study of the Algerian liberation struggle. Written from within the struggle with a manifestolike intensity, it received enough attention in France for the government to ban the book and prohibit further printing of it six months after its publication.

Shortly afterwards, while traveling in Mali as an FLN representative, Fanon suddenly became ill. By December 1960 it became apparent that he was suffering from leukemia. He was taken to Moscow for treatments, but the disease worsened. Soviet doctors eventually suggested that Fanon travel to the United States, where he could receive the most advanced treatment. Instead, while the disease was in remission, Fanon returned to Tunis. Writing from what he realized was his deathbed, Fanon produced in a period of ten weeks his last and most famous book, Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth). Finally, despite his disgust at the idea of dying in what he called “that nation of lynchers,” he agreed to travel to Washington, DC, for treatment. Persistent rumors have suggested that the CIA arranged for him to be left alone in a hotel room for eight days so that he could be interrogated rather than admitting him immediately to a hospital. In any event, by the time he finally entered the hospital, it was too late. Fanon died on December 6, 1961, at the age of 36. His body was taken to Tunisia, then smuggled across the border to Algeria, where he was buried in an FLN cemetery with full military honors.

It was not long after his death that debates over Fanon’s work began in earnest. Those that followed most closely upon his death involved his engagements with revolutionary Marxism; particularly controversial were his opinions (or, in many cases, what were seen as his opinions) on violence, the need to rethink class struggles in the colonial situation, and the relative revolutionary potential of colonized agricultural workers and the proletariat.⁵ As Immanuel Wallerstein has suggested, the aspects of Fanon’s work that “shocked the most, and were meant to shock the most” were those that posited the need for a total, violent break with colonialism (1979:253). The popular image that began to arise was Fanon as a prophet of violence, a figure who was denounced by Marxist critics like Jack Woddis (1972) and liberal critics like Hannah Arendt (1969) and Lewis Coser (1970), but had a particular kind of value for leaders of the Black Panther Party in the US such as Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (see Sutton 1971).

The editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader, an important recent anthology, have suggested that Fanon studies can be divided into five stages (Gordon et al. 1996: 5–8). The first stage consisted of applications of and reactions to his work, which would include the sorts of critical debates I have already suggested, as well as the applications of his work in practice by revolutionary thinkers such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Huey Newton, and Paulo Freire. The second stage was primarily biographical, featuring work by David Caute (1970), Peter Geismar (1971), and Irene Gendzier (1973). The editors identify the third stage as “one of intense research on Fanon’s significance in political theory”; they mention the work of Hussein Adam, Emmanuel Hansen, and Renate Zahar (one might also include here the work of L.A.Jinadu (1986)). Things get a bit more worrisome, according to this account, when the fourth stage is reached, since it “is linked to the ascent of postmodern cultural and postcolonial studies in the academy.” The diverse list of theorists said to inhabit this stage, “which is still under way,” include Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Benita Parry, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cedric Robinson (this list seems to come from a review essay on “Critical Fanonism” by Gates (1991)). The editors complain that this stage is marked by a literary-critical bias and by a tendency to attack Fanon “under a number of fashionable political designations.” But fortunately (in their view) there has been a fifth and final stage, one which “consists in engagements with the thought of Fanon for the development of original work across the entire sphere of human studies,” inaugurated by Hussein Bulhan (1985) and continued in the work of Tsenay Serequeberhan (1994), Lewis R.Gordon (1995), and Ato Sekyi-Otu (1996). Not surprisingly, the editors declare their book to be “squarely rooted” in this fifth and final stage.

This version of the development of Fanon studies is a compelling one. While I would have to disagree with its explicitly teleological bent—the editors suggest that “each stage represents…an ongoing dialectical process” (1996:7) —what is particularly important about their account is that it forces us to rethink the assertion that Fanon’s work has enjoyed a “resurgence” in recent years. This has become a critical commonplace among many contemporary theorists, especially those working in cultural studies, who invoke Fanon’s work. Instead, this account suggests that Fanon’s work has, since at least the time of his death, been applied and interpreted in a variety of different locations for a variety of different reasons.

But what this account misses, in my view, is the fact that significant disagreements and debates have marked every stage of Fanon studies. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader suppress the internal tensions within the discipline they identify (interchangeably) as “postcolonial” or “postmodern” cultural studies, a suppression which is all too typical of sweeping dismissals of this field (Alessandrini 1997). What I want to point out here is the way in which these sorts of internal tensions have always existed in Fanon studies, and the striking parallels between the kinds of debates that have gone on during its various stages. Almost thirty-five years ago, for example, Aristide and Vera Zolberg identified what they saw as “The Americanization of Frantz Fanon” (1966), a move very similar to that of many critics today (including several in this collection) who point to the increasing appropriation of Fanon’s work by American cultural studies. Similarly, by 1970 Tony Martin already felt the need to “rescue Fanon from his critics,” a mission which has today been taken up again by a number of critics, most recently Nigel Gibson (1998; 1999; see also his essay in this volume). And the essays in this collection by Gibson and Neil Lazarus return to a number of the issues raised by Fanon’s Marxist readers in the 1960s and 1970s, issues having to do with race and class in the post-colonial context.

This is not to suggest that there have not been important breaks and disjunctures in Fanon studies. The one which has been the most crucial for cultural studies work—and, as many of the essays in this volume suggest, has certainly been the most controversial—has been the re-reading of Fanon’s body of work by Homi Bhabha. First initiated in several essays in the early 1980s, and begun in earnest in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” his foreword to the British edition of Black Skin, White Masks (1986), Bhabha’s readings introduce a Fanon who “may yearn for the total transformation of Man and Society, but…speaks most effectively from the unce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Re-Reading Fanon’S Legacy
• Part II: Fanon and/as Cultural Studies
• Part III: Finding Something Different
• Bibliography