Frantz Fanon, Postcolonialism and the Ethics of Difference 0719075238, 9780719075230

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frantz fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference

Frantz Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference AZZEDINE HADDOUR

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Azzedine Haddour 2019 The right of Azzedine Haddour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 0 7190 7523 0  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

For Laura, Adam and Sami

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 2 3 4 5 6

page viii

Introduction: a black rebel with a cause 1 The significance of Sartre in Fanon 33 A poststructuralist reading of Fanon 58 A family romance 95 The North African syndrome: madness and colonization 123 The Wretched of the Earth: the anthem of decolonization? 159 Tradition, translation and colonization 197 Conclusion 243 Index 257

Acknowledgements

This book has incurred a number of debts of gratitude. Many thanks are due to the following: Andrew Leak, Kevin Inston, Stephanie Bird, Steve Brewer, Robert Young, Kamel Salhi, Margaret Mujumbar and Matthew Frost. Particular thanks must go to David Alderson for his friendship, encouragement and for very perceptive feedback which helped bring a number of improvements to the manuscript. I want also to thank Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko for publishing ‘Tradition, Translation, Decolonization’ in their edited collection Translation and ‘The Classic’ (Oxford University Press, 2007). Chapter 6 of this book bears the same title but covers new material and takes the discussion in a new direction. I am grateful to Jean Khalfa for inviting me to contribute an article entitled ‘Fanon dans la théorie postcoloniale’ to the special issue which Les Temps modernes devoted to Fanon; parts of Chapter 2 are informed by this work previously published in Les Temps modernes, 635–636 (2006), pp. 136–158. I am also grateful to Jonathan Webber for inviting me to give two lectures: ‘Being Colonized’ for ‘Reading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism’ at École Normale Supérieure on September 2009; and ‘Colonialism and Medicine’ for ‘The Workshop on Frantz Fanon’ on 19 September 2015. Elements of these two lectures are further developed in this book. On a more personal note, I want to thank Professor Huddart’s team at the Royal Marsden and I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mr Kumar for keeping me going when I thought I had reached the end of the road. I am especially grateful to Laura for all her ideas, help, patience and care and to my boys Adam and Sami for their encouragement and for the joy and laughter they bring to my life.

Introduction: a black rebel with a cause We are nothing on earth if we are not, first of all, slaves of a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of justice, the cause of liberty.1 Frantz was born on 20 July 1925 and brought up in a relatively well-to-do family: his father, Casimir Fanon, held a secured position as a custom official and his mother, Eléonore Félicia Médélice, had a haberdashery which provided supplementary income. His mother was the illegitimate daughter of Pauline Ensfelder, a descendant of Alsatian origin. His grandfather, Fernand Fanon, had a small plot of land that could barely feed the family. Significantly, he was a ‘Negro with a trade’; this qualification distinguished him from other Negroes working at the factory who were at the mercy of their employer.2 His paternal great-grandmother, Françoise Vindic, was the daughter of a slave born in Gros-Morne, Martinique. In the registry office, she was registered as a slave with the reference number 1405. Black Skin, White Masks records the legacy of slavery and the difficulties which arose from mixed marriage and the fear of miscegenation. It is difficult to construct a biographical portrait of Frantz Fanon, a very discreet and private man, whose life was cut short at the age of 36. He passed away on 6 December 1961, in Bethesda Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland. Until the 1980s he was legally presumed not dead because he was admitted to the hospital under the pseudonym of Ibrahim Fanon and as a Tunisian National. What is passed down to us through the various biographies are fragments of a life that was

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fraught with danger and conflict – physical as well as intellectual. At the age of 14, war interrupted his carefree adolescence and precipitated him into the world of conflict. He spent the best years of his life at war: he enlisted to serve in the Second World War (between 1943 and 1945) and then in the Algerian War (between 1957 and 1961), fighting the causes of others, struggling to safeguard notions of freedom and equality as well as the indivisibility of the natural rights of the individual. He also spent all his life in open warfare against racism and colonial neurosis which split his subjectivity as a black man. The year 1940 disrupted Fanon’s untroubled childhood and precipitated him into the turmoil of the Second World War. The fall of France raised serious questions about France’s strategic position in its colonies, especially in the Antilles. Admiral Georges Robert was appointed in September 1939 as High Commissioner for the French Antilles. He departed Brest on board Jean d’Arc which docked in Fort-de-France on 19 September. In June 1940, Emile Bertin docked carrying France’s gold reserves. The gunboat Barfleur, the Bearn carrying 106 planes and 6 oil liners, the Barham, the Kobad, the CIP, the Limousin, the Motrix and the Bourgogne – as well as the Var and the Mebong – followed suit.3 The Allies were concerned that Pétain might relinquish them to Nazi Germany and that France’s fleet and gold reserves might fall into German hands. On 18 June 1940, General de Gaulle addressed France and its colonies to encourage them to rally behind the forces of Free France. On 24 June 1940, the General Council of Martinique, proclaiming its attachment to France, called upon all Martinicans to fight on the side of the Allies. After a brief moment of procrastination, Admiral Robert came out in support of Pétain, implementing the laws of Vichy France, censoring newspapers and banning Free France’s radio broadcasts. Events in Mers el Kebir strengthened Robert’s resolve to uphold Pétain’s National Revolution and mount a propaganda campaign against de Gaulle. Under the Vichy regime, the white békés4 dominated the politics of Martinique. Political parties and trade unions were dissolved. The Robert–Greenslate agreement provided fuel and provisions to Martinique and allowed the French fleet to operate in the Antilles under United States’ supervision. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour and the subsequent involvement of the United States in the theatre of the

Introduction 3 Second World War changed its relationship with Martinique. Although the United States continued to provide fuel and basic provisions for the survival of Martinique, it imposed a full blockade on Robert on 9 May 1942, which was experienced as an occupation and had serious ramifications for the island’s economy. Martinique was henceforth isolated from mainland France; it was also cut off from Africa and the rest of the world. The blockade meant that Martinique had no income as it could no longer export sugar and rum, the two commodities which sustained its economic life. The stranded 2000 sailors in Fort-de-France added to the economic burden of the small island. The population was deprived of basic necessities. Inflation soared and a black market consequently thrived at the expense of the immiserated Martinicans. The population suffered from malnutrition, and the hardship of the Negro stood in sharp contrast to the opulence of the white békés and French sailors. This chasm between black and white gave rise to a tidal wave of communism that swept the island at the end of the Second World War and led to the election of Aimé Césaire as a communist deputy to the National Assembly; this phenomenon, which Fanon describes as the proletarianization of Martinique, could be attributed to the dire economic conditions of the black Martinicans and to the concentration of power in the hands of the white békés.5 France’s capitulation in 1940 was experienced as a national calamity. Pétain instituted ideals that went against the grain of the French republican tradition: ‘Famille, Travail, Patrie’ – the catchphrase of his National Revolution – came to replace ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’. Pétain put in place a fascistic ideology that opened a wedge between the republican constitution he abolished and a conception of society which looked backward to the ancien régime – the regime of aristocracy and privileges which was historically represented by the white békés in the Antilles. Martinique was abandoned to fend for itself against the excesses of the Robert administration. Vichy France underscored the importance of the French Empire, but the official discourse of its colonial administration was overtly colonial and racist. Despite Vichy repression, Fanon was one of a large number of Martinicans who joined the dissidence. Significantly, and as I will argue in this book, the diremption between Vichy and republican France determined his

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relationship with ‘mother’ France and radicalized him, a factor which is overlooked in Albert Memmi’s interpretation of his biography. Césaire’s political activities at the Schoelcher Lycée, Marcel Manville contends, radicalized the young Fanon who – albeit disillusioned by the Robert regime – still believed in the narrative that he was French.6 He initially explained away the racism which he encountered as a manifestation of the fascistic ideology of Vichy France. This racism undermined France’s republican tradition; it shattered the ‘France of ideals’ represented by the figure of the white Madonna in whose embrace the Martinican Negro child was held.7 In ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon describes the disillusionment – or better still the first ontological drama – of Martinicans who were relegated to the status of second-class citizens.8 ‘In Martinique,’ he writes, ‘it is rare to find hardened social positions. The racial problem is covered over by economic discrimination.’ Prior to the war in 1939, interpersonal relations were not determined by ‘epidermal accentuations’. Colour is not a factor because ‘there is a tacit agreement enabling all and sundry to recognize one another as doctors, tradesmen, workers. A Negro worker will be on the side of the mulatto worker against the middle-class Negro. Here we have proof that questions of race are but a superstructure, a mantle, an obscure ideological emanation concealing an economic reality.’9 Before the occupation of Fort-de-France in 1939, Fanon claims, describing somebody as ‘very black’ was meant to express neither contempt nor hatred.10 In ‘West Indians and Africans’, he clearly underplays the significance of race as a determining factor in social stratification, an account which contradicts the theorization he develops in Black Skin, White Masks. The main thrust of his argument is that the Vichy occupation of Martinique by Robert’s sailors exacerbated pent-up racial tensions and gave rise to the consciousness of race. The capitulation of France left Fanon bereft: it was experienced as a sort of ‘murder of the father’.11 He underscores the importance of the four years during which Fort-de-France became ‘submerged by nearly ten thousand Europeans having an unquestionable, but until then latent, racist mentality’.12 It was latent because, as he explains, ‘the sailors of the Béarn or the Emile-Bertin, on previous occasions in the course of a week in Fort de France, had not had time to manifest their racial prejudices’.13 However, during these four years the mask

Introduction 5 dropped and the sailors behaved as ‘authentic racists’. As we will see in Chapter 1, Fanon’s theory of perception is not simply a reformulation of Sartrean existential phenomenology but stems from the lived experience of West Indians who were racially discriminated against. The encounter with racism was vexing for these West Indians whose ontology was challenged as they experienced their ‘first metaphysical experience’.14 Prior to 1939, and more specifically the arrival of Robert and his sailors, they sought avenues of flight to ‘escape from [their] colour’.15 Césaire’s claim to authenticity, his affirmation of negritude as a poetics of deliverance for the oppressed Negroes, was a scandal in a society which had thus far identified with white Europeans. Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 explore this ambivalence vis-à-vis negritude. During the occupation, Martinique was in a state of political paralysis; only La Voix de la France libre (The Voice of Free France) broadcasting from London brought some fervour to the political life of the island. The wireless played a crucial part in the radicalization of the young Fanon: he was then an impressionable 18 year old; the BBC’s reports of the war progress and broadcast of de Gaulle’s call to join the Resistance influenced him. On 13 July 1943, the eve of his brother Félix’s wedding, Fanon decided to join the dissidence in Dominica, and after spending two months there he returned with the forces of Free France that liberated Fort-de-France from the Vichy regime. Immediately after he had re-sat his oral examination for the Première Partie du Baccalauréat, he joined the 5th Battalion. On 12 March 1944, he set off to North Africa on board the Oregon. The conscripted Fanon left in the obscurity of the dark, without pomp or military honour, in conditions that recall those endured by slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He landed in Casablanca on 30 March and was stationed in Guercif for a month. Manville compares the military camp of Guercif to a ‘Tower of Babel’, a sort of ‘hierarchical cosmopolitanism’ that was composed of different classes, races, cultures and ethnicities, and where French from mainland France, pieds noirs,16 black Antilleans and Africans served side by side.17 In this hierarchical cosmopolitanism, class differences were reinforced by racial and ethnic barriers; vestimentary habits were markers of ethnic and racial differences. For instance, West Indians donned shorts while black Senegalese were made to wear the ethnic chechia.18 In North

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Africa, Fanon grasped the cartography of racism, as well as the semiology of dress codes. He had to negotiate perceptible barriers separating the white Europeans, the colonized natives and black Africans. In ‘Algeria Unveiled’, he elaborates on the significance of vestimentary habits and this cultural semiology; in Black Skin, White Masks, he summons up his experience of colonial racism: Some ten years ago I was astonished to learn that the North Africans despised men of color. It was absolutely impossible for me to make any contact with the local population. I left Africa and went back to France without having fathomed the reason for this hostility. Meanwhile, certain facts had made me think. The Frenchman does not like the Jew, who does not like the Arab, who does not like the Negro.19 While serving in the Second World War, racism – or what Manville calls ‘hierarchical cosmopolitanism’ – opened Fanon’s eyes to the reality of French colonialism and its dehumanizing effect in North Africa. After a brief stay in Meknès, Fanon was transferred to Cherchell and thereafter to Bougie. In June 1944, he was stationed in Oran for a short period before he was moved to the South of France. In The Wretched of the Earth, he evokes the conditions in which the colonized lived – horrendous conditions which provide a context for Albert Camus’s political allegory of the plague in La Peste. The department of Oran was in the grip of famine and a devastating typhus epidemic. The sight of deprivation must have brought home to Fanon the realities of tan robè (‘Robert Time’),20 but this time there was no mistaking that it was free France which subjected the native Algerians to colonial brutality. This was the lesson which the war taught Fanon. In August 1944, Fanon was part of the 9th Division of Colonial Infantry that landed at the Bay of Saint-Tropez. From Marseille, the division moved northward to close on retreating German troops. In the autumn of 1944, the forces of Free France underwent an operation of ‘acclimatization’, as the white command decided to ‘whiten’ or, as Peter Geismar puts it, ‘bleach’ the division: black African soldiers remained in the South of France; Antilleans, because they were considered Europeans, were moved to the North.21 This decision was based not on ethnic, geographical or meteorological considerations but on cultural

Introduction 7 factors. Despite the fact that they came from a tropical zone, West Indians were considered Europeans because of their acculturation and linguistic competence. It must be noted in passing that cultural assimilation and its attendant white racism coloured the views of the Antilleans themselves who thought that they were not Negroes. In ‘West Indians and Africans’ Fanon discusses the debilitating effects which this disavowal of blackness had on Antilleans. In the Battle of Alsace, in conditions of bitter cold, Fanon encountered the Germans. In the Doubs, near Besançon, he came under fire and sustained a serious injury from mortar shrapnel which kept him out of action for several weeks. It was in these conditions that he voiced his disenchantment with the war. On 12 April 1945, he wrote a letter to his parents in which he renounced the high idealism which motivated his engagement to defend the cause of Free France. ‘If I do not return, and if one day you should hear of my death whilst facing the enemy, console one another but never say: he died for a good cause!’22 He dismissed the ideals for which he fought as ‘obsolete’, and regretted the decision that he had taken to defend the interests of French farmers when the latter never really cared.23 In 1945, Fanon was awarded the Croix de guerre for his bravery by none other than Raoul Salan. Ironically, in the Algerian War, Fanon and General Salan would fight on opposite sides: Fanon became the spokesman of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN); Salan, one of the key proponents of French Algeria, headed the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS). In April 1945, together with two friends, Manville and Mosole, Fanon went to Toulon. On 8 May 1945, during the celebrations of Victory Day which marked the end of the war, Fanon felt excluded and marginalized. French girls danced in the embrace of American soldiers but refused to dance with Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, he invoked the overt Negrophobic views which these girls displayed when they were among Negroes at dances: Most of the time the women made involuntary gestures of flight, of withdrawing, their faces filled with a fear that was not feigned. And yet the Negroes who asked them to dance would have been utterly unable to commit any act at all against them, even if they had wished to do so. The behavior of these women is clearly understandable from the standpoint of imagination.24

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According to his brother Joby, Fanon was more hurt by this rejection than by the mortar shell which hospitalized him. In Antilles sans fard, Manville also relates the feelings of rejection and disappointment felt by Fanon.25 If he felt sympathetic towards Jean Veneuse it was because he shared with the latter the same feeling of abandonment and rejection. In the name of freedom and racial equality, he fought to safeguard mother France from the threat of Nazism, but like Veneuse he was made to feel that he was not worthy of white love. Disenchanted with the experience of war, Corporal Fanon returned a changed man, marked by the sight of war and devastation as well as by his encounter with racism. He joined the Allied forces to safeguard France’s republican tradition, to defend freedom and to fight side by side with his French comrades against bigotry and racism. To his disillusionment, he encountered prejudice and was made conscious of his blackness. He had fought against Nazism – against intolerance, prejudice, narrow-minded and xenophobic nationalism – and yet, ironically, he found himself the subject of racial discrimination in France. He returned to Martinique in horrendous conditions on board a ship carrying freight, the San Mateo. The reception of the veterans was disappointingly muted: no pomp and military honour were given to these young men who risked their lives to defend and restore the pride of occupied France.26 After the war, Fanon resumed his studies. He enrolled at the Schoelcher Lycée and upon completion of the baccalaureate, and as a war veteran, he was awarded a scholarship by the French government to study in France. At the beginning of the academic session of 1946 and 1947, he went to Paris. Initially, he enrolled to study dentistry but decided against the course. He moved to Lyon to read psychiatry instead. His stay in Paris – a multicultural city where negritude was celebrated in the 1930s and 1940s – did not last more than three weeks. Paradoxically, he did not like its cultural mix; he jokingly told Manville that Paris did not appeal to him because there were ‘too many Negroes’.27 One can identify in Fanon’s joke elements of Negrophobia. Did he attempt to escape his blackness, much like Mayotte Capécia who sought to whiten her world? Did he eschew the parochialism of West Indians settled in Paris? Did he yearn to lose himself (much like the Sartrean ‘inauthentic’ Jew) in the anonymity of the crowd in Lyon? I will return

Introduction 9 to these questions in Chapters 1 and 3; it suffices to note at this stage that Fanon wanted to be seen as French interacting with other French.28 In Black Skin, White Masks, he evokes the difficulty he encountered in a white society that held him to authenticity: there were no avenues of escape from his blackness. As we will see in Chapter 2, the gaze of the white (child) exposes Fanon and proves to be devastating: it shatters the schema of his corporeality. Between the First and Second World Wars, West Indian and African students studying in Paris were immersed in a highly stimulating intellectual and political environment. These students came into contact with the writers of the New Negro movement. At the time, the phenomenon of expatriation was a source of creativity for hitherto fettered black American artists. France was a very attractive location for these writers and for other expatriates of black American origin. Paris became the hub of Pan-Africanism, bringing together black Americans and francophone blacks, such as René Maran, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. This Pan-Africanism generated a nationalism of colour which took shape in negritude. Two other movements influenced these students: the avant-garde aesthetic of the surrealists and the radical politics of the French Communist Party. On 1 June 1932, a group of West Indian students (namely Étienne and Thélus Léro, Jules Monnerot, René Ménil, Maurice-Sabat Quitman, Michel Pilotin and Simone Yoyotte)29 launched a journal entitled Légitime défense. These students focused primarily on political and cultural issues that were specific to the Antilles. Nevertheless, their literary and political journal was to exert a tremendous influence on other Black African students. Because of its radical propensities, Légitime défense was suppressed after its first number in 1934, only to be replaced by L’Etudiant noir. The focus was no longer the West Indies but the whole of the African culture.30 The Black West Indian and African students in Paris did not necessarily share the same political commitment. Though Senghor later distanced himself from the Marxist–Leninist movement represented by Légitime défense – supported mainly by Étienne Léro, René Ménil and Jules Monnerot – he was keen to associate himself with L’Étudiant noir. He did not believe in the importance of politics but rather in the role

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of culture, primarily in the poetics of negritude, as an effective instrument to overcome colonialism.31 Senghor describes negritude as ‘the ensemble of values of black civilization’.32 Since Césaire coined the term ‘negritude’ in L’Étudiant noir in the 1930s, Senghor says, its signification has changed from the struggle against colonial and cultural oppression to the inauguration of a new humanism. In the philanthropic sense of the term, this new humanism, as a system of thought and action concerned with the human race as a whole, necessarily also heralds the liberation of the Negro from the shackles of racism and colonialism. In the academic sense, this humanism embraces the study of literary culture that started with the Renaissance, and as such acknowledges the contribution of African civilizations to Western culture. Senghor uses it as an instrument of struggle against white colonialism and to affirm black identity. It is in this sense that he defines negritude as an affirmation of a negation; that is, a negation of a historical movement that threatens to assimilate and eradicate the difference of the black.33 In Senghor’s terms, negritude, by its ontology (that is, its philosophy of being), its moral law and its aesthetic, is a response to the modern humanism that European philosophers and scientists have been preparing since the end of the nineteenth century, and as Teilhard de Chardin and the writers and artists of the mid-twentieth present it. […] the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe. The latter is essentially static, objective, dichotomic; it is, in fact, dualistic, in that it makes an absolute distinction between body and soul, matter and spirit. It is founded on separation and opposition: on analysis and conflict. The African, on the other hand, conceives the world, beyond the diversity of its forms, as a fundamentally mobile, yet unique, reality that seeks synthesis.34 Cartesian theory holds that knowledge is the outcome of discursive reason, that is, it is accessible only to the cogito, the thinking subject. Two hundred years after Descartes, August Comte, the founder of positivism, perceived the history of human knowledge as evolving through three

Introduction 11 distinct stages: religion, metaphysics and sciences. Positivism led to the emergence of human sciences, with sociology as a field of scientific research having the individual and society as the objects of its critical investigation. Senghor rejects the dualistic theory of Cartesianism for prioritizing mind over body, and also positivism for removing the subject of intuition from the field of its scientific methodology.35 Senghor acknowledges the indebtedness of negritude to the surrealist movement, namely to the influence of Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara and André Breton, who repudiated the values of their bourgeois and capitalist society.36 Moreover, Senghor argues that negritude in turn influenced twentieth-century European culture. In the field of literature, symbolism and surrealism upset the prevalent values of European civilization, which since the Renaissance had ‘rested essentially on discursive reason and facts, on logic and matter’.37 In art, expressionism and cubism abandoned Western conventions of realism and the idea that art imitates reality and is a simulacrum produced according to the requirements of rationality.38 Significantly, in his critique of the Cartesian subject and of the subject of positivism, Senghor attempts to reverse the binary terms of opposition in which one of the terms – that is, black – is denigrated. In his terms, negritude is a revalorization of that which was hitherto denigrated. However, as we shall see in Fanon’s critique of negritude, Senghor reproduces these binary terms, still opposing black and white, European and African, the subject of discursive reason and that of intuition. His notion of negritude (or what he calls ‘africanité’) reproduces a Eurocentrism which essentializes the black as ‘authentically’ African.39 Arguably, negritude is nothing but a colonial fabrication, a Western mythology. Put simply, like a good Orientalist who Orientalizes the Orient by fabricating it, Senghor ‘Africanizes the African’.40 As we will see in Chapter 6 and in the Conclusion, Fanon delivers a scathing attack on the essentialism of the advocates of negritude and AraboIslamism, on what he characterizes as the racialization – or better still the tribalization – of thought, culture and politics, anticipating the critique of Laroui and Said. Written at the chafing limits of the binary language of body/mind, Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, is arguably part of the project of revalorizing blackness undertaken by the apostles of the

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negritude movement. It is important to bear in mind that Fanon studied in Lyon and was not part of the intellectual circle which contributed to the development of negritude in Paris and that his engagement with the movement was purely literary, as evidenced in his debate with Sartre. Although it inspires Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, the sort of humanism heralded by Senghor is, as we will see in the Conclusion, at odds with the one Fanon proposes in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon has a complex and ambivalent relationship with negritude. He criticizes its advocates, or what he calls ‘men of culture’,41 for having fallen back on archaic cultural practices which are far removed from the political realities of their colonized societies. Critics such as Renata Zahar, David Caute and Irene Gendzier consider Fanon’s fascination with negritude as a transitional stage before he rejects it.42 Their overriding assumption is that Fanon jettisons negritude and psychoanalysis and becomes more concerned with politics in The Wretched of the Earth. However, Fanon’s interest in the subject of psychoanalysis does not wane in Toward the African Revolution and in The Wretched of the Earth. In fact, the closing chapter of the latter provides an insightful psychoanalytical interpretation of the pernicious effects of colonial violence on the psychological constitution of colonized Algerians. Undoubtedly there is a noticeable change in Fanon’s approach to the issue of negritude. In Black Skin, White Masks his perspective is psychoanalytical, while in Toward the African Revolution and The Wretched of the Earth his take on the issue becomes highly politicized. Jock McCulloch’s contention that ‘Fanon becomes more rather than less sympathetic to negritude with the passing of time’43 is misleading. McCulloch mistakes negritude as a cultural movement (what Fanon calls ‘Negroism’ espoused by ‘men of culture’) and negritude as the consciousness of race. As we will see in the Conclusion, Memmi makes the same mistake in his rebuttal of Fanon. However, McCulloch is right to argue that Fanon grapples with the issue of blackness (that is, the consciousness of race) in all his works. He is, though, wrong to suggest that this continued critical engagement with negritude demonstrates Fanon’s endorsement of its ideology. In his statement to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome (1959), reproduced as a chapter ‘On National Culture’ in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon severs his visceral ties with negritude.

Introduction 13 As becomes evident in Chapter 6, Fanon rejects negritude on the same grounds as he dismisses the mythologizing rhetoric of the exponents of the Arabo-Islamic cultural past. Before engaging with the political motives which led Fanon to take such a stance, it will be useful to examine his ambivalent views vis-à-vis negritude. His debate with its followers can be traced back to Black Skin, White Masks. He sketches the initial lines of his critique thus: […] what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact. The educated Negro, slave of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro myth, feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. Or that he no longer understands it. Then he congratulates himself on this, and enlarging the difference, the incomprehension, the disharmony, he finds in them the meaning of his real humanity. Or more rarely he wants to belong to his people. And it is with rage in his mouth and abandon in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss. We shall see that this attitude, so heroically absolute, renounces the present and the future in the name of a mythical past.44 In the concluding pages of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon adopts Sartre’s position that negritude’s anti-racist racism cannot be an end in itself. He clearly realizes the dangers of its totalizing and essentialist rhetoric and therefore refuses to ‘derive [his] basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color’.45 He refuses now ‘to exalt the past at the expense of [his] present and [his] future’ and to dedicate himself to an opaque and ‘unrecognizable Negro civilization’.46 He rightly points out that if the Indo-Chinese are rebelling against French colonialism, it is not because they had a great civilization in the distant past, but because they are oppressed. Likewise, what the peoples of colour are rebelling against is their condition as oppressed peoples. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon elaborates further on this issue. He remarks that praising and proclaiming the greatness of the Songhai civilization will not change the circumstances of the exploited and underfed Songhais.47 Obviously, Fanon’s critique takes on a political turn. The suffering of the Negroes, as well as the colonized, must be sought not just at the

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level of culture and subjectivity, but at the level of history and politics. This critique of negritude is implicit in Black Skin, White Masks and explicit in The Wretched of the Earth. Arguably, his discussion of Hegel and the Negro in Black Skin, White Masks foreshadows his incendiary language in The Wretched of the Earth. However, and in spite of the latent violence lurking behind his psychoanalysis, Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks still believes in the possibilities of assimilation into French society. In ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon attempts to further outline and deconstruct ‘the affective complexes that could oppose West Indians and Africans’.48 Written three years after Black Skin, White Masks, his article examines the ambivalent relation which the Antilleans had with Africa, showing that such complexes alienated West Indians from themselves. Prior to 1939, they felt not only superior but fundamentally different to Africans. They were, however, oblivious to the fact that they were victims of colonialism and that they suffered ‘the tragedy of being neither white nor Negro’.49 In Africa, discrimination was manifestly open and brutal; it amputated the Negroes and denied their humanity. In Martinique, on the other hand, ‘there was no racial barrier, no discrimination’, but just that ‘ironic spice’ which coloured the Martinican mentality giving rise to a latent racism.50 An examination of Fanon’s analysis of race relations in Martinique may help us grasp his complex views on negritude and adumbrate the itinerary of his thinking which ultimately led him to reject negritude and Frenchness. According to Fanon, prior to the Second World War – that is, before the West Indians encountered the racism of the French sailors who were blockaded in Fort-de-France – social relations were not determined by racial factors but by the economic interests of the various social classes.51 The West Indians never perceived themselves as Negroes. ‘In every West Indian, before the war of 1939,’ he contends, ‘there was not only the certainty of a superiority over the African, but the certainty of a fundamental difference. The African was a Negro and the West Indian a European.’52 Before the War, Fanon points out, ‘no spontaneous claim of Negritude rang forth’.53 The West Indians donned a white mask: they lived, thought, dreamed like white Europeans.54 However, after encountering French sailors, ‘the West Indian was obliged,

Introduction 15 under the pressure of European racists, to abandon positions which were essentially fragile, because they were absurd, because they were incorrect, because they were alienating’.55 This realization was liberating; it brought into existence a ‘new generation’ which firmly believed that ‘[t]he West Indian of 1945 [was] a Negro’.56 As will be argued in Chapter 3, Fanon’s rebuttal of Capécia is a critique of these positions which are ‘incorrect’ and ‘alienating’ because they are Negrophobic. The West Indians’ encounter with the racism of the French sailors precipitated them into what Fanon calls their ‘first metaphysical experience’. Racism profoundly impacted their very existence, forcing them to defend their ‘virtuous colour’.57 As Fanon explains, ‘before ten thousand racists, the West Indian felt obliged to defend himself. Without Césaire this would have been difficult for him.’58 This change of attitude ‘amounted to nothing less than requiring the West Indian to recast his world, to undergo a metamorphosis of his body. It meant demanding of himself an axiological activity in reverse, a valorization of what he had rejected.’59 Racism brought about the consciousness of race and radicalized the Martinicans in two ways. Not only did it lead them to rally behind de Gaulle – who convinced them that ‘France, their France, had not lost the war but traitors had sold it out’60 – it also gave rise to class consciousness. As Fanon maintains, ‘the demonstrations on the occasion of the Liberation, which were held in the West Indies, in any case in Martinique, in the months of July and August 1943, were the consequence of the birth of the proletariat’.61 The coming-into-consciousness coincided with the proletarianization of Martinique which ‘for the first time systematized its political consciousness’. Pithily put: ‘the first metaphysical experience, or if one prefers, ontological experiment, coincided with the first political experiment’62 and this experiment was negritude and the radical political propensities to subvert the colonial narrative. If August Comte considered ‘the proletarian as systematic philosopher’, Fanon is adamant that ‘the proletarian of Martinique [was] a systematized Negro’.63 After the war, Martinicans discovered that they were Negroes. The movement of negritude provided them with a defence mechanism to overcome racism: it helped them come to terms with the ‘facticity’ of

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their blackness. The movement empowered them to go back to their roots, to black Africa, with their hearts full of hopes, eager to rediscover the source, to suckle at the authentic breasts of the African earth. The West Indians, civil servants and military, lawyers and doctors, landing in Dakar, were distressed at not being sufficiently black. Fifteen years before, they said to the Europeans, ‘Don’t pay attention to my black skin, it’s the sun that has burned me, my soul is as white as yours’. After 1945 they changed their tune. They said to the Africans, ‘Don’t pay attention to my white skin, my soul is as black as yours, and that is what matters.’64 Having rediscovered that they were the descendants of transplanted Negro slaves, the West Indians immersed themselves in the poetry of negritude and ‘aspired only to one thing: to plunge into the great “black hole”’.65 Césaire’s celebration of blackness helped the West Indians come into consciousness. The political awakening of the West Indians as an exploited class would not have been possible without negritude.66 In ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon assigns a progressive role to negritude: the espousal of negritude coincided with the coming-intoconsciousness – that is, the ‘proletarianization’ – of the black West Indians who were exploited by a white ideology.67 However, after the ‘great white error’, Fanon comes to the realization that the poetic dreams of negritude were nothing but a ‘great black mirage’.68 He criticizes the essentialist rhetoric of negritude. In his view, the Negro experience cannot be generalized: there is not one Negro, but there are Negroes. Negritude casts the Negro people into a shadowy anonymity, obliterating their historical, cultural, national and ethnic differences. Different nationalities traverse the facticity of blackness. The expression ‘Negro people’ is devoid of any meaning for Fanon. It replicates the racist language which refuses to acknowledge cultural difference. As he puts it concisely: ‘The object of lumping all the Negroes together under the designation of “Negro people” is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression.’69 Fanon deconstructs the totalizing representation of negritude that ‘all Negroes agree on certain things,

Introduction 17 that they share the principle of communion’. He aptly argues that ‘there is nothing, a priori, to warrant the assumption that such a thing as a Negro people exists’.70 In his view, the followers of negritude advocate a return to a cultural past which is far removed from current political reality; negritude is nothing but a ‘great black mirage’, the ‘black abyss’ in which the cultural, historical and national differences of the blacks are obfuscated and lost.71 In ‘Racism and Culture’, published at the height of the Algerian War, Fanon explains that what made the return of the revolutionary Algerians to the past historical was the fact that their ‘plunge into the chasm of the past [was] the condition and the source of freedom’.72 It consolidated the nation and enabled it to take roots. But in the case of the advocates of negritude, he observes: Rediscovering tradition, living it as a defence mechanism, as a symbol of purity, of salvation, the decultured individual leaves the impression that the mediation takes vengeance by substantializing itself. This falling back on archaic positions having no relation to technical development is paradoxical. The institutions thus valorized no longer correspond to the elaborate methods of action already mastered. The culture put into capsules, which has vegetated since the foreign domination, is revalorized. It is not reconceived, grasped anew, dynamized from within. It is shouted. And this headlong, unstructured, verbal revalorization conceals paradoxical attitudes.73 Such attitudes express for Fanon a form of exoticism which ‘allows no cultural confrontation’, no revolutionary praxis for a genuine decolonization. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon adds to his critique of negritude. As we will see in Chapter 1, his argument runs counter to Sartre’s views in Black Orpheus: the poetry of negritude is not revolutionary. Fanon makes a clear distinction between the revolutionary and acculturated elite, between the former engaged with current political struggle and the latter dubbed ‘men of culture’, namely the apostles of negritude who rediscovered their own culture which they had hitherto jettisoned

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in favour of the French one. In Fanon’s view, the culture they sought to recover was not a living culture; it was a ‘mummified culture’, an ensemble of ‘characteristics’, of curiosities, of exotic things.74 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon analyses the psychological effects which acculturation had on the native elite. By donning the mask of metropolitan white culture, this acculturated elite expressed an exoticism vis-à-vis the native culture they had previously relinquished and deprecated – an exoticism which represented it negatively from a position of exteriority. However, during the period of decolonization, the same elite abandoned the culture of the colonizer in which they had until then been assimilated and sought anchorage in their native culture. ‘In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man’s culture,’ Fanon argues, ‘the native feels the need to turn backwards towards his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people.’75 Evoking the example of negritude, Fanon remarks: ‘If in the world of poetry this movement reaches unaccustomed heights, the fact remains that in the real world the intellectual often follows up a blind alley.’76 Fanon dismisses the attempt of the native elite to rehabilitate the native culture as nothing but ‘a banal search of exoticism’.62 This banal exoticism is epitomized by Senghor and the advocates of negritude who spent their time Africanizing the African, or rather negrifying the Negro, in order to liberate themselves from colonial racism and its stereotypical language. As Fanon puts it: ‘Finding your fellow countrymen sometimes means in this phase to will to be a nigger, not a nigger like all other niggers but a real nigger, a Negro cur, just the sort of nigger that the white man wants you to be.’77 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon irrevocably dismisses negritude as an anachronistic ideology, along with its essentialist rhetoric which reproduces the racist assumption of the colonizer. This rejection is unequivocal. He laments that men of culture in Africa were marching toward a nebulous culture – a culture that is cut off from the events of today, a mummified culture, a ‘culture in capsules’ – and that their movement was not chiefly orientated towards decolonization and the consolidation of national culture.78 In Chapter 6, I will return to elaborate further on the significance of culture as the site of anticolonial struggle. Let me now hasten to make some brief remarks

Introduction 19 on Fanon’s project of decolonization, the issue of violence and his neo-humanism. Fanon’s political project in Studies in a Dying Colonialism can be best comprehended in the context of the political activism of French Algerian Liberals and their avowed desire to work for French and Muslim coexistence.79 The chapter that he devotes to European and Jewish ethnic minorities in Algeria expresses this desire. However, as Ferhat Abbas forcefully argues, the activities of the ultras80 jeopardized any possibility of cohabitation and intensified hatred and violence. Arguably, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is written as the epilogue to this hatred and violence. A number of critics misinterpret Fanon’s political project by abstracting his discussion on violence from its historical context. Whilst criticizing the Liberal Left in the articles he wrote two years earlier, in 1957, for El Moudjahid, he clearly solicits their political support in Studies in a Dying Colonialism. The chapter ‘Algeria’s European Minority’ is footnoted by two accounts: one by Yvon Bresson, a police officer who worked as an FLN agent; the other is written by Fanon’s colleague, Geronimi. In line with Ramdane Abane’s political project to inaugurate a multicultural Algeria, Fanon seeks to establish the foundation for a rapprochement between the Algerians and the Europeans. He is keenly aware that the definition of nationality is up for grabs in post-independence Algeria, where Europeans, Jews, Berbers and Arabs will play a key role in the reality of an Algerian nation governed by democratic political institutions. In stark contrast with the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, the tone of his essay is conciliatory. Fanon’s project is clear: ‘We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow.’81 The Fanonian conception of the ‘new man’ as outlined in The Wretched of the Earth has its roots in Studies in a Dying Colonialism. Two pointers are needed to define this conception: first, the mummified society is rendered dynamic by revolutionary praxis, and the ‘reality of the nation’ gives rise to the new man; second, the tone of the book is conciliatory – in its attempt to consolidate the unity of the movement, the book glosses over the internal divisions in an effort to reconcile ethnic minorities, European and indigenous, Christian, Jew and Muslim. Fanon’s incendiary discourse in the preface of Studies in a Dying

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Colonialism announces the rhetoric of violence as a necessary conclusion to colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. A number of critics misinterpret Fanon’s point on violence: it is not the death of the European, or more precisely the French, that Fanon wills, but rather the symbolic death of colonialism which he considers the preamble to the new humanism which decolonization will usher in. The Second World War destroyed two myths: the myth that France was an invincible colonial power and the myth that France was the beacon of republican tradition. Like Fanon, the Algerians who fought side by side with French soldiers were disillusioned after the war; and because they were not treated on the same terms of equality as the French, they found themselves in the ranks of the FLN. The brutal repression of the 1945 uprising announced the armed struggle of the Algerian people. Violence begat violence: to paraphrase Fanon, the Algerians understood that the only language that the French colonizer comprehended was violence. The specificity of the Algerian context shaped Fanon’s views on violence and decolonization. His reference in The Wretched of the Earth to the 1945 uprising makes this amply clear.82 Throughout the history of Algeria’s colonization, politics achieved nothing. A hundred years after the Constitution of the Second Republic annexed Algeria to French territory, the Algerians were at the margins of the political process, deprived of the right of political representation as citizens. The ballot box, as the 1948 elections proved, was always rigged and could not help emancipate the Algerians. Their armed struggle – which came to symbolize for Fanon the revolution of Africa as a whole – strengthened his belief in the Hegelian axiom that freedom was something that could not be given but must be fought for. At the Accra Conference held in December 1958, Fanon with the Algerian delegation (headed by Ahmed Boumendjel and Chauki Mostefaï) sought to mobilize support of the African Nations, and ‘Concerning Violence’ draws its significance from the conference’s resolutions and more specifically from its stance on Algeria’s armed struggle.83 Alluding to Nkrumah’s opening speech, he writes: ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains and we have an immense continent to win.’84 Algeria’s ‘legalist nationalism’ failed to resolve the Algerian problem and the armed struggle was an exemplar for nationalist movements in Africa. ‘The Algerian war,’ Fanon points out, ‘had in

Introduction 21 fact a decisive bearing on this Congress. For the first time, it was realized, a colonialism waging war in Africa proves itself powerless to win.’85 In El Moudjahid, he writes the obituary of European colonialism in Africa: ‘In the settlement of colonies of the type of Kenya, Algeria and South Africa,’ he contends ‘there is unanimity: only armed struggle will bring about the defeat of the occupying nation.’86 He presents the armed struggle as ‘a continuous, sustained action, constantly being reinforced, which contains in its development the collapse and the death of French colonialism in Africa’.87 In Ghana, Fanon met a number of prominent nationalist figures – Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Félix Moumié (leader of the Union du Peuple Camerounais (UPC)), Robert Holden (leader of the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA)) and Patrice Lumumba (leader of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC)). Fanon was inspired by Nkrumah’s vision of the united states of Africa and worked hard to realize African unity.88 However, he was cognizant of the fact that tribalism divided the continent – and neo-colonialist agents, in the pay of colonial Europe, compromised such a vision. Fanon defended Algeria’s armed struggle and sought to emulate the Algerian Revolution in other African countries. As David Macey remarks, ‘[h]is hugely successful performance in Accra also helped to promote the image of Fanon as the apostle of violence three years before the publication of Les Damnés de la terre’.89 Nevertheless, the armed struggle in Algeria was the exception rather than the rule. Algeria seemed to furnish Fanon with a conception of the revolution (or better still decolonization) where violence is presented as the ‘midwife of history’.90 In all the conferences that he attended, he sought to unite the Africans in their struggle to shake off colonialism. He fought stubbornly against the tide of neo-colonialism, against the politics of compromise and resignation.91 Léopold Senghor and Félix Houphouët were a case in point of such politics. As colonialism entered its death throes in Africa, de Gaulle proposed in the referendum of September 1958 that African countries could opt for self-determination provided they maintained close political ties with France. Senghor and Houphouët (representing respectively Senegal and Ivory Coast) backed de Gaulle’s proposal, while Sékou Touré voted for independence.92 Fanon commended Sékou Touré for his political stance and endorsed Nkrumah’s

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Pan-African politics which constituted a front of political resistance against de Gaulle’s neo-colonialist politics. Fanon was of the view that if de Gaulle was willing to grant French colonies in Africa independence, it was because he had no choice: France had overcommitted itself in a costly war in Algeria and could not contain the tide of decolonization which was sweeping the continent. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes the epiphany of what was to take place in post-independence Algeria, Africa and the Third World and exposes how the nationalist elements, in the pay of neocolonialism, deceived the African people. To be sure, his critique points to the pitfalls of nationalism, to the bourgeoisement of the revolutionary movement, to the establishment of the one-party state, to the concentration of power in the army which became the arbiter between the people and the leadership. He did not, however, live to see how postindependence politics betrayed his view of Algeria’s revolutionary movement as the paragon of a new brand of socialistic humanism for a unified Africa. Sartre maintained that The Wretched of the Earth did not need a preface, but he nevertheless wrote one ‘to carry the dialectic through to the end’: the decolonization of the people of Europe and the extirpation of the colonialist that lived within them. The preface echoes his tumultuous outcry in ‘Colonialism Is a System’: We, the people of mainland France, have only a lesson to draw from these facts: colonialism is in the process of destroying itself. But it still fouls the atmosphere. It is our shame; it mocks our laws or caricatures them. It affects us with its racism; as the Montpellier episode proved the other day, it obliges our young men to die for the Nazi principles that we fought against 10 years ago; it attempts to defend itself by arousing fascism even here in France. Our role is to help it to die not only in Algeria but wherever it exists.93 Sartre’s project is ostensibly to decolonize France and old colonial Europe. It is my argument in this volume that Fanon is driven by the same necessity as Sartre to decolonize both colonizer and colonized. As I will show in the concluding chapter, Fanon conceives of the

Introduction 23 ‘being-of-decolonization’, in Sartrean existential phenomenological terms, as a new form of (inter)nationalism. In the hectic months before his death, Fanon was able to read and digest Sartre’s voluminous and complex Critique de la raison dialectique, which provided him with a critical framework to analyse violence in Algeria and conceive of the Third World as a massive ‘project’ of both decolonization and re-humanizing politics; within this framework, decolonization was essentially ‘a form of praxis, or purposeful human action determined by a project, that responds to and negates the primal and endemic violence of colonization’.94 To be sure, violence as a praxis challenged colonial racism and allowed Fanon to make his pronouncement that the violence of decolonization was humanistic, announcing the emergence of ‘new’ humanity. It was ‘quite simply the replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men’; it was a sort of tabula rasa: ‘The last shall be first and the first last’ – the overhauling of the whole social structure from bottom up.95 In ‘National Independence: The Only Possible Outcome’, Fanon affirms, ‘Independence descended from the sky of ideal possibilities. It has become flesh and life, has been incorporated into the very substance of the people.’96 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes decolonization in biblical terms, evoking the second coming that the First shall be last, the Last first. But this eschatology announces the end of history – the history of colonialism and the advent of new humanism. From the Algerian of the colonial period, a new man has sprung, the Algerian of the era of independence. This Algerian rediscovers his personality in action, discipline, the sense of responsibilities, and rediscovers the real that he takes fully in hand and transforms by renewing efficient relations with it. He becomes a responsible citizen.97 In The Wretched of the Earth, elaborating on one of the key themes of Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Fanon argues that decolonization is a revolutionary movement which radically changes people and social structures. Decolonization, he writes, ‘influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crashed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s

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floodlights upon them.’98 The violence of decolonization is not gratuitous: it announces the end of colonialism and gives birth to ‘new men’. In Fanon’s words: ‘it brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity’.99 Fanon’s project is not to celebrate violence per se but the advent of a new humanism. Fanon considers decolonization as a creative process, a ‘veritable creation of men’, and it is thanks to this phenomenon that the colonized, ‘the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself’.100 In its exploration of Fanon’s project of decolonization and his humanism, this book comprising six chapters covers a number of different issues. For the sake of coherence, and to knit them in a cohesive structure, it is important to adumbrate clearly the terms of my problematic. A great deal has been written about Fanon’s interest in psychoanalysis and sexual politics in Black Skin, White Masks and his revolutionary praxis in The Wretched of the Earth. What has been thus far overlooked in Fanonian scholarship is the ethical dimension of his psychiatry and politics. This book attempts to remedy this oversight by engaging with Fanon’s humanism and its ethical preoccupation. In this regard, Chapter 1 offers an exploration of the influence of Sartre on Fanon, establishing that his ethics is predicated on Sartrean Marxist existential phenomenology. As we will see, Fanon problematizes the Sartrean ‘doubling of the fundamental relation with the Other’. In Black Skin, White Masks, the conflict is not just phenomenological but also historical, affecting the Negro’s body and un/conscious. Fanon does not discover himself in the midst of the crowd, as a person among other people. Racism corrupts intersubjective relations and attenuates Sartre’s existential phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception; the relationship between the body and the world (that is, ‘le schéma corporel’ or what he terms the ‘historical bodily schema’) is racialized and Fanon apprehends his embodied self as an object in the world. Chapter 2 undertakes a poststructuralist and deconstructive interpretation of Fanon. Demonstrably, such an interpretation discounts the significance of Sartre in Fanon’s work. As I will argue in this chapter, the dissembling of self in Black Skin, White Masks is not a deconstructive and poststructuralist metaphorical device. It is my intention to show

Introduction 25 how Bhabha’s postcolonial readings of Fanon depart from and go beyond the Fanon brief. In fact, these readings go against Fanon’s thought. Nevertheless, in his preface to Richard Philcox’s The Wretched of the Earth, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, Bhabha raises a host of pertinent questions about the relevance of Fanon’s work today, about his humanism and ethics, about violence, decolonization and neocolonialism in the post-independence period, and about his politics in the age of globalization. Over the course of this book, I will engage with these questions and argue that Fanon’s (inter)nationalism – what Bhabha calls transnationalism – is not a feature of the ‘ontopological split’, that is, the deconstruction of the bond which grounds subject/ identity and history to a specific geographical location; on the contrary, it is anchored in history. Fanon makes it clear that the colonized’s entry into history is of fundamental importance to the process of decolonization. While linking the idea of identity with history and territory, Fanon warns against the nefarious consequences of narrow and xenophobic nationalism. His brand of nationalism is internationalist and is predicated upon an ethics which acknowledges and recognizes differences. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Fanon epidermalizes language and sexuality, underscoring that the Symbolic is marked by the dimension of race and ethnicity. The significance of this dimension is crucial in developing a feminist critique, an approach which is timely but beyond the scope of my project in this book. The focus of this chapter is on Fanon’s censure of Negrophobia’s colouring of language and sexuality. Nonetheless, it is important to caution against a critique which obfuscates this dimension or which uses the issue of race to colour an ethnocentric white feminism. It is also important to go beyond a strictly Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of gender/sexual politics to explore psychoanalytical notions, such as ‘the family romance’ or ‘in the name of the father’, in the light of France’s colonial paternalism and practice of slavery. Colonial racism thwarted intersubjective relations and also undermined the universality of France’s republican institutions. I appropriate Freud’s ‘family romance’ to throw into sharp relief the contradictions at the core of this universality, demonstrating that these institutions did not create fraternal ties between black and white but were rather at the origin of their alienation.

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Chapter 4 is concerned primarily with the involvement of medicine in the colonization of Algeria. It also examines the contradictions inherent within the assimilationist rhetoric which legitimated colonialism and the attendant violence it engendered. As we will see, France’s republican institutions played a key role in imperializing Algeria and expropriating its people. Fanon identifies colonialism as the root cause of the colonized’s alienation in both senses of the term, psychological and political: colonialism brought about the madness of the colonized, as well as their dispossession and uprooting. This chapter shows how colonialism engendered madness, while Chapter 5 describes the historical processes which determined the expropriation of the peasantry and its deracination. Chapter 5, drawing on Marx’s and Sartre’s critiques of French colonialism in Algeria, elaborates further on these processes which ultimately created an indigenous lumpenproletariat. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon throws into sharp relief the pitfalls of nationalism and the shortcomings of some Marxist concepts as tools to grasp the Manichaean economy of colonial and postcolonial society. My task in this chapter is not only to problematize orthodox Marxism for overlooking the colonial question and to show that Fanon envisages the Revolution as a peasant revolution, but also to recover the complex historical specificities which determined the notion of the lumpenproletariat in Fanon’s work – a notion which is appropriated by Peter Stallybrass and Ranjana Khanna without considering its colonial history. Chapter 6 undertakes a study of one of the most insidious forms of alienation, prevalent in Arabo-Islamic society, namely the traditionalization of culture and its promotion as an emblem of nationality. As I will argue in this chapter, Abdallah Laroui develops Fanon’s analysis of this sort of alienation, drawing on his critique of negritude and its mystification of culture. Unlike Fanon, Laroui assigns to the proletariat – led by the organic intellectual – a crucial role in overcoming the alienation and retardation of the colonized society. Abdelkabir Khatibi dismisses Fanon’s and Laroui’s historicism as fanciful theorizing and proposes a pluralistic view of culture supported by technical and scientific developments. Sadly, these developments did not pave the way to a genuine decolonization as envisaged by Khatibi, but instead maintained an unfettered neo-liberalism which generated unspeakable violence.

Introduction 27 Drawing on the work of Edward Said, I will elaborate further on Fanon’s views on the pitfalls of nationalism and on neo-liberal capitalism and the attendant cultural chaos it engendered. In this book, I provide an extended discussion of Fanon’s ambivalent relationship with negritude and of the importance of national culture in the process of decolonization. My project is twofold: first, to assess the legacy of Fanon by focusing my discussion on Laroui, Khatibi, Bhabha and Said; second, to demonstrate that culture is constitutive, a site of ideological struggle and political resistance, and that it is also an instrument of cultural imperialism. The book engages with various aspects of Fanon’s work, examining the ways in which Fanon is appropriated by postcolonial theorists such Homi K. Bhabha, by feminists like Gwen Bergner and by cultural materialists such as Peter Stallybrass. Moreover, the book adumbrates the influences which impacted on his psychiatric practice and politics – these influences are wide and range from existential phenomenology, to psychoanalysis and Marxism. I will endeavour to read Fanon’s work in a new way, moving the discussion beyond the sterile debates which impose on Fanon’s work a bifid structure, opposing early and late Fanon, his psychoanalysis in Black Skin, White Masks and his revolutionary praxis in The Wretched of the Earth. It is important to resist critical approaches which discount the specificities of his work: theories which read him as a pseudo-Marxist or as a poststructuralist avant la lettre and which valorize his psychoanalysis without considering his politics. My aim is to present a reading which takes into account the plurality of perspectives in his work and more importantly its ethical dimension. I hope to show that an anthropological view of the subject – as a totality constituted of the biological, the sociological, the historical and psychological – defines his psychiatry and politics. In evidence is his humanism in his psychiatry and politics. Critics who might have applauded him for his contribution to the war efforts in the Second World War – but excoriated him for joining the ranks of the FLN – fail to see that the idealism which motivated Fanon to join the dissidence spurred him to fight French colonialism in Algeria. In both instances, Fanon sought to uphold the republican and democratic institutions. His humanism is shaped by these institutions which he fought to protect from the threat of fascism in the Second World War and from

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colonialism during the Algerian War. In a letter he sent to Roger Taïeb from his deathbed, Fanon wrote: what I want to say is that death is always close by, and what’s important is not to know if you can avoid it, but to know that you have done the most possible to realize your ideas. What shocks me here in this bed, as I grow weaker, is not that I’m dying, but I’m dying in Washington of leukaemia considering that I could have died in battle with the enemy three months ago when I knew I had this disease. We are nothing on earth if we are not, first of all, slaves of a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of justice, the cause of liberty.101 Racism thwarts human relations. In his work, Fanon sought to restore health to these relations and he fought twice, risking his life, to safeguard France’s institutions. It must be said that Fanon spent all his life fighting to uphold the cause of justice and freedom. He enlisted in the Second World War to fight Nazi Germany and defend France. It was no contradiction for Fanon to take up arms against France and serve the causes of the Algerian people, of Africa and of the Third World. Notes 1 Peter Geismar, Fanon (New York: The Dial Press, 1971), p. 185. 2 Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), pp. 20–21. Biographical details relating to Fanon’s family background and education were, by and large, taken from this source. Some details come from Geismar’s Fanon, from Irene Gendzier’s Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (London: Wildwood House Ltd, 1973), from Alice Cherki’s Frantz Fanon, Portrait (Paris: Le Seuil, 2000) and from David Macey’s Frantz Fanon, A Life (London: Granta, 2000). 3 Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, vol. 3 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 15. 4 The Créole term békés refers to white French/European settlers in Martinique. 5 Frantz Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, in Toward the African Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970), p. 34.

Introduction 29 6 Marcel Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, in Elo Dacy (ed.), L’actualité de Frantz Fanon, Actes de colloque de Brazzaville (Paris: Karthala, 1986), p. 13. 7 Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, p. 15. 8 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, pp. 33–34. 9 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 28. 10 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 28. 11 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 32. 12 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 32. 13 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 32. 14 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 31. 15 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 31. 16 The term pieds noirs refers to European settlers in colonial Algeria. 17 Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, p. 17. 18 A fez or red hat with a tassel on top. 19 Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, London, 1986), pp. 102–103. 20 David Macey is right to observe that ‘Tan Robè and its aftermath had an incalculable effect on the young Fanon, who now began to learn precisely what it meant to be a black Martinican wearing a white mask’ (Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 78). 21 Geismar, Fanon, p. 38. 22 Fanon, Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique, p. 69. 23 Fanon, Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique, p. 69. 24 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 156. 25 Marcel Manville, Les Antilles sans fard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). 26 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 23. 27 Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, p. 20. 28 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 118. 29 Lilyan Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une littérature (Brussels: Edition de l’Institut de Sociologie de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1965), p. 26. 30 Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, p. 40. Furthermore, the journal Revue du Monde noir, founded by the Martinican Paulette Nardal and sponsored by the Haitian Doctor Léo Sajous, exerted an influence on the followers of Negritude (cf. L.S. Senghor, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1988), p. 137. 31 Senghor, Ce que je crois, p. 143. 32 Senghor, Ce que je crois, p. 137 and p. 158. 33 Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs, p. 112.

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34 L.S. Senghor, ‘Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 30. 35 Senghor, Ce que je crois, pp. 209–210. 36 Senghor, Ce que je crois, pp. 216–217. 37 Senghor, ‘Negritude’, p. 28. 38 Senghor, ‘Negritude’, p. 32. 39 Tsenay Serequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 49. 40 Serequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy, p. 47. 41 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 168. 42 J. McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Psychology and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 35. 43 McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact, p. 36. 44 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 16. 45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226. 46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226. 47 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 168. 48 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 27. 49 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36. 50 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36. 51 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 28. 52 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 30. 53 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 31. 54 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36. 55 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36. 56 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 35. 57 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 33. 58 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 33. 59 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 34. 60 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 33. 61 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 34. 62 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 34. 63 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 34. 64 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 35. 65 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 37. 66 Not only did the West Indians espouse wholeheartedly the ideology of negritude, but they also supported Césaire’s radical politics. After the end of the Second World War, two out of three deputies elected were of a communist political persuasion and Césaire was one of them.

Introduction 31 67 McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact, p. 43. 68 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 37. 69 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 27. 70 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 28. 71 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 37. See also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 16. 72 Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, p. 53. 73 Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, p. 52. 74 Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, pp. 44–45. 75 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 175. 76 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 177. 77 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 178. 78 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 175. 79 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 401. It is important to bear in mind that the European minority – be it of Jewish faith or liberal political persuasion – played a key role in the Algerian Revolution. Liberals – ‘like Jacques Chevalier, Jean-Marie Tiné, Jean-Pierre Gonon, Perrin, Alexandre Chaulet and his children, Lucien Biterlin and others’ – worked to promote a genuine Franco-Muslim fraternization and to maintain the French element in an independent Algeria. 80 The word ultras refers to the extremists who represented colonial fascism and sought to maintain French colonialism in Algeria. Ferhat Abbas, Autopsie d’une guerre (Paris: Garnier, 1980), p. 302. 81 Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, (London: Earthscan Publications Ltd, 1989), p. 32. 82 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 62. 83 The First Conference of Independent African States raised tepidly the question of armed struggle. However, when Nkrumah reconvened the Conference in Accra in December 1958, the delegates were unanimous in their support for the colonized to use all possible means to liberate themselves from colonial oppression. The Second Conference of the African People held in Tunis in January 1960, as well as the Conference of Independent African States in Addis Abba in June 1960, reaffirmed the resolution of the Accra Conference. 84 Frantz Fanon, ‘Accra: Africa Affirms its Unity and Defines its Strategy’, in Toward the African Revolution, p. 167. 85 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria in Accra’, in Toward the African Revolution, p. 161. 86 Fanon, ‘Accra: Africa Affirms its Unity and Defines its Strategy’, p. 166. 87 Fanon, ‘Algeria in Accra’, p. 161. 88 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 205. 89 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 371.

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90 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 477. 91 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 213. 92 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 202. 93 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, in A. Haddour, S. Brewer and T. McWilliams (trans.), Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 47. 94 Sartre, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, p. 478. 95 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 27–28. 96 Frantz Fanon, ‘National Independence: The Only Possible Outcome’, in Jean Khalfa and Robert Young (eds) and Steven Corcoran (trans.), Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 554. 97 Fanon, ‘National Independence’, p. 554. 98 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28. 99 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28. 100 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28. 101 Geismar, Fanon, p. 185.

1 The significance of Sartre in Fanon

Introduction The influence of Being and Nothingness, Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus is perceptible in the work of Fanon, and the ethical dimension of existential phenomenology is fundamental to his anticolonial project. In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre writes: ‘my intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom that confronts my own and that cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. We are thus immediately thrust into a world that we may call “intersubjectivity”. It is in this world that man decides what he is and others are.’1 Sartre is adamant that we discover the dimension of our existence in the outside world, in the midst of the crowd, as we interact with others. In conversation with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus, Fanon ascertains in Black Skin, White Masks that Negroes do not discover themselves in the midst of the crowd and bemoans that racism corrupts intersubjective relation between black and white. This chapter follows two developments. First, it examines Sartre’s existential phenomenology and his views on negritude. Second, it goes on to engage with Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s pronouncement on negritude as the most revolutionary poetry in the twentieth century. The aim of this chapter is to underscore the significance of Sartre in Fanon’s work, providing a context in which to interpret the latter’s psychoanalysis, universal humanism and political praxis. My task is to establish that his humanism and politics are predicated on Sartreanism. In Black

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Skin, White Masks, his engagement is purely psychoanalytical, seeking to restore the intersubjective relation between black and white, and attempting to de-alienate the notion of Being-for-Others in Sartre. This engagement later becomes more politicized, as I will argue in the concluding pages of the book. The brand of nationalism he proposes in The Wretched of the Earth is not at variance with his humanism: it is internationalist and premised on an ethics of Being-for-Others which is respectful of differences. The site of difference ‘It is not in some hiding-place,’ Sartre writes, ‘that we shall discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man amongst men’.2 Here, Sartre is closer to Baudelaire than Proust, in that he strives to rid existentialism of Proustian infatuation with psychoanalysis. According to Sartre, we discover ourselves not through introspection but by looking outside: ‘everything is finally outside,’ he asserts, ‘everything, even including ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others.’3 The self does not inhabit consciousness; the latter can be neither reduced to an inner process of cogitation nor confused with a nebulous substance called the psyche. Consciousness is a nothingness; being is experienced on the outside. The self is constructed in its interaction with others, in the outside world, or to put it in Heideggerian terms, as being-in-the-world. Sartre situates the consciousness of self at the nexus of a relation of reciprocity between one ‘seeing-the-Other’ and that ‘being-seenby-another’.4 Through the look, there is an upsurge of being, or as he puts it, an ‘irruption of the self’ – ‘I see myself because somebody sees me’.5 One becomes conscious of oneself by becoming conscious of others. Objectness is one of the characteristics of this Being-for-Others.6 The look is crucial in establishing intersubjective relations – relations which are hostile and conflictual.7 Sartre conceives of these relations in terms of a master/slave Hegelian dialectic which opposes the master of the gaze to an objectified Other.8 In this chapter, I will elaborate on the workings of this dialectical operation in Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus with a view to establishing an interpretive framework for Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask. How does Sartre apprehend the



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being-of-the-colonized in a schema where he appropriates the trope of the slave to hypostatize the alienation of the ‘being-seen’ at the end of the Other’s objectifying look? As they offer themselves to the Other’s appraisal, both the Jew and Negro experience their Being-for-Others as a source of anguish and alienation. Could they return the look and discover themselves in the crowd, by interacting with other people as men in the midst of other men? Could they ever overcome the determinants of facticity without falling into the pitfalls of inauthenticity? Is their consciousness to be apprehended just from the outside? It is instructive to inscribe Black Orpheus as well as Anti-Semite and Jew in the philosophical discourse of Being and Nothingness, two correlative works which elaborate a phenomenology of perception, race and embodied selves. These works were cornerstones for the negritude movement and had an impact on Fanon. It is important to provide a cursory critical review of these two texts before turning to Fanon’s take on them and his engagement with Sartrean existential phenomenology. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre conceives of Jewishness as an ‘identity of situation’ constructed through the objectifying gaze of the anti-Semite.9 In the midst of a society which takes the Jew as a Jew, Sartre writes: the root of Jewish disquietude is the necessity imposed upon the Jew of subjecting himself to endless self-examination and finally of assuming a phantom personality, at once strange and familiar, that haunts him and which is nothing but himself – himself as others see him. You may say that this is the lot of all, that each of us has a character familiar to those close to us which we ourselves do not see. No doubt: this is the expression of our fundamental relation to the Other. But the Jew has a personality like the rest of us, and on the top of that he is Jewish. It amounts in a sense to a doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other. The Jew is over-determined.10 Anti-Semitism, argues Sartre, poisons the life of Jews, overdetermining their conduct from the inside so as not to conform to its stereotypical views.11 Overdetermination is the consciousness of oppression and alienation; it is the opposite of ideology which, as a stratagem, gives

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rise to false-consciousness by hiding the objective conditions of its subjects as oppressed subjects. According to Sartre, Jews are not subjects of an ideology insidiously working to exploit them, but objects of anti-Semitism that patently alienates them from themselves and from others. They are made to perceive themselves through the prism of anti-Semitic discourse as outsiders. In Sartre’s phraseology: The Jew, because he knows he is under observation, takes the initiative and attempts to look at himself through the eyes of others. This objectivity toward himself is still another ruse of inauthenticity: while he contemplates himself with the ‘detachment’ of another, he feels himself in effect detached from himself; he becomes another person, a pure witness.12 One of the most contentious and problematic aspects of Anti-Semite and Jew (arousing the acrimony of its Jewish readers) is the jargon of authenticity and inauthenticity that Sartre employs to delineate the ambivalent character of Jews. Inauthentic Jews, writes Sartre, look at themselves and at their coreligionists with the eyes of the anti-Semite or the democrat.13 According to Sartre, ‘inauthentic Jews’ seek avenues of flight from an insufferable situation by either disavowing their Jewishness or striving to be recognized as people by other people, by losing themselves in the crowd, by obliterating their difference in a universe of ‘anonymity’ and by effacing the traces of their ethnicity in a ‘humanity without race’.14 Sartre characterizes them as ‘disembodied’ Jews whose ‘passion for the universal’ necessitates the loss of ‘individual traits’.15 Sartre evokes ‘the impossible dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects [them]’. Being and Nothingness establishes the critical grounds for Sartre to analyse overdetermination in Anti-Semite and Jew as well as in Black Orpheus. In Being and Nothingness, he describes ‘the transfiguration of the Other’ as an ambivalent dialectical operation that oscillates between objectification and subjection, a constant movement from transfiguration to degradation, from the Other-as-subject to the Otheras-object, and vice versa. This movement must not be confused with what Sartre terms, in Anti-Semite and Jew, the ‘doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other’. In this relationship, the Other



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assumes a productive and yet contradictory function: at one level, the Other represents the speculum through which the process of individuation and differentiation takes place. The Other is that which engenders difference. At a second level, the Other is that which conversely brings about the exclusion of those who are perceived as different. In fact, this perception removes individuality from the subject and ostracizes difference. Simply put, this fundamental relationship is doubly ‘Othering’ in the sense of ‘alienating’; and alienation in Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus is of a different order to that described by Sartre in ‘normal’ intersubjective relations in Being and Nothingness. Like Negroes, Jews have got a distinct personality and in addition to that they are Jews, which sets them apart from the rest of the group. Like Negroes, they are overdetermined by their ethnic difference. In fact, ethnic and racial difference becomes a supplementary characteristic which comes to define them tautologically: Jews as Jews and Negroes as Negroes. The Otherness of Jews and Negroes becomes an absolute difference which as a supplement attaches itself to their bodies. In Derridean terms, it is a sort of a ‘supplementary double’ or, to use Fanon’s language, a ‘mask’ which comes to superimpose itself on their character determining them as an inassimilable difference. The ambivalence at the centre of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a feature of overdetermination and the significance of the ‘mask’ as a metaphor for identity must be sought at the level of its binary economy. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon problematizes Sartre’s existential phenomenology, as expressed in Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus, contending that Negroes are overdetermined not just from the inside but from the outside. As we will see in the next chapter, Fanon does not experience the ‘irruption of the self’ as he encounters the look of the white. It suffices to note at this stage, before turning to Sartre’s discussion of the white gaze and negritude in Black Orpheus, that what Bhabha calls ‘dissembling of the self’ is a phenomenology of the doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other, which Sartre discusses in Anti-Semite and Jew and further develops in Black Orpheus. In Black Orpheus, Sartre affirms that the gaze reveals the secret of being and hypostatizes its essence. Whiteness is by no means ideologically neutral; it consolidates the white man’s claim to universality: the mythic

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idea that white represents the very essence of existence.16 Sartre establishes an equivalence between seeing and being, contending that whiteness is ‘a further aspect of vision’.17 He inscribes colour, as well as vision, within a colonialist economy that perpetrated the dominance of the white. He is adamant that the poets of negritude are now returning the look as they fix their ‘steady and corrosive gaze’ on the white man who ‘has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen’.18 This ‘corrosive gaze’ is as disconcerting as the language which they deploy to address the white. Through their poetic expression, they become conscious of themselves, but this coming-into-consciousness is different from class consciousness. Written not for the white, Sartre warns, the poetry of negritude is racial, replicating in its struggle the impetus of white racism. Unlike other oppressed white minorities or ethnicities, he maintains, the Negro cannot deny the facticity of blackness, for reasons he outlines thus: The Negro, like the white worker, is a victim of the capitalistic structure of our society, and he discovers a solidarity of interests beyond the nuances of skin color with certain classes of Europeans oppressed as he. Such a solidarity incites him to plan a society without privilege where the pigmentation of the skin will be treated as a simple accident. But, if the oppression is a common one, it is patterned after historical and geographical conditions. The black man is a victim of it, inasmuch as he is black, in his role as colonized native or as a deported African. And since he is oppressed in his race and because of it, it is first of his race that it is necessary for him to take conscience. He must compel those who, during the centuries, have vainly attempted, because he was a Negro, to reduce him to the status of the beast to recognize him as a man. Now here, it is not escape, nor trickery, nor ‘crossing the line’ that he can consider. A Jew, white among white men, can deny that he is a Jew, can declare himself a man among men. The Negro cannot deny that he is Negro nor claim for himself this abstract uncolored humanity. He is black. Thus he is held to authenticity.19 The proletariat takes consciousness of itself as a class oppressed by the material forces of industrial capitalism in the factory. This



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coming-into-consciousness is objective. It is in accordance with the Sartrean theory that we discover ourselves in the world as people among other people and not by retreating into the inner recesses of the self through the process of introspection. White workers do not need to descend into the unfathomable depth of the self in order to comprehend their condition as an exploited class. The language through which this class realizes self-knowledge is materialistic, devoid of poetry. Negritude as a coming-into-consciousness ‘differs in nature from that which Marxism attempts to waken in the white worker’.20 Negroes are denied subjectivity – ‘personhood’ – in its psychological and physical sense of self.21 Oppressed in their body and soul, they cannot discover themselves and overcome their alienation ‘in the midst of the cold buildings of the white culture and the white techniques’. Negritude, as consciousness of race, is exactly the opposite of class consciousness: it is a return to African culture and an inward look into the self; it is a ‘redescent into the burning Hell of the black soul’.22 Sartre describes negritude as the sole great revolutionary poetry in the twentieth century. It offers us a poetry of exile, drawing inspiration from a ‘phantom Africa, vacillating as a flame, between being and non-being’.23 This retreat into subjectivity gives rise to poetry. Put simply, ‘the Negro who vindicates his negritude in a revolutionary movement places himself, then and there, upon the terrain of Reflection, where he wishes to rediscover in himself certain objective traits growing out of African civilizations, or hopes to find the black Essence in the wells of his soul’.24 In his critique, Sartre contrasts white with black, class-consciousness with negritude, subjectivity with objectivity: the language of the white European workers as objective and devoid of poetry to that of Negroes as subjective, a source whence springs poetry. More pertinently, he opposes the white proletariat to Negro poets, subjects oppressed by technical forces to subjects attuned to the rhythm of Nature. Sartre represents white and black in binary terms, signifying, respectively: rationalism (the subject of thought) and intuition (the subject of feeling), the empiricism of material positivism governing Europe’s technical societies and the spontaneous poetic creativity of primitive Africa. Like Senghor, Sartre reconstructs the experience of these black writers in dichotomous terms: white and black, same and other, colonizer and colonized, culture and nature, mind and body, technology and poetry, and so on.

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The specificities of a given society are captured by what Sartre calls ‘the untranslatable locutions of its language’; because they do not have a common language, the black poets of the diaspora are, however, forced to appropriate the language of the white colonizer to express their views.25 Elaborating upon the ways in which they adopted language, Sartre writes: Dispersed by the slave trade to the four corners of the earth, the blacks have no language common to them all; to incite the oppressed to unite they must have recourse to the words of the oppressor. It is the French language which will furnish the black singer the largest audience amongst the blacks, at least within the limits of French colonization. It is in this language, pale like the flesh of the chicken, pale and cold as our gods, and of which Mallarmé said, ‘it is the neutral language “par excellence”, since its genius requires an attenuation of all colors too vibrant or variegated’; it is this language, for them half dead, that Damas, Diop, Laleau, Rabearivelo pour the fire of their skies and of their hearts. Only through it can they communicate; like the scholars of the sixteenth century who understood each other only in Latin, the blacks rediscover themselves only on the terrain full of the traps which white men have set for them … And since words derived from ideas, when the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he takes in one hand that which he has pushed aside with the other.26 Sartre establishes a correlation between language and existence, or in his parlance ‘a pre-established harmony [that] rules the correspondence of the Word and of Being’.27 Words are, Sartre writes, ‘like sensory organs, like the mouth and the hands, open windows to the world’. Language allows the poets of negritude access to a white world in which they were hitherto denigrated; ‘since the oppressor is present even in the language they speak, they will speak this language to destroy it’.28 Their use of French idiom is deconstructive, affecting ‘the holocaust of words’ and the ‘auto-destruction of the language’29 which maintained the hierarchical coupling of white and black, the domination of the former over the latter. By subverting the ‘language which consecrate[s]



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the priority of white over black’,30 the poets of negritude poetize the French language. Their poetry is political: it overturns all conceptual oppositions which perpetuate the rhetoric of difference and racism. It is no coincidence that they subscribe to Surrealism, a movement which seeks deconstruction in the ‘conflagration of the language’. As Sartre writes: ‘In Césaire the great surrealist tradition is achieved, takes its definite sense, and destroys itself. Surrealism, a European poetic movement, is stolen from the Europeans by a black who turns it against them and assigns it a rigorously prescribed function.’31 It is no coincidence that ‘the most ardent of the apostles of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists’.32 Sartre is emphatic that the poets of negritude are the most radical and revolutionary of the avant garde. By reaching to the depths of their being, they project ‘a certain form of humanity concrete and well determined’.33 Sartre describes their descent into these depths as an attempt ‘to plunge under the superficial crust of reality, of common sense, of reasonableness, in order to touch the bottom of the soul to awaken the immemorial powers of desire’.34 This introspective turn to self empowers these black poets to ‘recover beyond race and … class … the silent dazzling shadows which no more oppose themselves to anything’.35 In Sartre’s view, negritude deconstructs the hierarchical coupling of binary opposites: ‘It is not a question of meeting in a calm unity of opposites but rather a forced coupling, into a single sex, of black in its opposition to white.’36 Negritude sets itself against Europe’s colonial white culture that objectified Negroes only to announce the death of these denigrated objects and the birth of Negro subjects. Simply put, this ‘dialectic law of successive transformations’ empowers Negroes to coincide with themselves in negritude.37 It is the upsurge of negritude; it is the ‘being-in-the-world of the Negro’.38 Sartre describes negritude as ‘a sort of poetic psycho-analysis’39 which helps men of colour discover who and what they are. It is at one and the same time necessity and freedom; a ‘datum of fact’ and a ‘value’; an object of ‘empirical intuition’ and a ‘moral concept’; facticity of blackness and will-to-be.40 It is a moment of negativity and separation because it smacks of racism, but this sort of ‘anti-racist racism’ paves the way to the abolition of racial and ultimately class differences.41 Negritude is, at one and the same time, the colour of being42 and ‘nudity

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without color’;43 it is a celebration and disavowal of colour; it is love, the coming together of differences. Despite warning against the confusion of the specificity of class with the facticity of race,44 Sartre could not help but reproduce the binary language which opposes white to black: the former representing Capital, the latter Labour; the one employs intellection, the other comprehension. For Sartre, the notion of class is abstract and universal and that of race is concrete and particular; class is ‘a methodical construction emerging from experience’, race is ‘the product of a psycho-biological syncretism’.45 Men of colour have to renounce their negritude in order to join the proletariat in its march towards universal history. Sartre insists that negritude must be dialectical; it must surpass itself in order to fulfil its ambition of acceding to universality: a project which coincides with Marxist eschatology. Put in Sartre’s words: ‘At a blow the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude “passe”’ as Hegel would say, into the objective, positive, exact notion of the proletariat.46 Furthermore: Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of the negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without racism. Thus Negritude is dedicated to its own destruction, it is passage and not objective, means and not the ultimate goal.47 Ultimately negritude must lose the particularities of race, in the same way as the white proletariat ‘takes conscience of [its] class to deny it, since [it] wishes the advent of a society without class’.48 ‘It is,’ writes Sartre, ‘at the moment that it renounces itself that it finds itself.’49 To attain universality, the specific must obliterate itself; to become universal, men of colour have to overcome their facticity. Here we confront a major contradiction in Sartre’s position: the poets of negritude must ultimately renounce that which they ought to celebrate – their negritude. Indeed, oppressed people must take responsibility to rid themselves of oppression, but how could the black person overcome



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the facticity of blackness? ‘[I]t is,’ says Sartre, ‘at the bottom of his heart that he finds race and it is his heart which he must tear.’50 Contrary to his earlier view that consciousness is nothingness and being is experienced outside, Sartre admits in the case of Negroes that they discover themselves not outside in the crowd but in the inner depth of the heart. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon problematizes existential phenomenology, which Sartre situates at the interface of inside/outside, subjective/objective, black/white. It is in a white crowd – as we are going to see – that Fanon discovers his difference and is made to apprehend the facticity of blackness, the markers of ethnicity which have made him a victim of racism and colonial oppression. If Jews are overdetermined from the inside, as Sartre argues, it is because they are alienated in a world where they cannot interact with others. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre rebukes ‘inauthentic Jews’ for both denying their facticity and retreating into the refuge of inner self away from the tormenting gaze of the anti-Semite. As has been argued, the consciousness of self is, for Sartre, an intersubjective activity discovered objectively outside the self; the consciousness of race, an activity which he situates at the level of the reflection, as a re-descent into the depths of the soul. In Black Orpheus, he paradoxically maintains that the Negroes’ retreat into the inner recesses of the self to discover themselves engenders poetry. Fanon was the first to excoriate Sartre for what Memmi dubs Sartre’s ‘philosophy of points of view’. Fanon’s ‘black skin/white mask’ establishes a tangled relation between inside/outside, between self/facticity, between consciousness/world, between for-itself/in-itself, putting Sartrean existential phenomenology on its head: consciousness is not nothingness; being for the Negro is not experienced on the outside. Fanon is adamant that the Negro is overdetermined not just from the inside but from the outside. The ‘being colonized’ is a for-itself-in-itself occupying an ambiguous position between being and nothingness. In his discussion of conflictual relations of intersubjectivity, Sartre uses the trope of the slave to describe the alienation of self at the receiving end of the look of the Other. Nonetheless, he seems to be oblivious to the historical signification of the trope, what Fanon calls the ‘historico-racial bodily schema’ of the Negro. Fanon reminds Sartre that the Negro is the

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ultimate other. The conflict is not just existential and phenomenological but it is historical, affecting the Negro’s body and un/conscious. Ontology and the facticity of blackness Sartre’s conception of history driven by conflict and contradictions takes a dialectical path: the Marxist theory of class struggle motivates its march. In his interpretation of negritude, Sartre clearly appropriates a Hegelian/Marxist view of history. His dialectics posits white supremacy as the thesis and negritude as its antithesis. The synthesis is a classless society without racism. Sartre perceives negritude as a ‘weak moment’ in the progression of dialectics, which leads to the transcendence of racism and ultimately to the end of class struggle. Negritude is a means and cannot be an end in itself. In response to this conception of history, Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks: When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, ‘The generation of the younger black poets had just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.’ Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being.51 Furthermore: while I was shouting that, in the paroxysm of my being and my fury, he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term … Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that



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the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man. Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably one of transcendence.52 In the two passages above, Fanon prefigures Memmi’s critique of Sartre’s ‘philosophy of points of view’. While Sartre considers negritude as a source of poetry, Fanon accuses him of damming up its poetic source by abstracting the being-of-the-black. Fanon acknowledges the importance of Sartre’s intervention in Black Orpheus, but criticizes it for intellectualizing the experience of the black. Fanon wants to immerse and lose himself completely in negritude, ‘in the depths of that unhappy romanticism’.53 Sartre robs him of this chance by presenting his negritude as a moment of negativity. With a touch of irony, Fanon bemoans that philosophy – and more specifically ontology – cannot comprehend the being-of-the-black. He attempts to rationalize the world but it is the world that rejects him because of his colour. ‘Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason,’ he writes, ‘I threw myself back toward unreason.’54 The reference to Senghor is explicit; it refers to Senghor’s deconstructive attempt to reverse the binary couplets of black/white, nature/culture, irrationality/rationality which enacted the inferiority of the former and the superiority of the latter. Like Senghor, he ‘wade[s] in the irrational’ and finds himself at home in negritude. ‘From the opposite end of the white world,’ Fanon maintains, ‘a magical Negro culture was hailing me.’55 For a moment, he is convinced by Senghor’s rejection of the Cartesian logic which governed the white world, asserting that ‘the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. And long live the couple, Man and Earth!’ Taking his cue from men of letters like Senghor and Sartre, Fanon is adamant that ‘white civilization overlooks subtle riches and sensitivity’.56 With negritude, he writes, ‘we have the Negro rehabilitated, “standing before the bar,” ruling the world with intuition’.57 In the sodality of the disciples of negritude, he discovers a relation of coexistence with the world. As he accuses the white man of attempting to colonize and enslave the world by deploying reason as an instrument of oppression, Fanon parodies the views of those who conceive of negritude as ‘an insurance policy on humanness’ in a world that has become prosaic and

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soulless. Those who ‘feel that they have become too mechanized’, Fanon ironically notes, are now turning to ask people of colour for ‘a little human substance’.58 Fanon’s stricture seems to target the author of Black Orpheus who presents negritude as a source of poetry. How can it provide ‘a little human substance’ when Negroes are dehumanized? Sartre can only gloss over, as he poetizes, the material suffering of Negroes. As has been suggested, the creolization of French language is for Sartre a revolutionary act that disrupts the conceptual bond the signifier has with the signified: a deconstructive operation which produces poetry. For Fanon, in contrast, there is nothing poetic about the appropriation of pidgin French, and Créole does not have the same revolutionary impetus. In Chapters 3 and 4, I will elucidate further on the intersectionality of language and colonial ideology. It suffices to underscore at this stage that language is an important aspect of existence, as it provides the key to ‘the dimension of the other’. Like Sartre, Fanon affirms that language enables human beings to be in the world: it puts them face to face with Being. Simply put: ‘to speak is to exist absolutely for the other’.59 Language is not a neutral structure: to speak a given language, Fanon argues, is to assume the whole weight of a culture, and the black Antilleans who relinquish their native Créole and choose to speak French instead are in fact donning a white mask.60 They espouse rather than turn against the French language.61 They adopt French language so as to lose themselves – the facticity of their blackness – in a white world. To address them in pidgin is therefore to denigrate them.62 Relations of identity are problematic for Negroes who are made to situate themselves in relation to two systems of cultural reference. Intersubjective relations become fraught because of their racial difference. Being-for-Others is doubly a source of alienation and anguish. Elaborating on the being-black-in-the-world-of-the-white – the ontology of the black – Fanon writes: As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of ‘being for others,’ of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable



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in a colonized and civilized society … In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology – once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.63 Racism has perverse effects on the ontological constitution of Negroes. In a white society, they encounter an objectifying gaze that denies them subjectivity. This gaze disrupts the harmonious relationship Negroes have with their body and self. By internalizing the views of the white, they start to perceive themselves through the prism of a racist discourse which contests their own identity. They are made to adopt the posture of a third person viewing themselves with the critical ‘detachment’ of a ‘pure witness’. Since they do not have any ‘ontological resistance’ to the objectifying gaze of the white, Fanon argues, Negroes cannot experience their being through others.64 Their encounter with this gaze gives rise to the fragmentation of their black self. In a phraseology which summons up Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, he writes: ‘And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.’65 Drawing on Jean Lhermitte’s L’Image de notre corps and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s La Phénoménolgie de la perception, Fanon describes

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the ‘corporeal schema’, the Erlebnis of the black and the consciousness of blackness in a white world, but couches his discussion in Sartrean terms, critiquing at one and the same time Sartre’s existential phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. In his encounter with the child, the gaze of the white other, Fanon experiences an ‘ontological violence’ culminating in the disintegration of his bodily schema which he subsequently describes in terms of ‘historico-racial schema’, or better still ‘racial-epidermal schema’ to underscore the nature of its artificiality, fragility and untenability in a racialized world. As Jeremy Weate astutely remarks, Fanon reproduces the three instances in Sartrean intersubjective relations: first, the subject-seeing-the-other has an objective outlook on the world; second, the subject-being-seenby-another under the scrutiny of an objectifying gaze internalizes the consciousness of ‘a contingent difference within the world, as an “other”’; third, the subject – experiencing its alienation – starts to view itself from a position of exteriority, as a ‘Being-for-Others’, through the prism of an objectifying gaze. Indeed, this conflict between subjective and objective, self and other, being-for-itself and being-in-itself is a source of anguish, alienation, nausea, abjection.66 In A Tempest, Césaire captures this state of abjection and alienation, as does Jean Amrouche in his remarks on the split subjectivity of the acculturated colonized. To return to the encounter with the child, Fanon becomes aware of his Being-for-Others; his subjectivity is reduced to objectivity which he apprehends from the outside as an objectified body. In his encounter with the Other, Fanon is made to feel ‘at once responsible for his body, for his race, for his ancestors’. As Weate suggests, ‘Fanon clearly concurs with Merleau-Ponty’s insight that the self and the world are constructed through the work of the schéma corporel’67 but finds Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual frame inadequate to apprehend the facticity of blackness.68 This schema which constitutes in Merleau-Ponty the reciprocal relation between body and the world, between the embodied self and its others, is attenuated by racism. In Weate’s terms: ‘Fanon points to a fundamental asymmetry between blacks and whites and the active relation to “the world”.’69 Fanon’s analysis of black Erlebnis clearly problematizes orthodox phenomenology, and in particular the thought of MerleauPonty. The putative sameness that exists across all able-bodied beings



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in Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing is ‘nullified and rendered naive by the black experience’.70 Taking his cue from Merleau-Ponty, Fanon argues that the corporeal schema of the Negro is a historico-racial one, constructed by the Other – the white – through an arsenal of racist stereotypes. He describes it as ‘[a] slow composition of [the] self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world’, better still, as ‘a definitive structuring of the self and of the world – definitive because it creates a real dialectic between [the] body and the world’.71 As I will show in the next chapter, his encounter with the interpellating gaze of the white child – ‘Look, a Negro!’/’Mamma, see the Negro, I’m frightened!’72 – shatters his corporeal schema in terms which invoke Sartre: ‘it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person’. The look subjects Fanon to an objective self-examination; he is made to occupy not ‘one but two, three places’; he is made to perceive himself not only from an ‘I’ or a ‘third-person’ vantage point, but to see himself through the critical eye of the Other, a speculum which refracts a distorted view of his body. In encountering the look of the Other, Fanon loses mastery and experiences alienation, the decentring of his world and the decomposition of the self. He apprehends himself as seen in the crowd from the point of view of a world marked by racism. The feeling of nausea and shame reveals to Fanon a view of himself at the end of the Other’s look, the feeling of being exposed, his nakedness; it is the consciousness of being the object of the Other’s judgement and appraisal. The Negro wants ‘to be a man among other men’,73 to lose oneself in the anonymity of the crowd, to pass unnoticed, but feels unable to escape the facticity of blackness, ‘dark and unarguable’,74 – ‘being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes’.75 Referring to Sartre’s discussion of the Jew’s overdetermination in Anti-Semite and Jew, Fanon writes: In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre says: ‘They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype … We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside’.

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All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behaviour are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some other debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed. He belongs to the race of those who since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough, one has only not to be a nigger. Granted, the Jews are harassed – what am I thinking of? They are hunted down, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.76 Fanon laments that both the Jew and Negro are oppressed in their body. Like the Jew, the Negro lives in a diasporic state, but for Fanon there is a difference between the two: ‘wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro’.77 Unlike the white Jew, Fanon contends, the Negro does not have the choice to be authentic or inauthentic. No avenues of escape are available to the Negro: overdetermined from without, the Negro is trapped in a corporeal schema. Negroes might aspire to the ideals of a universality that proclaims the inalienable rights of a human sameness, but as soon as they encounter the racist language of the white they are imprisoned in their blackness, a characteristic of which they cannot divest themselves. Fanon asserts that ‘the first encounter with a white man oppresses [them] with the whole weight of [their] blackness’.78 He is keen to stress that Negroes are not prisoners of an insidious ideology but of their own appearance: their blackness. The racial drama is not ideological, the symptom of false-consciousness internalized but repressed by Negroes. This drama is manifestly ‘played out in the open’. Negroes suffer in their body and do not experience racism at the level of the unconscious. ‘In terms of consciousness,’ writes Fanon, ‘the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself.’79 What keeps this consciousness self-enclosed is the fact that the white master does not recognize its existence. The absolute Other for the white is and remains the



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Negro, and the reverse is true.80 The black is the visual representation of that which negates the ego: the non-self that can be neither identified nor assimilated. This assumption was upheld by colonialism in reality and by racism at the level of the imaginary. Relations of identity are experienced as an encounter with the Other. Self-validation is realized through the white gaze, a speculum which projects a negative image of the Negro. Commenting on interpersonal relations in his native Martinique, Fanon observes: The Martinicans are greedy for security. They want to compel the acceptance of their fiction. They want to be recognized in their quest for manhood. They want to make an appearance. Each one of them is an isolated, sterile, salient atom with sharply defined rights of passage, each one of them is. Each one of them wants to be, to emerge. Everything that an Antillean does is done for The Other. Not because The Other is the ultimate objective of his action in the sense of communication between people that Alder describes, but, more primitively, because it is The Other who corroborates him in his search for self-validation.81 As we will see in Chapter 3, Fanon describes the Martinican society as a ‘society of comparison’, a neurotic society suffering from an inferiority complex. The problem with the Negro ‘soul’ does not reside in the unfathomable depth of the individual self, but at the heart of society. Fanon holds society responsible for the myths which objectify the Negro; colonial myths which denigrate and inculcate ‘white attitudes’ in the Negro. Employing a Sartrean framework, Fanon contends that people realize themselves as being-in-the-world, either fulfilling the possibilities of freedom or thwarting them by aggression and enslavement.82 ‘The self,’ he argues, ‘takes its place by opposing itself.’83 The self is at one and the same time affirmation and negation; it is the will-to-be-free, but it is also the will-to-power that negates the realization of human freedom. Like Sartre, he is adamant that every consciousness, in its attempt to realize the project of its ethical dimension, is ‘a movement of love’ and ‘a gift of self’. ‘The person that I love,’ Fanon writes, ‘will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to

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earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making structure on my whole vision of the world.’84 In a colonial situation, interpersonal relations are impossible; this gift of self and movement of love become sources of frustration, dishonesty, self-contempt and inauthenticity. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon examines the black and white relationship which is determined by a dual narcissism, a narcissism which seals the white in their whiteness and the black in their blackness. According to him, only psychoanalysis can interpret the structure of this dual complex. His psychoanalytical approach is at variance with Sartreanism. Fanon contends Negroes suffer from an inferiority complex: an economic inferiority which is subsequently internalized, better still, epidermalized.85 However, by arguing for sociogeny, Fanon goes counter to Freud’s autogenetic perspective which only considers individual factors. Fanon is of the view that ‘Man is what brings society into being’;86 the alienation of the Negro is not just an ontological question. To comprehend it, Fanon situates it on the level of subjectivity and objectivity, taking into account the Negro’s individuality as well as the overriding determining social factors. Unable to assimilate and pass unnoticed, because of the facticity of blackness, Negroes are held to authenticity.87 Although they could overcome the social determinants of class and improve their social status through hard work and intelligence, Negroes ‘[are] incapable of escaping [their] race’.88 They are culturally shaped into the image of the white and ‘struggle to free [themselves] from a purely subjective conflict’.89 As I will elaborate in Chapter 3, Negroes who undergo a process of lactification but find themselves repudiated and rejected in a white world lead a neurotic existence and ‘[i]t is this tripod – the anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise, and the devaluation of self that flows out of it – that supports the whole symptomatology of this neurosis’.90 Negroes, such as Jean Veneuse, alienated and suffering from neurosis, do not discover themselves in the crowd, as Sartre suggests; they retreat into the unfathomable depths of self to lead an introvert existence. Rejected by others, they suffer from a lack of self-esteem and look for approval in the eyes of the white. After reading Being and Nothingness, Fanon ‘came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, [his] spirit



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filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then [he] found that [he] was an object in the midst of other objects’.91 The gaze ‘sealed him into a crashing objecthood’; ‘the glances of the other fixed [him] there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye’.92 Conclusion What conclusions can be gleaned from Fanon’s critique of Sartrean existential phenomenology? In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon seeks recognition – to be seen as same, a person among other people. Intersubjective relations are, however, thwarted by colonial racism and the fundamental relationship with Others is doubly alienating. Fanon writes Black Skin, White Masks with the intention of dis-alienating Sartre’s notion of Being-for-Others, hitherto a source of anguish, hostility and alienation. Like Sartre, he posits human freedom at the centre of these relations. Sartrean existential phenomenology provides Fanon with an ethics of Being-for-Others which could restore the universality of human relations. These ethics, as I will argue, are crucial to the humanism he announces in The Wretched of the Earth. In Black Skin, White Masks, he holds ambivalent views with regards to negritude and never really questions France’s assimilationist doctrine and the racism it engendered. In the Introduction I engaged with these views; I will return in Chapters 3 and 4 to explore his ambiguous identification with France and his critique of colonial assimilation. In summary, it is instructive to note that existential phenomenology left an indelible imprint on his psychoanalytical theorizing in Black Skin, White Masks. My task in the next chapter is to problematize Bhabha’s postcolonial reading of Black Skin, White Masks, a reading which discounts the significance of Sartreanism in Fanon’s work and political thought. Notes 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, Carol Macomber (trans.) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 45. 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea in Husserl’s Phenomenology’, Joseph Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1:2 (1970), p. 5.

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3 Sartre, ‘Intentionality’, p. 5. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes (trans.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 281. 5 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 284. 6 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 277–278. Sartre elaborates on this relation of objectness: ‘if the Other-as-object is defined in connection with the world as the object which sees what I see, then my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other. It is in and through the revelation of my being-as-object for the other that I must be able to apprehend the presence of his being-as-subject. For just as the Other is a probable object for me-as-subject, so I can discover myself in the process of becoming a probable object for only a certain subject. This revelation cannot derive from the fact that my universe is an object for the Other-as-object, as if the Other’s look … came following a definite path to place it on me. I have observed that I cannot be an object for an object. A radical conversion of the Other is necessary if he is to escape objectivity. Therefore I cannot consider the look which the Other directs on me as one of the possible manifestations of his objective being; the Other cannot look at me as he looks at [an object]. Furthermore objectivity cannot itself derived for me from the objectivity of the world since I am precisely the one by whom there is a world; that is, the one who on principle cannot be an object for himself.’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 280–281.) 7 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 451. 8 In Sartre’s parlance: ‘While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me.’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 386.) In this dialectical schema, ‘being-seen constitutes me as a defenceless being for freedom which is not my freedom. It is in the sense that we can consider ourselves as “slaves” in so far as we appear to the Other. But this slavery is not a historical result – capable of being surmounted – of a life in the abstract form of consciousness. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the centre of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being.’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 291.) 9 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, George J. Becker (trans.) (New York: Schocken 1995), p. 72. 10 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 78–79. 11 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 95. In Sartre’s words: ‘It is our eyes that reflect to him the unacceptable image that he wishes to dissimulate. It is our words and our gestures – all our words and all our gestures – our anti-Semitism, but equally our condescending liberalism – that



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have poisoned him. It is we who constrain him to choose to be a Jew whether through flight from himself or through self-assertion; it is we who force him into the dilemma of Jewish authenticity or inauthenticity. We have created this variety of men who have no meaning except as artificial products of a capitalist (or feudal) society, whose only reason for existing is to serve as scapegoat for a still prelogical community.’ (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 135–136). 12 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 97. 13 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 103 and 117. 14 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 98. 15 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 111. 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976), p. 8. 17 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 7. 18 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 10 and p. 7. 19 Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 14–15. 20 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 16. 21 White workers, though exploited in their labour, are treated by the bourgeoisie as human beings. On the other hand, the colonized Negroes are treated like a beast of burden. As Sartre points out: ‘During the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as covetous creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care to include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they considered that they were free men – that is to say, free to sell their labour. In France, as in England, and humanism claimed to be universal. In the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no contract; moreover, they must be intimidation and thus oppression grows. Our soldiers overseas, reflecting the universalism of the mother country, apply the “numerus clausus” to the human race: since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellow-man without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the natives is not one of our fellow-men.’ (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 13.) 22 Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 13, 19 and 21. 23 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 19. 24 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 17. 25 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 22. 26 Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 22–23. 27 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 25. 28 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 26. 29 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 25. 30 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 27. 31 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 39. 32 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.

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33 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 37. 34 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 33 and p. 34. 35 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 36. 36 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 36. 37 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 31. 38 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 41. 39 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 58. 40 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 58. 41 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 15 and p. 59. 42 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59. 43 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62. 44 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59. 45 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59. 46 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59. 47 Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 59–60. 48 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62. 49 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62. 50 Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 63. 51 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 133–134. 52 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138. 53 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 135. 54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 123. 55 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 123. 56 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 126–127. 57 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 127. 58 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 129. 59 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 17. 60 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 36. 61 Like Michel Leiris, Fanon is adamant that ‘Créole seems already predestined to become a relic eventually, once public education […] has become common enough among their disinherited classes of the population’. (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 27.) 62 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 35. 63 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 109–110. 64 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 109–110. 65 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 110–111. 66 Jeremy Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 173. See also David Macey, ‘Race, Phenomenology’, Radical Philosophy, 95 (May/June 1991), pp. 191–203 and Jean Khalfa, ‘My Body, This Skin, This Fire: Fanon on Flesh’, Frantz Fanon Special Issue, Wasafiri, 44 (Spring, 2005), pp. 42–50. 67 Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’, p. 172.



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68 Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’, pp. 169–183. 69 Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’, p. 172. 70 Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’, p. 176. 71 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 111. 72 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. 73 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. 74 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 117. 75 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 116. 76 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 115–116. 77 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 173. 78 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 150. 79 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 134. 80 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138. 81 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 212–213. 82 This is what Fanon meant by man is a yes and no: ‘Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of white as most human in man: freedom.’ (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 222.) 83 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 222. 84 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 41. 85 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 13. 86 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 13. 87 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 65–66. 88 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 67. 89 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 70. 90 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 73. 91 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109. 92 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109.

2 A poststructuralist reading of Fanon

Introduction In the early 1960s, after his death, Fanon became the symbol of anticolonial struggle in the Third World. At the same time, in the United States, black political activists involved in the civil rights movement embraced his views. The initial infatuation with Fanon gave rise to a militant trend in Fanonian scholarship. This trend was, however, short lived and had abated by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. At the time, Fanon became important in the field of social sciences, namely in the departments of politics, sociology and psychology, and, as a result, a number of biographical works were published. It is worth noting that much of this interest in Fanon was taking place outside mainland France and his adoptive country, Algeria. Indeed, Christiane Achour laments the fact that Fanon was relegated to oblivion in France and Algeria; she thanks Alice Cherki for saving him from the dereliction of forgetfulness with the publication of her book Frantz Fanon, Portrait.1 After a long period of neglect, Achour remarks, a number of colloquia in the 1980s renewed interest in the work of Fanon. It is indeed ironic that this revival appeared at a moment when Algeria was in the grip of civil unrest and the socialist project envisaged by Fanon and undertaken by the FLN, his comradesin-arms, was politically bankrupt. Certainly, the irony is not at Fanon’s expense, the caution he issued against the pitfalls of nationalism shows he had the foresight to anticipate this bankruptcy. Fanon insists that nationalism leads to a blind alley if it does not develop into a pedagogy



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nurturing social and political consciousness and giving rise to a new humanism. As Achour suggests, Fanon is a relatively minor figure in France and Algeria. However, Achour glosses over the fact that this marginal character came from the outside (from the margins of colonial France) to occupy a central role in Anglo-American critical circles. It was predominantly in English, cultural studies and postcolonial studies programmes that he emerged as a global figure in the 1980s. Homi Bhabha’s Foreword to the publication of the 1986 edition of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks marked a revival in Fanonian scholarship and was in effect a major event in postcolonial studies. The contribution of Bhabha to this revival and the role he played in the emergence of postcolonialism cannot be underestimated. Arguably, Bhabha has ‘reinvented’ Fanon for us. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the ways in which Bhabha reinterprets and appropriates the work of Fanon in the field of postcolonialism. It is true that Bhabha focuses on Black Skin, White Masks in his Foreword, prompting critics to accuse him of neglecting subsequent works by Fanon. As we will see in the second of part of this chapter, this criticism is, to some extent, unfair and unfounded. In the Foreword, Bhabha makes references, albeit fleetingly, to other works by Fanon, namely Studies in a Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth. What these critics attack in Bhabha’s review of Fanon is the total lack of a historical dimension. They excoriate him not only for overlooking the contexts of Fanon’s works, but for conflating the specificities of Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his own concern with postcolonialism. Much work is needed to disentangle the confusion in Bhabha’s interpretation. My main task here is twofold: first, to outline how Bhabha deploys Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive criticism as critical tools to interpret the work of Fanon; and second to problematize the appropriation of Fanon in postcolonial and cultural studies. The look and the dissembling of the self To capture the ambivalent psychology and split character of the évolué assimilated into French culture, Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact’.2

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The ambivalence inherent within the terms of the couplet black skin/ white mask, according to Bhabha, reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself; its split representations stage that division of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ which enacts the artifice of ‘identity’; a division which cuts across the fragile skin – black and white – of individual and social authority. What emerges from this figurative language I have used to make such an argument, are three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in the analytic of desire.3 Bhabha outlines these three conditions as follows. First, being is determined by the condition of an Otherness, that is, by its site (locus) and by its sight (look). From this general condition, which constitutes the universal basis for identification, Bhabha moves on to delineate the colonial space as a contested space. ‘It is always in relation to the place of the Other,’ he argues, ‘that colonial desire is articulated: that is, in part, the fantasmatic space of “possession” that no one subject can singly occupy which permits the dream of the inversion of roles.’4 Second, the space of identification is a space of splitting. Bhabha maintains that Fanon’s metaphor of ‘black skin, white masks’ does not represent a ‘neat division’, but the ‘doubling’, or rather ‘dissembling image of being in at least two places at once’.5 Giving rise to ambivalence, this splitting opens up the interstices, the gaps and the space in between where the subject of colonial otherness is constituted. Arguably, it is in this space that Bhabha confuses the subject of colonial otherness with the unconscious as a psychoanalytical concept. Third, from these two conditions of identification, Bhabha deduces that identity is the returning image which ‘bears the mark of splitting’: as in Lacan’s mirror stage, this image reflects the ambivalence of the ‘Other’, the ‘place from which it comes’.6 How does Bhabha define this place of the Other? He defines it in Lacanian terms as the locus of signifiers and speech. ‘For Fanon, like Lacan,’ argues Bhabha, ‘the primary moments of such a repetition of the self lie in the desire of the look and the limits of language.’7 A brief outline of Lacan’s theory is necessary to help us better understand Bhabha’s reading of Fanon. Between the age of six and



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eight months, the child comes to self-recognition, which Lacan calls the mirror stage. He defines it ‘as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’.8 Lacan goes on to elaborate: This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage … would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.9 The function of the mirror stage establishes a relation of reciprocity between the image of the child’s body and its reality, or between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. Lacan describes the mirror stage as a ‘drama’, the central thrust of which produces for the subject a ‘succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality’.10 The mirror stage is the initial articulation of the I, which prefigures the subject’s entry into the symbolic order. Put simply, the specular I at this stage gives rise to the social I. The subject is born with its entry into the symbolic order, and Lacan describes the insertion of the subject into this order (or what he also calls ‘the order of signifiers’) as a passage from the world of nature to that of culture.11 This passage from the natural to the conceptual is mediated through the rules and taboos which govern society. Like Althusser, who argues that there is no subject other than the subject of ideology, Lacan maintains that there is no subject without language. Language individuates: it defines the contours of the self by establishing a distinction between inside and outside, between self and others, between the consciousness-of-self and its unconscious other. In Lacan’s view, the subject is nothing but a signifier. It is not an agent but an effect of language. Lacan argues that the subject alienates itself in language, and that its entry into the symbolic splits its constitution. Discourse is thus the site of primal repression which institutes the unconscious in the subject. The Other is that which escapes, yet marks discourse by the weight of its constitution; it is also that which is not expressed because it is repressed by the very function of discourse.

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Meaning is produced between signifiers; but in the interval between them there is slippage, which makes meaning escape and impossible to fix or grasp completely. Put simply, the subject sliding into meaning slides also into undecidability. Lacan calls this undecidability ‘lack’ or ‘void’ in the Other. Lacan’s supposition that the unconscious is structured like language means that the unconscious is determined by what is suppressed, in the sense that meaning is determined by what cannot be articulated, by this lack, by this void, by the intervals which come between signifiers. These signifiers which slide in speech and which are impossible to grasp constitute the locus of the Other; that is, the locus of the subject as a site of ambivalence. To be sure, the Lacanian subject is a split and alienated subject. The question we must ask Bhabha is: does the subject of this alienation suffer from the same alienation as the Fanonian colonized subject? I will leave this question in abeyance. It is important to bear in mind at this stage that Lacan, as a psychoanalyst discussing the category of the subject in universal terms, offers a theorization of the process of identification in general, whereas Fanon is concerned with the subject of colonialism. As we will see in Chapter 4, Fanon learnt in his training as a clinical psychiatric doctor to take into account the specificities of the colonized subject; that is, the cultural and social determinants which impact on the subject of his psychoanalysis. Let us now turn to Bhabha and concentrate on the way he appropriates Lacan to read Fanon. Bhabha takes the poststructuralist view that identity is not an a priori: it is not a finished process; it works discursively like language.12 In his own terms: The discursive conditions of this psychic image of identification will be clarified if we think of the perilous perspective of the concept of the image itself. For the image – as point of identification – marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split – it makes present something that is absent – and temporally deferred – it is the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition. The image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity; it must never be read mimetically as the ‘appearance’ of a ‘reality’. The access to the



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image of identity is only ever possible in the negation of any sense of originality or plenitude, through the principle of displacement and differentiation (absence/presence; representation/repetition) that always renders it a liminal reality. The image is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by that same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss. It is precisely from this edge of meaning and being, from this shifting boundary of otherness within identity, that Fanon asks: ‘What does a black man want?’13 I will address this question in the next chapter, where I engage with Bergner’s reading of the intersection of gender and colonial politics. Here, however, it suffices to underscore that Bhabha, to quote Henry Louis Gates, ‘regrets those moments in Fanon that cannot be reconciled to the post-structuralist critique of identity’.14 Bhabha imposes Lacanian theory on Fanon, and then goes on to criticize him for not adhering to Lacan’s definition of the subject, for situating the place of the Other at ‘a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the self, that represents a culturally alien consciousness’.15 Bhabha admonishes Fanon for not sticking to a strictly psychoanalytical problematic; and, as the following passage illustrates, he levels against Fanon the charge of engaging directly with the political issues of colonial alienation and racism: In his more analytical mode Fanon can impede the exploration of these ambivalent, uncertain questions of colonial desire … At times Fanon attempts too close a correspondence between the mise-en-scène of unconscious fantasy and the phantoms of racist fear and hate that stalk the colonial scene; he turns too hastily from the ambivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cultural discrimination; he is too quick to name the Other, to personalize its presence in the language of colonial racism — ‘the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely.’ These attempts, in Fanon’s words, to restore the dream to its proper political time and cultural space can, at times, blunt the edge of Fanon’s brilliant illustrations of the complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relation.16

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Bhabha reprimands Fanon for: first, conflating the political with the psychoanalytical; second, ‘turn[ing] too hastily from the ambivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cultural discrimination’; third, identifying the Other in terms of colonial racism; and fourth, attempting ‘to restore the dream to its proper political time and cultural space’. In Bhabha’s view, it is the notion of politics which ‘blunt[s] the edge’ of Fanon’s psychoanalysis of the colonial relation. Incontrovertibly, Bhabha prioritizes theory over politics. The political agenda of Fanon, namely his engagement with colonialism and racism, seems to be at odds with Bhabha’s critical project. How can Bhabha advance the postcolonial debate without engaging with colonial politics? Part of the problem in his interpretation of Fanon’s work resides in the definition assigned to the ‘Other’. In Fanon’s parlance, the Other is the object of colonial alienation and racism. This object must not be confused with the Other as a psychoanalytical category. In the same vein, the notion of splitting in Fanon refers principally to the colonial subject, a subject straddling two cultures but excluded from both, and not to a grand theory on identification and subjectivity. Bhabha contends that ‘the Unconscious speaks of the form of Otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement’.17 Like Lacan, he defines the relation between the subject and the Other (the locus of signifiers and speech) in discursive and not in dialectical terms, though these terms are also a factor in the work of Lacan. The subject is constituted discursively, or as Lacan and Bhabha would say ‘metonymically’, through the signifying chain. Conversely, Fanon defines the relation between self and other in Hegelian language, within a dialectical schema which turns purely on biological and racialized terms in a context petrified by colonialism. Fanon’s interpretation of the Lacanian specular relation reflects and refracts this dialectical schema. His reference to the Lacanian mirror stage must be situated within two contexts. First, it is a long footnote to his argument that ‘with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins’.18 This argument is of central importance to what Fanon calls the ‘corporeal schema’, a notion which he borrows from Jean Lhermitte and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to highlight the shortcomings of ontology and existential



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phenomenology in dealing with the Erlebnis of the black and the consciousness of blackness in a white world. Second, drawing on Sartre, he refers explicitly to the theme of Negrophobia which he discusses in the light of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew and Black Orpheus. As we saw in Chapter 1, Fanon rejects Sartre’s Marxist eschatology that conceives of negritude as a negative term in a dialectical schema which objectifies the Negro’s subjectivity. Furthermore, Fanon rebukes Sartre for forgetting that ‘the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man’.19 In a footnote to this citation in Black Skin, White Masks (on p. 138), Fanon writes: Though Sartre’s speculations on the existence of The Other may be correct (to the extent, we must remember, to which Being and Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness), their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious. That is because the white man is not only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary.20 Clearly, this footnote announces the reference to Lacan’s mirror stage on p. 161: It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self — that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities come into the picture.21 Bhabha overlooks these ‘historical and economic realities’ and, more significantly, the Hegelian and Sartrean terms in which Fanon couches his formulation of the Lacanian mirror stage. Bhabha misconstrues

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the gaze in Fanon as a Lacanian look. To differentiate between the two, it is instructive to refer briefly to Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser whose works were contemporaneous with Fanon’s. Written at the pinnacle of the Algerian War in 1957 (five years after the publication of Black Skin, White Masks), Barthes’s essay ‘Myth Today’ in its description of the black soldier giving the French salute echoes Fanon’s description of the Negro interpellated by the white child in Black Skin, White Masks. At the level of language, the representation of the Negro denotes that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.22 This interpretation can be sustained as long as the historical specificities of this representation are kept out of view. At the level of myth, Barthes argues, the relation between the signifier and its signified is deformed: myth neutralizes the specificities of the representation of the Negro. It glosses over them, therefore depriving the Negro of history. Barthes describes myth as an ‘interpellant’ or a ‘frozen speech’ which ‘makes itself look neutral and innocent’.23 The political naturalization of the Negro neutralizes his historical reality. Myth promotes a kind of assimilation which puts his subject status as a colonized under erasure. It is, Barthes writes, a kind of arrest, in both the physical and the legal sense of the term: French imperiality condemns the saluting Negro to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the Negro suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment the Negro’s salutes thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality. On the surface of language something has stopped moving: the use of signification is here, hiding behind the fact, and conferring on it a notifying look; but at the same time, the fact paralyses the intention, gives it something like a malaise producing immobility: in order to make it innocent, it freezes it.24



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Further on, Barthes describes this ‘notifying look’ as a ‘benumbed look’ which denies the Negro agency.25 Barthes uses ‘mythology’ and ‘ideology’ as interchangeable terms. Mythology is in many ways akin to Althusser’s notion of ideology which interpellates the subject of its address. It is important to note the specificities of the context in which both Fanon and Barthes intervened politically against a rampant racism festering in a decaying and crumbling French Empire. It is in this context that we must read Barthes’s observation that the Other could not be represented by white Eurocentric discourse. As Barthes explains, such discourse either refuses to acknowledge difference or transforms the latter into its own ideological image. This kind of naturalization engenders the neutralization of the Other’s difference which, in Barthes’s view, poses a threat to colonial hegemony. In his words: ‘any otherness is reduced to sameness. The spectacle or the tribunal, which are both places where the Other threatens to appear in full view, become mirrors.’26 These mirrors project a certain exoticism, an objectified difference which cannot be assimilated, as in the case of Fanon’s Negro ‘benumbed’ by the look of the white child. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon anticipates the theory of interpellation which Althusser adumbrates. Althusser conceives of ideas as inscribed within the materiality of practices which are defined by what he calls ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs). He establishes a relation of reciprocity between the notion of ‘practice’ and that of the ‘subject’. He introduces two interrelated theoretical proposals: first, ‘there is no practice except by and in ideology’; second, ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’.27 Ideology is constituted via the subject and the latter category is ‘recruited’ from concrete individuals by the very function of ideology. It is by way of interpellation that ideology turns the abstract category of the ‘individual’ into a concrete subject.28 In Althusser’s terms: ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject’.29 What does he mean by ‘hailing’ and ‘interpellation’? He defines them as ‘the ideological recognition function’ by which the individuation of the subject takes place, guaranteeing that the individual becomes a ‘concrete’, ‘distinguishable’, ‘irreplaceable’ subject.30 Recognition gives rise to consciousness, as in the example given by Althusser of the person who becomes the subject of the police hailing ‘Hey, you

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there’.31 This person is subjected the moment s/he turns round, believing that s/he is the subject of the address. Furthermore, Althusser remarks: the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning. Which means that all ideology is centred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a double mirrorconnexion such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him …32 Althusser’s definition of interpellation as a specular function through which the subject is subjected chimes with Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage: the specular relation in the symbolic that forces the subject to define itself in accordance with the gaze of the Other. One can also describe the Lacanian mirror stage as a kind of interpellation: through the speculum of the Other (that is, speech and signifiers), the individual enters the symbolic order and becomes a subject. As we have seen, the insertion of the individual in the ISAs forces it to lose its abstract characteristics to become a concrete subject. In Lacan, the individual loses his/her animal status by entering the symbolic: the order ‘which essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies’.33 In the mirror stage, the child acquires a projection of its body and becomes conscious of it as an entity. In Fanon, however, the gaze of the Other does not help the Negro acquire a unified representation of his/her body. In fact, the mirror loses its structuring function through which a relation of reciprocity between self and other emerges. In Lacanian theory, the split is nothing but the manifestation of the ‘subjection’ of the individual; it is consequent upon the latter leaving the infans stage (a stage prior to the subject’s individuation) to enter into the symbolic order. The split in Fanon does not have the same manifestation. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon puts Lacanian theory on its head:



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the adult Negro witnessing the white child’s interpellating gesture or gaze ‘Mamma, see the Negro, I am frightened!’ represents a reversal of the Lacanian mirror stage. Significantly, in the scenario Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks, the subject interpellated by the Other – the gaze of the white child – is not at the infans stage prior to its subjection; it is an adult Negro, whose subjectivity is already defined and constituted within a black Umwelt. The encounter with the white child proves devastating: it shatters the psychological constitution of the Negro and precipitates the latter’s expulsion from the symbolic order. This encounter infantilizes the Negro. The gaze of the white reveals the bare psyche, the nakedness of the Negro in his objectified state, stripped of his cultural attire and of his human characteristics. Here we witness with Fanon the degradation of the Negro to the level of an ‘animal’.34 Colonial racism paralyses and petrifies the dialectical relation between self and other, the terms of which turn on a biological cycle and seal the Negro into a ‘crushing objecthood’.35 In this relation, biological difference is exploited to create a gulf between white culture and black nature. Racism is the token of the colonial state, as Memmi argues, ‘the sine qua non of colonial life’ and ‘lays the foundation for the immutability of this condition’.36 In fact, the gaze imposes on the Negro a different kind of alienation from that described by Lacan. Aimé Césaire describes it as ‘thingification’.37 Actually, as we saw in Chapter 1, this interpellative process removes individuality from the subject and ostracizes difference. The mirror stage in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is analogous to what Sartre calls ‘the doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other’.38 In terms which echo Sartre, Fanon writes: In the white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.39 Put in Sartre’s terms, the Negro experiences subjectivity as a ‘phantom personality, at once strange and familiar, that haunts him and which is nothing but himself — himself as others see him’.40 Introspection

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– that is, self-examination or looking into oneself – is an objective exercise experienced from without. What Bhabha calls the dissembling of the self is the outcome of this alienating experience for the Negro who ‘look[s] at himself through the eyes of others … while he contemplates himself with the “detachment” of another, he feels himself in effect detached from himself; he becomes another person, a pure witness’.41 Fanon appropriates the Sartrean notion of the gaze to establish that the Negro is overdetermined not only from the inside but from the outside. The Negro reaches out to the Other, but the gaze of the Other seals the Negro in his blackness.42 Under this gaze, the corporeal schema of the Negro crumbles and a racial epidermal schema takes its place. In ‘Myth Today’, Barthes describes the interpellation of the Negro as ‘a kind of arrest in the physical and legal sense of the term’. This description concurs with Fanon’s view that the gaze of the white objectifies and robs the Negro of subjectivity. However, according to Althusser, interpellation is the gesture of hailing and of inviting the individual to be an active agent in society and of subjecting him/her to the social process. As we have seen, this gesture of hailing is constitutive, it is a strategy by which ideology recruits its subjects. Interpellation produces subjects. It is, in this sense, positive and productive. The gaze in Fanon works negatively. Similarly, whereas in Lacan the look (or the mirror stage) constitutes the subject, this process of individuation is not at work in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: the gaze objectifies and denies the Negro subjectivity. What Fanon wanted to establish by referring to Lacan is that the Negro is denied access to the symbolic order because this order is racialized. By conflating Fanon and Lacan, Bhabha overlooks the fact that Fanon ‘epidermalizes’ the symbolic order and the locus of the Other. As we will see in the next chapter, one of the chief concerns of Fanon in Back Skin, White Masks is to show that race and ethnicity traverse this order and locus, marking the notions of language, subjectivity and sexuality. Nevertheless, the dissembling of the self conjures up deconstruction for Bhabha, who does not conceive of the colonial relation in binary terms as a dialectical encounter between the colonialist self and the colonized other. The terms of opposition, he argues, are determined by the shifting boundary of language which defines the contours of



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this relation. He interprets the dialectical operation at work in Fanon’s text thus: What [Fanon] says in The Wretched of the Earth of the demography of the colonial city reflects his view of the psychic structure of the colonial relation. The native and settler zones, like the juxtaposition of black and white bodies, are opposed, but not in the service of ‘a higher unity’.43 Paraphrasing Fanon, Bhabha concludes: ‘No conciliation is possible … for of the two terms one is superfluous.’44 As we will see, he abstracts this quotation from its context. This ‘non-dialectical moment’ of Fanon’s Manichaeism, however, opens up a critical space for Bhabha to posit the ambivalent nature of the colonial relation. He contends: There may be no Hegelian negation but Fanon must sometimes be reminded that the disavowal of the Other always exacerbates the ‘edge’ of identification, reveals that dangerous place where identity and aggressivity are twinned. For denial is always a retroactive process; a half acknowledgement of that Otherness which has left its traumatic mark. In that uncertainty lurks the white masked black man; and from such ambivalent identification – black skin, white masks – it is possible, I believe, to redeem the pathos of cultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion … In occupying two places at once – or three in Fanon’s case – the depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject can become an incalculable object, quite literally, difficult to place.45 By occupying different positions, Bhabha maintains, this slippery figure challenges and disrupts colonial authority. This ambivalent figure occupying two subject positions at once stands like the Derridean character writing with two hands, sowing confusion and effecting deconstruction. The influence of Jacques Derrida is discernible in Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s work. To grasp the extent of Bhabha’s ‘strategy of political subversion’, I want to concentrate on some critical concepts which are central to Derrida’s deconstructive critique: the supplement, mimesis

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and the hymen. Derrida argues that the history of Western metaphysics is premised on a view that privileges the signified over the signifier, speech over writing, presence over absence, sameness over difference, and so on. Binary (or what Fanon would call ‘Manichaean’) oppositions clearly support this view, perpetrating and perpetuating this hierarchical coupling — that is, the dominance of one of the terms of binary opposition over the other. A simple definition of deconstruction is the subversion of this view. According to Derrida, one of the terms of this binary is excluded, for it is regarded as ‘simple exteriority, pure addition or pure absence’.46 The supplement is perceived as an alien intruder that comes from the outside to threaten the integrity of the inside. The economy of supplementarity consists in expelling this outsider by considering it as a supplement.47 The supplement insinuates itself into ‘the body of discourse with all its ambivalence’.48 In order for these binary terms to be in opposition, one of the terms becomes the matrix in which they are constituted as opposing terms.49 This matrix becomes the medium of opposition; it governs the movement, the locus and the play of difference.50 The supplement is simultaneously the agency that expels difference and the subject of difference as such. It is the difference produced through this process of exclusion; it is also that which escapes such process and effects its deconstruction. What holds for the supplement holds for mimesis and the hymen. Mimesis fulfils the task of production and reproduction of opposites. Derrida brings to our attention three consequences of the double inscription of mimesis: first, it repeats what it represents; second, it repeats identity – it simulates sameness; third, mimesis is a pure repetition repeating itself and this repetition is a phantasm – a copy of a copy, a simulacrum, an imitation that does not represent its essence and origin.51 The Derridean hymen is the token of virginity, and in addition to this it is the symbol of marriage. It is a sign of (con)fusion between identity and difference. Its consummation, he argues, removes the spatial heterogeneity of the terms of the binary. The deconstructive strategy is, in Derrida’s terms, an operation that both sows (disseminates) confusion between the two opposites and stands between them at once.52 He situates this strategy in the entre: in between the terms of the binary. Drawing from Derrida, Bhabha insists that mimicry functions deconstructively, by opening up a gap between the articulation of



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(Western) signifiers and their (colonial) signification. In terms which echo Derrida, Bhabha writes: What threatens the authority of colonial command is the ambivalence of its address … which will not be resolved in a dialectical play of power. For these doubly inscribed figures face two ways without being two-faced. There is the supplementarity within the Western imperialist discourse which continually puts under erasure the civil state, as the colonial text emerges uncertainly within its narrative of progress. Then, there is the hierarchical process of colonialist differentiation between civility and despotism. Between the civil address and its colonial significance – each axis displaying a problem of recognition and repetition – shuttles the signifier of authority in search of a strategy of surveillance, subjection, and inscription. Here there can be no dialectic of the master-slave for where discourse is so disseminated can there ever be the passage from trauma to transcendence? from alienation to authority? How can the white ego-ideal interpellate the native in an eternal misrecognition when each point of identification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self – democrat and despot, or from the ‘other’ side, individual and servant.53 Bhabha’s colonial subject, occupying two spaces at the same time, that figure ‘facing two ways without being two-faced’, is an agent of deconstruction. By adopting the colonialist’s language, this slippery character subverts its rules. Bhabha deploys mimicry as a deconstructive strategy: as a stratagem working to undermine the demand of the colonial narrative. As in the case of Derrida’s mimesis, mimicry in Bhabha’s theory simulates sameness, but this sameness is threatening for the colonialist. Because this repetition of identity is not a pure repetition of an originary identity, of an essence, but it is a copy of a copy of this identity, a menacing double which ‘disclos[es] the ambivalence of the colonial discourse [and] disrupts its authority’.54 What emerges from the interstices, the gaps, of the two spaces occupied by the évolué is a hybrid: neither a colonialist self, nor a colonized other. As Bhabha puts it in these terms: ‘a subject of a difference that is

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almost the same, but not quite’; ‘the same but not white’.55 Bhabha’s subject of hybridity evokes the Derridean deconstructive entre that comes in between the terms of binary opposition, deconstructing their hierarchical coupling which engenders colonial oppression and violence. Bhabha refuses to succumb to the temptation of Fanon’s language that sought to reverse the Manichaean (opposing) terms upon which the language of colonialism is premised. Bhabha maintains that discursive and power relations function in an ambivalent way. Such ambivalence enables the colonized to form a mode of resistance by divulging the contradictions inherent within the language of colonialism. Through the ambivalent modes of the colonized’s articulations and subject positioning, Bhabha embarks upon the project of deconstructing the colonial text so as ‘to liberate the colonial from its debased inscription as Europe’s monolithic and shackled Other’.56 In Bhabha’s view, it is possible to deconstruct the colonial text by interrogating it in the native’s accent. By responding in the colonialist’s language, the évolué subverts the colonial signifier and reverses the colonial gaze. As Bhabha puts it, ‘the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined’.57 Mimicry, that is the natives’ appropriation of the discourse of the colonialist, or as Bhabha would say their ‘inappropriate imitations’, has the effect of menacing colonial authority. In ‘Day by Day’, Bhabha revisits Fanon’s work with a particular emphasis on the notion of revolutionary ‘spontaneity’, which he conceives of in terms of postmodern temporality. Elaborating on the dialectical operation at work in The Wretched of the Earth, he writes: ‘Fanon’s dialectic of the everyday is, most significantly, the emergence of a new historical and theoretical temporality generated by the process of revolutionary transience and transformation.’58 Bhabha postulates that the ethics of Fanon’s politics are effectively postmodern: they are based on truths which are unstable, limited and partial. He contends that The Wretched of the Earth disrupts dialectic by situating it within the temporality of a past-present, and that this temporality announces Fanon’s brand of nationalism as an emergent ‘trans-nationalism’, a manifestation of globalization ‘without ethnic nationalisms’.59 Quoting Derrida, Bhabha proposes that ‘the public sphere of our time … disturb[s] the assumptions of a national ontopology: that is, the specific binding



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of identity, location and locution/language that most commonly defines the particularity of an ethnic culture’.60 Clearly, he bases this interpretation on Fanon’s critique of the pitfalls of national consciousness and advocacy of a nationalism which must transcend its narrow limits in order to acquire an international dimension. In his discussion of Fanon’s (inter)nationalism as a manifestation of this ‘ontopological split’ which disables dialectics, Bhabha refers again to the ‘dissembling of self’: ‘the colonized subject and psyche [as] totally laid bare, naked before the paradox of his own “objectivity” in a strange way now neither black or white man, because the binary polarity of the colonial “position” has lost its signifying “difference”’.61 He also refers to the putative non-dialectical moment he associates with the ‘zones … opposed but not in the service of a higher unity’.62 Bhabha rethinks the question of time ‘in the interstices of the Manichaean division, in the refusal or impossibility of a transcendent or teleological temporality’. In his view, the Fanonian Manichaean divide is a ‘borderline that neither sublates difference nor divides division in two’.63 This boundary has the same signifying characteristics as the Derridean hymen: it is a ‘cultural divide deriv[ing] its peculiar signifying space – like the Derridean entre – which stands between the oppositions and sows confusion between them at the same time’.64 Two points to conclude this section. First, the notion of the dissembling self in Black Skin, White Masks must not be read as a poststructuralist trope. The ‘binary polarity’ does not lose its ‘signifying differences’, as Bhabha intimates in his reading of Black Skin, White Masks and in his Preface to the new translation of The Wretched of the Earth. In fact, such polarity structures the Fanonian text. Second, the ‘non-dialectical moment’ in The Wretched of the Earth is not deconstructive. As I will demonstrate in the second part of this chapter, Bhabha misinterprets this moment and its dialectical significance. Fanon describes the cartography of the colonial space as constituted of two opposed zones which are mutually exclusive. Manichaean politics governs this space by dividing it into compartments. For Fanon, ‘it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species’.65 To describe the colonial problematic, Fanon observes that the Marxist concept of dialectics must be rethought thus: you are rich because you

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are white; poor and excluded because black and colonized. The economic base is also a superstructure which reflects a reality determined by the dimension of race and ethnicity. In the colonial context, the dialectical relation ‘follows the principle of reciprocal exclusivity’; and if no conciliation is possible, it is because one of two terms is superfluous.66 The Negro or the colonized is this superfluous term to be excluded. Fanon is keen to stress that the colonial world is a Manichaean world which is ‘characterized by the dichotomy it imposes upon the whole people’; he is adamant that this ‘motionless’ and ‘Manichaeistic world’ marked by division is governed by the rules of an ‘apartheid’.67 For critics like Bhabha interested in deconstructing the discourse of colonialism and its sets of binary opposition which govern the relationship between black and white, colonizer and colonized, self and other, insider and outsider and so on, Fanon’s Manichaean theory falls short, failing to take into account the ‘heterogeneity’ of power. These critics often criticize Fanon for reproducing the polarities constructed by the discourse of colonialism. The process of decolonization initiated by Fanon meant an overturning and simultaneous displacing of the terms of binary oppositions. The ‘reversal’ of the hierarchical coupling of these terms and the subsequent ‘displacement’ of the structure in which these terms are conceived are two separate stages of political resistance. I concur with Benita Parry’s view that Fanon represents this first stage which is of central importance to the deconstruction of the colonial discourse. She warns that some of Fanon’s critics ‘jump’ the first stage of this process of decolonization.68 By refusing to engage with the Manichaean politics of colonialism, they leave intact the hierarchy imposed by these terms. Parry criticizes Bhabha for proffering ‘Fanon as a premature poststructuralist’ and for condemning Fanon’s revolutionary politics as a ‘desperate, doomed search for a dialectic of deliverance’.69 She excoriates Bhabha for reading Fanon back to front, ‘shift[ing] the political charge of [Fanon’s] text from inscriptions urging the colonized to insurrection … to Fanon’s meditation on the ambivalent identification’ in Black Skin, White Masks.70 Bhabha evokes ceremonially Fanon’s radical politics which he fails to read as a discourse of emancipation.71 This discourse must be inscribed in existential Marxism: Fanon’s Hegelianism – better still Sartreanism – aims to liberate the consciousness of the colonized from the fiction



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of colonialism (what Fanon calls ‘the white man’s artifact’) and to reverse the terms of binary opposition which determined the relation of black and white and the construction of self and otherness. In Parry’s view, Bhabha’s theorizations obfuscate ‘the “murderous and decisive struggle between two protagonists”, and discount or write out the counter-discourses which every liberation movement records’.72 His critique overlooks the significance of ‘socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis’ which determined the history of colonialism. If mimicry as a stratagem and subterfuge has a destabilizing effect on the colonial text, Bhabha nonetheless fails to write an alternative text.73 Bhabha fails to comprehend Fanon’s project as part of a ‘literature of combat’ disrupting the colonial narrative but also shaping the contours of national consciousness. Moreover, Bhabha fails to capture the political intentions of Fanon’s theory to overthrow the language of the colonizer and with it ‘imperialism’s signifying system’.74 What is lacking in Bhabha’s critique is ‘a conception of the native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse’.75 Taking issue with critics such as Parry who accuse Bhabha of reading ‘Fanon as a sort of Lacanian avant la lettre’, Stuart Hall contends that Bhabha’s argument is more complex in its attempt to address the conceptual frame within which Fanon posits central issues but cannot resolve them.76 The crux of my argument here is that Bhabha does not read Fanon within the framework in which Fanon posits these issues – that is within the specificities of colonialism – but within a framework of abstract psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Hall acknowledges that Bhabha’s readings of Fanon do not attempt to recover their historical and political specificities. I am not concerned that Bhabha ‘departs from and goes beyond his Fanonian brief’.77 Rather, what I find troubling in his reading is its tendency to be partial and very selective to the point of misrepresenting Fanon. Bhabha glosses over those aspects of Fanon’s work which do not support his argument, and which in fact go against the grain of his thought. Postcolonial Fanonism and the spectre of violence The appropriation of Fanon as leading figure in postcolonial studies must be sought at the level of cultural politics. Kobena Mercer offers

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a possible answer to the complex question regarding why Fanon came to be considered as the chief exponent of postcolonial theorizing. In ‘Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia’, he writes: As a result of epochal shifts over the past ten to fifteen years, from post-Fordism to post-Communism, there probably isn’t anyone whose identity has not been touched by the bewildering uncertainties of living in a world with no stable center … These changed circumstances profoundly alter the way in which Fanon’s writings speak to our contemporary crises. Whereas earlier generations prioritized the Marxist themes of Fanon’s later work, above all The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 at the height of the optimism of the postwar social movements, the fading fortunes of the independent left during the 1980s provided the backdrop to renewed interest in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s first and his most explicitly psychoanalytical text.78 As we will see in Chapter 6, Ahmad characterizes this ‘epochal shift’ as a manifestation of perestroika in the world economy but also in cultural theory. The postcolonial and cultural turn is arguably a byproduct of this shift. It is worth reiterating that this renewed interest in Fanon in the 1980s owed much to the 1986 Pluto edition of Black Skin, White Masks, prefaced by Homi Bhabha, who, with his cultural studies approach and his psychoanalytical interpretation, opened up new readings. These new readings brought the issues of language, sexuality and race to the fore. According to Stuart Hall, Black Skin, White Masks – which explores the interrelationship between psychoanalysis and politics, the issues of colonialism, gender, race and sexuality – ‘provides the privileged ground of Fanon’s “return” and of the contestation over him’.79 The perceived ‘symptomatic breaks between Fanon’s early and late work’ is, in Hall’s view, dubious in its attempt to privilege Fanon’s political commitment over his psychoanalytical theory.80 Hall takes a converse position: he seems to privilege the latter. Indeed, he proclaims that the revolutionary politics of Fanon, his ‘incendiary Third Worldism’, has become dated, if not obsolete. Thus, Hall defends Bhabha’s ‘strategic reading’ of Fanon against the criticism mounted by the materialists. In particular, Hall points



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out that Bhabha departs at a certain point from Fanon. In fact, as has been noted, Bhabha’s reading has less to do with Fanon than with his own agenda to promote postcolonial studies in the 1980s. The location of his interpretation of Fanon must not be overlooked. Nonetheless, his introduction to the new translation of The Wretched of the Earth – ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’ – represents a remarkable departure from his readings of Fanon which are dismissed by critics for not taking into account the most obvious historical and political contexts from which the work of Fanon emerged. In this introduction, Bhabha raises a number of crucial questions regarding the relevance of Fanon today:81 Has Fanon become obsolete? Has the new humanism which he inaugurates in the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth turned out to be nothing but a vain plea? What grounds for optimism does he allow us, if any? What is to be salvaged from his ethics and politics in this age of globalization? Bhabha raises two crucial points: the first concerns the ethical dimension of Fanon’s brand of nationalism and appraises whether his views on decolonization are still relevant to our postcolonial/global world; the second focuses on the issue of violence. To engage effectively with Bhabha’s Foreword, I will discuss these two points in reverse order. To read the theme of violence out of context, without accounting for the wider historical specificities of Fanon’s text and the context of its ethical preoccupations, is to commit violence against Fanon. Let me first engage with his views on the theme of violence. In The Wretched of the Earth, he calls for decolonization, which is nothing but the ‘complete calling into question of the colonial situation’.82 Thus, decolonization is here a ‘historical process’ marked by violence: it is ‘a programme of complete disorder’; or better still, it is ‘the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature’ and involved in a ‘murderous and decisive struggle’.83 Colonialism is not an ideology, in the sense that it has never sought to hide or dress up its violence: its agents openly speak a brutal language.84 As Fanon argues, ‘colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties’. It is maintained by naked violence: ‘violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence’.85 Incontrovertibly, the logic of decolonization flows from that of colonialism and ‘[t]he

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native’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal’.86 Nevertheless, the theme of violence does not constitute the centrality of Fanon’s project, a project which – as it emerges in the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth – celebrates the advent of universal humanism. Violence, for Fanon, is just a negative moment in the process of decolonization, which must pass through two phases: the breaking-up of the colonial state and the emergence of the postcolonial nation. This is how Fanon describes the ultimate purpose of decolonization: it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlight upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.87 As Bhabha suggests, the theme of violence cannot be fully comprehended without ‘exploring the processes by which decolonization turns into the project of nation building’, a stage prior to ‘constructing a worldsystem based on the ideals of global equity’.88 He describes this stage as a moment of ‘fundamental importance in the colonized’s pyschoaffective equilibrium’. Bhabha borrows from Fanon the term ‘psychoaffective’ to demarcate the space within which ‘the citizen and individual develop and grow’.89 Like Fanon, he inscribes violence in this space, the site where political citizenship is enacted and re-enacted. Bhabha is right to remark that the exclusion of the colonized from the public sphere leads them to adopt ‘the reactive vocabulary of violence and retributive justice’.90 This violence arises from the simple fact that colonialism creates a diremption between the ideals of French Republicanism and the practices of political citizenship. To grasp Fanon’s ‘approach to the phenomenology of decolonization’ – his views on colonial violence – it is important to underscore the ‘internal dissonance […] between the free standing of citizen and the segregated status of the subject – the double political destiny of the same’.91 Bhabha is



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vague in his discussion of the political economy of assimilation, or what he calls ‘the double political destiny of the same’. As I have argued elsewhere,92 the sénatus-consulte of 1863 and 1865 worked to expropriate the colonized and deny them subject status. The sénatusconsulte of 1863 had two devastating consequences on colonized Algeria. First, it displaced the social structures of traditional life and precipitated the collapse of its political economy. Second, and more importantly, it facilitated the expropriation of Algeria’s most fertile land. As I will argue in Chapter 5, because of this historical factor, Fanon assigns a revolutionary role to the expropriated peasantry, which colonialism turned into a lumpenproletariat. The sénatus-consulte of July 1865 stipulated that the Arabs and Berbers were subjects; it allowed them to apply for French citizenship, provided they relinquish their ‘personal status’ – namely, their Muslim identity. In reality, the offer of citizenship amounted to nothing: the Muslims did not renounce their cultural identity; moreover, the colonial administration thwarted the assimilationist laws always proposed but never promulgated. The sénatus-consulte of 1865 produced a fracture at the core of French citizenship: it subjected the colonized to French laws but denied them the rights of political citizenship. This fracture also manifested itself in the form of a disjunction between the public and private spheres, between personal life and the life of the nation, between past and present. Excluded from the benefits that political citizenship bequeathed to citizens, the colonized were confined to the private sphere of domestic life or religion to enact and re-enact their sense of identity and cultural belonging. This exclusion from the public, that is, from the political life of the nation, forced the colonized to fall back on ‘archaic’ cultural practices inherited from an unchanging past. The religious formalism that gave rise, both in colonial times and subsequently, to fundamentalism – or what Bhabha calls the ‘ethnonationalist’ religious conflicts – was one of the consequences of colonialism which denied the colonized subject status and political participation. Paradoxically, the ideology of assimilation put in place a regime of apartheid, characterized by its Manichaean violence, compartmentalizing and segregating the nation into a French Algeria, which enjoyed the rights of political citizenship, and a native Algeria, to which these rights were denied. To be sure, the rhetoric of assimilation went against the grain of France’s republicanism. It rendered citizenship an ‘unstable, unsustainable

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psycho-affective site in the conflict between political and legal assimilation, and the respect for, and recognition of, Muslim ethical and cultural affiliations’.93 Bhabha highlights the pernicious effects of the laws instituted by the sénatus-consulte, which divested the colonized Muslims of their identity. But he is oblivious to the material consequences that these laws had in dispossessing them of their land – the root cause of violence. In Chapter 5, I will explore in greater detail these consequences. Fanon has been dismissed as an ‘apostle of violence’, a preacher of hate. He has been compared to Hitler, Sorel and Pareto. Hannah Arendt denounced him for ‘glorify[ing] violence for violence’s sake’ and for expressing ‘a much deeper hatred of bourgeois society than the conventional Left’.94 Sartre, on the other hand, thinks that Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth represents ‘the moment of the boomerang, the third stage of violence’: a returning violence that comes back to assail its perpetrators.95 The violence inflicted upon the colonized was, in Sartre’s view, systemic: it could be seen in the expropriation of the colonized and the pulverization of their social structures by brutal force. This violence determined their objective condition, that is their immiseration, their unemployment, their chronic malnutrition, famine, disease. Sartre argues that in order to overcome this condition, violence must be confronted with violence. Echoing Fanon, he is adamant that the violence involving colonizer and colonized in the context of Algeria’s decolonization was the sum total of colonial oppression: the violence of the colonized was nothing but the interiorization of a single violence, that of the colonizer. Sartre distinguishes between the gratuitous violence of the latter and that of the colonized ‘[which] is no less than man reconstructing himself’.96 Unlike Arendt (for whom Fanon’s incendiary language announces ‘the end of politics’), and unlike Sartre (who fanned it and for whom violence represented ‘the fiery, first breath of human freedom’),97 Bhabha proposes a different reading. The following passage illustrates well the distance that separates Bhabha from Arendt and Sartre: Fanon, the phantom of terror, might be only the most intimate, if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence. But poetic justice can be questionable even when it is exercised on behalf



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of the wretched of the earth. And if, as I have argued, the lesson of Fanon lies in his fine adjustment of the balance between the politician and the psychiatrist, his skill in altering the ‘scale’ between the social dimension and the psycho-affective relation, then we have to admit that he is in danger of losing his balance when, for instance, he writes: ‘Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. The praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end.’ Knowing what we now know about the double destiny of violence, we must ask: Is violence ever a perfect mediation? Is it not simply rhetorical bravura to assert that any form of secular, material mediation can provide a transparency of political action (or ethical judgment) that reveals ‘the means and the end’? Is the clear mirror of violence not something of a mirage in which the dispossessed see their reflections but from which they cannot slake their thirst?98 Bhabha reproduces Henry Louis Gates’s ‘Critical Fanonism’: he characterizes him as a contradictory and ‘polemical’ figure, ‘dialectically rich’, hypostatizing the complexities of our global culture.99 In Bhabha’s critical account, the work of Fanon provides valuable insights into the segregated economy of our globalized world. Nevertheless, Bhabha’s treatment of the issue of violence is one-sided and rather superficial in that it does not account for the historical context of Fanon’s political intervention in colonial Algeria. Implicitly and explicitly, Bhabha intimates that violence mars Fanon’s ethics of decolonization. Bhabha concludes his discussion of the question of violence with rhetorical questions. It is easy to sit on the fence and depict Fanon as ‘the intimate, if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence’ and ‘the phantom of terror’, projecting for the colonized the phantasmata of violence. Bhabha presents Fanon as deluded because he confuses the means with the ends of colonial violence. It is important to stress that, for Fanon, violence is not a mediating agency between the means and the end, as Bhabha suggests. Rather, it is a feature of the Manichaean economy which structures the colonial space. Bhabha introduces Fanon as performing a difficult balancing act, one in which he risks losing his bearings and precipitating the colonized into blind violence. In his

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analysis, Bhabha crucially does not distinguish between the different levels within which violence operates in Fanon’s discourse. In particular, it is necessary to recognize that Fanon’s account of the politics that generated colonial violence should be situated at the level of description. If this is acknowledged, the systemic violence of colonialism cannot be attributed to him. At the prescriptive level, he endorses violence only as a last resort to combat a system that could not be overhauled without being dismantled. Bhabha’s conflation of these two levels results in his overlooking the larger picture in Fanon’s description of the violence of colonialism. Bhabha misses the significance of Fanon’s discerning analyses of colonial violence. In today’s world, where violence and terror have gone global, what conclusions might we draw from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth? Should we keep on blaming Fanon for the colonial violence which he internalized and struggled against, and overlook the fact that the very Manichaeism that previously governed the economy of colonial societies is now generating violence and terror on a global scale? To be fair, Bhabha astutely remarks that globalization has reproduced the Manichaeism of colonial politics. [T]he economic ‘solution’ to inequality and poverty subscribed to by the IMF and the World Bank, for instance, have ‘the feel of the colonial ruler’, according to Joseph Stiglitz, once senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. ‘They help to create a dual economy in which there are pockets of wealth … But a dual economy is not a developed economy.’ It is the reproduction of dual, unequal economies as effects of globalization that render poor societies more vulnerable to the ‘culture of conditionality’, through which what is purportedly the granting of loans turns, at times, into the peremptory enforcement of policy.100 This dual economy, argues Bhabha, has created divided worlds, which are mutually exclusive: the haves and the have-nots. Bhabha conjures the spirit of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in his pronouncements against the pernicious effects of this economy on the Third World. I concur with Bhabha’s view that The Wretched of the Earth transcends its specificities ‘because of the peculiarly grounded, historical



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stance it takes towards the future’.101 Bhabha reinscribes Fanon’s Manichaean language within ‘the anticolonial spatial tradition’.102 Clearly, he has reconsidered his previous position with regard to the conceptual opposition that marks Fanon’s thinking. ‘This critical language of duality,’ he remarks, ‘is part of the spatial imagination that seems to come so naturally to geopolitical thinking of a progressive, postcolonial cast of mind: margin and metropole, centre and periphery, the global and the local, the nation and the world.’103 Nonetheless, Bhabha’s understanding of this geopolitics is not consistent with his deconstructive take on Fanon: his pronouncements that put the dialectical operation at work in The Wretched of the Earth out of commission. In addition, one might ask: what is so progressive about this language of duality which stems from colonial practice, a language that he has thus far dismissed? Arguably, Fanon’s language is progressive in as much as it anticipates the Manichaean economy which governs globalization, an economy which has reproduced in our postcolonial world the compartmentalized societies of the colonial era. Let me now turn to the first point raised by Bhabha and examine the significance of Fanon’s ethics. According to Bhabha, this ethics introduces a temporal dimension into the discourse of decolonization. It suggests that the future of the colonized world – ‘The Third World must start over a new history of Man …’ – is imaginable, or achievable, only in the process of resisting the peremptory and polarizing choices that the superpowers impose on their ‘client’ states. Decolonization can truly be achieved only with the destruction of the Manichaeism of the cold war; and it is this belief that enables the insights of The Wretched of the Earth to be effective beyond its publication in 1961 (and the death of its author in that year), and to provide us with salient and suggestive perspectives on the decompartmentalized world after the dismemberment of the Berlin Wall in 1989.104 The dismantling of the Berlin Wall has been hailed by some critics as a movement towards the completion of the project of globalization, the advent of open society, the triumph of freedom in the world and the liberalization of the market. Paradoxically, this movement has

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reinstated the Manichaeism that determined the politics of the old colonial regimes. Fanon’s ethics of decolonization calls for a different kind of globalization, for a new world order in which segregated economies must be abolished. Fanon envisages the emergence of a new humanism, freed from the weight of the colonial past and from the ideological conflict of the Cold War. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wages war on two fronts: against colonialism in Algeria and in the Third World, and against capitalism in the post-independence period. His struggle to unshackle Algeria from the chains of colonial domination is concomitant with his commitment to liberate the Third World from Europe’s hegemony. After decolonization, he maintains, the Third World could find itself subjected to an insidious neo-colonialism. In his view, genuine decolonization cannot be attained without implementing a policy that ensures its ideological independence or non-alignment; for in the period of post-independence, he fears that the Third World will be drawn into ‘the framework of cut-throat competition between capitalism and socialism’.105 The end of direct colonial rule (which hitherto depended on territorial occupation of former Third World countries) does not necessarily mean the end of colonialism. In the postcolonial period, decolonization necessitates a cultural and political revolution which must guarantee economic independence from the West. The prospect of seeing the Third World mortgage its future to capitalism fills Fanon with fear and trepidation. He warns that the Third World might become a ‘factor’ in the ideological conflict of the Cold War. The aid from the developed countries often comes with strings attached: it is employed as a tool of ideological control and manipulation. In Fanon’s view, however, it must not be perceived as a charitable gesture, endowing its sponsors with some moral authority. Aid is nothing but ‘reparation’. He draws a parallel between the situation of the Third World after the anti-colonial wars and that of Western Europe after the Second World War. He argues that just as Nazi Germany was made to compensate Western European countries, the latter should pay for the damages they inflicted on the Third World. He underscores that the poverty of the Third World is the outcome of a long history of ‘domination, of exploitation and pillage’.106 As he puts it, ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under-developed peoples.’107 In



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prophetic language which conjures up the abject poverty of today’s Africa, he writes: The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an under-developed world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but it is a world without doctors, without engineers and without administrators. Confronting this world the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes from the soil and subsoil of that underdeveloped world.108 What is even more reprehensible is the fact that this ‘geography of hunger’ still persists in the twenty-first century. This troubling fact confirms Fanon’s remark that ‘the primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization’.109 This geography is characterized by the Manichaeism of the colonial world as a divided world, made up of separate zones, inhabited by different species and with segregated economies. The plight of the Third World is indeed a scar on Europe’s conscience. Relief programmes intended to alleviate the chronic famines which have plagued and continue to plague Africa – Europe’s handouts – must not conceal the brutal history of colonial exploitation. Of course, Europe could eradicate this ‘geography of hunger’ if it were to give up its programmes of weapons of mass destruction. Fanon is adamant that: Those literally astronomical sums of money which are invested in military research, those engineers who are transformed into technicians of nuclear war, could in the space of fifteen years raise the standards of living of under-developed countries by sixty per cent. So we see that the true interests of under-developed countries do not lie in the protraction nor in the accentuation of this cold war.110 Let us note in passing that Fanon’s views here run counter to the portrayal of them by critics who have denounced him for preaching

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violence. One could not underscore enough the significance of the humanist dimension of his critique: he conceives of this humanism within ‘a socialist regime, a regime which is completely orientated towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions’.111 Fanon warns against nationalism for substituting colonial antagonism with class conflict: displacing the colonizers only to replace them with the évolués, the middle-class elite that is steeped in French colonial culture. This elite does not represent, for Fanon, the revolutionary force that will call a halt to colonialism. On the contrary, it epitomizes an emergent neo-colonialism that will perpetuate the misery of the exploited masses. This perhaps goes some way towards addressing Memmi’s question of why Fanon relinquishes the politics of negritude. Fanon’s call to liberate the Third World through development has fallen on deaf ears. Governments in the Third World did not heed Fanon’s warning against the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness. Selfstyled revolutionary movements in the Third World and in Africa have failed to achieve a genuine decolonization. Nationalism has not been harnessed by a pedagogy that fosters social and political emancipation. This failure has fatally undermined Fanon’s project to ‘put Africa in motion, to cooperate in its organization, in its regrouping, behind revolutionary principles, to participate in the ordered movement of a continent’.112 What Africa’s postcolonial politics show – and this is no fault of Fanon’s – is the reverse of his efforts to protect Africa from ‘passing through the middle-class chauvinistic national phase with its procession of wars and death-tolls’.113 In postcolonial Africa, myriad dictatorships have been installed and propped up by the West. To echo Hussein Bulhan, home-grown dictators sponsored by Europe have instituted the ultimate form of oppression: ‘auto-colonialism’. Sad to say, ‘these African tyrants of today, many of them products of colonial servitude, rule with lethal arms sent as “aid” by more “developed countries” in a manner reminiscent of the way firearms and gunpowder were [used in] … Africa during the slave trade’.114 I concur with Bhabha that The Wretched of the Earth raises important political questions with respect to the project of decolonization, questions that have become acute after the end of the Cold War. I also agree with Bhabha that Fanon’s work ‘provides a genealogy for globalization



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that reaches back to the complex problems of decolonization’.115 Bhabha incisively points out that: Fanon’s proleptic proposal that the postcolonial narrative of independent nation building could enter its international phase only after the end of the Cold War telescopes that long history of neglect into our times, whence it reveals the poignant proximity of the incomplete project of decolonization to the dispossessed subjects of globalization.116 What Bhabha highlights here is the failure of postcolonial studies to deal effectively with the problems that globalization poses for emergent postcolonial nations. Two practical conclusions could be drawn from Bhabha: first, that globalization has instituted an insidious neo-colonialism; second, that the most powerful members of the international community have failed in their responsibility to help the wretched of the earth, to lift them from the doldrums, from the depths of colonial and postcolonial misery. Conclusion By way of conclusion, let us recall Kebena Mercer’s contentious view that the ‘decentring’ of the subject and the epochal shifts in the 1980s and 1990s (both spurred by the economy of globalization) renewed interest in Fanon’s early work Black Skin, White Masks and rendered obsolete The Wretched of the Earth. This view chimes with Hall’s and subscribes to Bhabha’s poststructuralist reading of Black Skin, White Masks. In ‘Framing Fanon’, the thrust of Bhabha’s argument goes against the grain of this reading. His critique of The Wretched of the Earth throws into relief difficult questions. For instance, how are we to resolve the question of postcolonial domination, and what strategies are we to adopt against the progress of an insidious neocolonialism? It must be said that Bhabha does not provide effective answers to these pertinent questions – questions which are for now left in abeyance but are central to my discussion of Khatibi and Said in Chapter 6. What emerges from Bhabha’s critique is the depressing thought that while postcolonial theorizing has thrived thanks to the

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work of Fanon (and at times in spite of it), neo-colonialism has been consolidating its rules of domination and expanding its spheres of influence; and globalization is sapping the foundations of deconstructive postcolonialism, rendering its rhetoric almost obsolete – the rhetoric of difference that is leading to political apathy and indifference. It has cut the ground from critics such as Hall, Mercer and Bhabha, who have attempted to read Fanon deconstructively, leaving them with nothing to offer but Fanon expurgated from the rhetoric of violence – the very same violence against which Fanon struggles and which rules over our postcolonial world. In an age where oppression lurks behind globalization, a more accurate reading of Fanon is urgent. It is important to revisit The Wretched of the Earth as we enter into a new age of globalized terror and violence. Fanon does not render dialectics inoperative in The Wretched of the Earth. It is erroneous to interpret its politics as revolutionary, transient, undialectical and trans-historical – in essence, as postmodern and based on partial truths. As I have shown in this chapter, the notion of the dissembling self in Black Skin, White Masks must not be read as a poststructuralist trope; the signifying differences underpinning such a notion have an economic edge in the psychoanalysis of Black Skin, White Masks and colour the Manichaean politics which structures the cartography of colonial space in The Wretched of the Earth. It is reductionist to compare Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth and argue that the former is apolitical, engaging only with psychoanalysis, while the latter is incendiary in its politics. A close reading of these two texts reveals that the section ‘The Negro and Hegel’ is as violent as ‘Concerning Violence’. I have examined the violence engendered by the gaze of the Other – the mirror stage and processes of identification and exclusion of difference. It is worth reiterating that Fanon defines the relationship between Self and Other in Sartrean and not Lacanian terms. In Black Skin, White Masks, he posits Lacan’s specular relation within the framework of existential phenomenology, underscoring the Negro’s racialized corporeal schema. In the scenario Fanon adumbrates, the mirror stage loses its structural functioning to individuate, subject and help the Negro enter the symbolic order. To enable me to nuance Fanon’s reading of the Lacanian mirror stage, it is important in the next chapter to examine his views on



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language and the processes of individuation and identification which were marked by colonial racism and Negrophobia in Martinican society in tan robè. It is also important to focus on the interplay of gender, race and sexuality, exploring his critique of the Negrophobic narratives of Capécia and Maran. I will interpret these narratives from the perspective of a Freudian ‘family romance’ thwarted by colonial violence and racism.

Notes 1 Christiane Chaulet Achour, Frantz Fanon: l’importun (Montpellier: Éditions Chèvre-Feuille étoilée, 2004), pp. 15–18. 2 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 16. 3 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, in Black Skin, White Masks, p. xv. 4 Bhabha, ‘Forward: Remembering Fanon’, p. xv. All biographies of Fanon stress how racial discrimination within the Free French Forces during and after the war shocked him. On the situation of black soldiers and prisoners during the Second World War, see Serge Bilé, Noirs dans les Camps Nazis (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher/Le Serpent à Plume, 2005), pp. 53–56. Bilé reports that tens of former black Senegalese inmates in Nazi camps were executed on 1 December 1944 in a French military camp in Dakar, where they had been repatriated, for having protested against discriminations in pay and war indemnities compared to white soldiers. Such inequalities had provoked several revolts in camps in France and the reports written by military authorities explicitly advocate the crushing of claims for equality, which they accurately diagnosed as borne from a loss of prestige of the whites following the debacle: ‘Aux yeux du Noir qui n’est pas dénué de tout sens critique, le Blanc a perdu de son prestige.’ 5 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xvi, my italics. 6 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xvi. 7 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xvi. 8 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1977), p. 2. 9 Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. 2. 10 Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. 4. 11 Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. 148. 12 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xvii. 13 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, pp. xvii–xviii.

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14 Henry Louis Gates, ‘Critical Fanonism’, Critical Inquiry, 3:17 (1991), p. 460. 15 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xviii. 16 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, pp. xix–xx. 17 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xvi. 18 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 161. 19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138. 20 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138. 21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 161. 22 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin Books, 1979), p. 116. 23 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 125. 24 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 125 25 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 125. 26 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 151. 27 Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 44. 28 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, p. 50. 29 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, p. 47. 30 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, p. 47. 31 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, p. 48. 32 Althusser, Essays on Ideology, p. 54. 33 Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. 148. 34 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 113. 35 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109. 36 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), p. 74. 37 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 21. 38 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 79. 39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 110. 40 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 78. 41 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 97. 42 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 11. 43 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xxi. 44 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xxi. 45 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’, p. xxii. 46 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 167. 47 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 145. See also Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 128. 48 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 70. 49 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 127.



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50 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 127. 51 Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 186–187. 52 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 212. 53 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October, 34 (Fall, 1985), p. 76. 54 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (Spring, 1984), p. 129. 55 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man, p. 126 and p. 130. 56 Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Postcolonial Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), p. 40. 57 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, p. 129. 58 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (London: ICA, 1996), p. 190. 59 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 190. 60 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 191. 61 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 196. 62 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, pp. 196–197. 63 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 199. 64 Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 195. 65 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 30–31. 66 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 30–31. 67 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 35, 40. 68 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’ (citing J. Dollimore), p. 30. 69 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 31. 70 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 31. 71 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, pp. 27–28. 72 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 43. 73 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 43. 74 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 45. 75 Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 45. 76 Stuart Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?’, in Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness, pp. 24–25. 77 Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 25. 78 K. Mercer, ‘Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia’, in A.C. Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 197. 79 Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 15. 80 Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 16. 81 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. ix–xi. 82 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28. 83 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 27–28.

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84 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 29. 85 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 48. 86 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 31. 87 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28. 88 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, pp. xxv–xxvi. 89 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xix. 90 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xx. 91 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xx. 92 A. Haddour, Colonial Myths, History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 93 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xxii. 94 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: The Penguin Press, 1970). 95 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 147. 96 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 148. 97 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xxxvi. 98 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xl. 99 Gates, ‘Critical Fanonism’, pp. 457–458. 100 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xii. 101 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv. 102 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv. 103 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv. 104 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p.xiv. 105 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 59. 106 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 39. 107 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 81. 108 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 76. 109 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 39. 110 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 64–65. 111 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 78. 112 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 187–188. 113 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 197. 114 Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1985), p. 254. 115 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xv. 116 Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, pp. xxvii–xxviii.

3 A family romance

Introduction Before he turned 18, Fanon had joined the dissidence in Dominica and then the 5th Battalion which set off to North Africa. He enlisted to defend mother France and her republican institutions from the threat of Nazism, but his encounter with colonial racism in North Africa and mainland France shattered his idealism. As I noted in the Introduction, he wrote to his parents in April to express his disillusionment with the war and the causes he was fighting for. In ‘family romance’, argues Freud, children reject their parents because they held an idealized view of them in their childhood. I want to argue in this chapter that Fanon’s disillusionment with France expresses his idealization of its tradition, its culture and its political institutions. To engage with the elements of this family romance, it is important to analyse the interplay of language and ideology and how the notion of race traverses gender and sexual politics. Language and coloniality In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon analyses the ways in which language constructs the psychology of the Antilleans, imparting in their consciousness a white colonial Weltanschauung. Language is not neutral, a passive instrument, a motionless vehicle. As a means of communication, language necessitates the existence of others and is therefore a crucial dimension of existence itself. ‘To speak,’ writes Fanon, ‘means to be

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in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.’1 What does it mean for the Antilleans to speak French? Does it mean that they are bilingual and that language provides them with cultural membership? The acquisition of French, the colonizer’s language, does not necessarily bring about the assimilation of the colonized subject. Rather, colonialism can create a gulf between the colonizer and the colonized. Its language, Fanon argues, ‘injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies’.2 By dint of violence, it invades the edifice of consciousness with devastating consequences, creating a disjunction between the body of the colonized and their subjectivity, between their psychical and their cultural life. The Antilleans who speak the language of the colonizer internalize a white ideology and, as a consequence, start to perceive their black body through the prism of its denigrating racism. As Fanon explains, the Antilleans enter into an open conflict with their native black culture: Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.3 Here lie the seeds of self-hate, the most destructive of the effects of colonialism. By appropriating the language and cultural values of the white, the Antilleans put on a white mask but come face to face with racism that reminds them of their difference. This white mask cannot conceal the facticity of their blackness. White racism imprisons, shuts them in what Fanon calls a ‘schema of corporeality’ which seals the Negro in blackness and the European in whiteness.4 The metaphor of ‘black skin, white masks’ hypostatizes the position of a split subject – to quote Albert Memmi – straddling two cultural spaces, uncomfortably seated, and seldom finding the right pose.5



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Dialectics operates at the cusp of being and thinking, and Fanon evokes the example of the Martinicans who undergo a change of personality as soon as they land in France: they no longer understand Créole and deprecate their culture. Such a change is, in Fanon’s view, ‘evidence of a dislocation, a separation’, brought about by the adoption of a language different from Créole.6 Créole, or in Fanon’s parlance ‘petit-nègre’, is made up of multifarious elements of European and other African and Caribbean idioms that evolved after the seventeenth century into a common language used by the white békés to give orders to the black slaves on the plantations. Marked by the historical weight of colonialism and slavery, Créole mediates the power relations between the white master and black slave. The acculturated black middle class reproduce these power relations when they speak French to express their class position and use Créole to address their servants. This mode of address – be it employed by the acculturated middle class or by the French white – is vexing and manifestly racist. As Fanon writes: To make [the black man] talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible … speaking pidgin-nigger closes off the black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies. Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black man express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world.7 To address the Antilleans in petit-nègre primitivizes and decivilizes them; it reminds them that they are pidgin-nigger-talkers and that they must stay in the culture and language they are attempting to disavow; it infantilizes and treats them like children; it degrades them; it attaches them to an image which they cannot escape, and for which they are not responsible: their own colour.8 Much has been said about the inscription of discourse on the body; arguably, Fanon is one of the first exponents to inscribe colour on discourse by ‘epidermalizing’ language. Quoting from Léon G. Damas’s Pigments, he establishes a connection between language and the pigmentation of the Negro’s skin.

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Like Michel Leiris, Fanon believes that the future of Créole in Martinique is endangered by colonial pedagogy. At school, as well as at home, children are forced to ‘speak French/the French of France/ the Frenchman’s French/French French’.9 ‘In Martinique,’ David Macey points out, ‘the ban on speaking Créole resulted in a conflation of linguistic and racial problems.’ The ambivalent relationship that Martinicans have with regards to French and Créole constitutes ‘an important aspect of the donning of the white mask that covers the black face, and it is one of the major themes of Fanon’s first book’. Undoubtedly, Fanon’s ‘education in Martinique was – and is – an induction into linguistic and cultural schizophrenia’.10 Cultural schizophrenia, or better still self-division – the crux of Black Skins, White Masks – is nothing but the internalization of conflicting images of France: mainland France with its enlightened tradition and with its liberal and republican political institutions, as opposed to colonial France. One of Fanon’s contemporaries, the Algerian poet and cultural critic Jean Amrouche, captures the split identity of the acculturated Fanon. In ‘La Culture peut être une mystification’, Amrouche laments that in the acculturated subject there is only ‘division and trouble’.11 Much like Fanon, Amrouche feels excluded from French culture, which he espoused, but also cut off from his native culture. In ‘Colonialism et langage’, he points out that French language fractures the spiritual life of the colonized pupils by inculcating in them the values of the colonizing culture.12 These pupils are not merely invited to develop exclusively in the language and civilization of the colonizer, they are expressly forced to deny their cultural tradition as well. Like Amrouche, Fanon argues in Black Skins, White Masks that identity is objectively contested in a language which produces an image of the colonized that is contorted and caricatured. Under the colonizer’s gaze, the colonized start to contest their own identity. The Negro, argues Fanon, suffers from a double inferiority complex: economic inferiority; and the epidermalization of this inferiority, that is, the inscription of this complex on the Negro’s skin. In his critique of Mayotte Capécia’s and René Maran’s work, Fanon analyses this complex, clearly delineating the different shades which colour the cartography of Martinican society – shades which also reflect class privileges. A white colonial Weltanschauung – racist and classist



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– determines its lines of demarcation, motivating the workings of what Fanon calls the ‘dialectic of having and being’:13 you are rich because you are white, and you are poor because you are black. It is instructive to note in passing that Fanon elaborates on this dialectic in his description of the colonial city in The Wretched of the Earth. Let me now turn my attention to the intersectionality of colonial and sexual politics in Black Skins, White Masks, concentrating on Fanon’s reading of Capécia and Maran, and exploring the ways in which both language and sexuality are marked by the dimension of colonial ideology. Black and White Love In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon devotes two chapters to the study of black and white sexual relations, focusing specifically on Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948) and on René Maran’s Un homme pareil aux autres (1947).14 In his psychoanalysis of the Negro’s inferiority complex, he shows how authentic love is impossible for Negroes who internalize a white ideology. His psychoanalysis of Capécia and Jean Veneuse (a sobriquet for Maran) provides a rider to the adage ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: ‘beauty is white’. Mayotte loves André because he has blue eyes and white skin.15 All she wants from her relationship with him is ‘a bit of whiteness in her life’. She bemoans that ‘a woman of color is never altogether respectable in a white man’s eyes. Even when he loves her.’16 Fanon finds her views troubling – pathologically Negrophobic. Through the narrative viewpoint of Mayotte, and as he recounts her love affair with the white French sailor André, Fanon evokes the hardship which the black Martinicans suffered during the blockade: There were evenings, unhappily, when he had to leave me alone in order to fulfil his social obligations. He [André] would go to Didier, the fashionable part of Fort-de-France inhabited by the ‘Martinique whiteys,’ who are perhaps not too pure racially but are often very rich … Among André’s colleagues, who like him had been marooned in the Antilles by the war, some had managed to have their wives join them. I understood that André could not always hold himself

100 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference aloof from them. I also accepted the fact that I was barred from this society because I was a woman of color; but I could not help being jealous. It was no good his explaining to me that his private life was something that belong to him alone and that his social and military life was something else, which was not within his control; I nagged so much that one day he took me to Didier. We spent the evening in one of those little villas that I had admired since my childhood, with two officers and their wives. The women kept watching me with a condescension that I found unbearable. I felt that I was wearing too much makeup, that I was not properly dressed, that I was not doing André credit, perhaps simply because of the color of my skin – in short, I spent so miserable an evening that I decided I would never again ask André to take me with him.17 Mayotte has admired the villas in Didier since childhood, and her fantasy to be in Didier, the preserve of the white and rich, with a white lover, is the dream of escape from her condition as black, ‘a form of salvation that consists of magically turning white’.18 She is not accepted in society because of her colour. If love is forbidden to Mayotte, Fanon contends, it is because she cannot overcome her infantile fantasies. At an obvious level of reading, she manages to turn them into reality; at a more complex level, her childhood fantasies reproduce a racist discourse that degrades and infantilizes the Negro. Unable to whiten herself, the 15-year old Mayotte used to pour black ink on white pupils’ heads, subconsciously ‘negrifying’ the world surrounding her by ‘turning whites into blacks’.19 Putting too much makeup on has indeed a supplementary function to both cover up her colour which represents her social expulsion, and to compensate for her inferiority. It is no coincidence that she becomes a laundress, and Fanon describes her wish to bleach her world and whiten her blackness as an attempt at ‘lactification’.20 There is only one avenue of escape open to Mayotte, and this avenue leads directly to a ‘white world’ which she constructs at the level of the imaginary. She espouses a white ideology, or more precisely, speaks a language which denigrates the facticity of her blackness. Fanon criticizes Mayotte for her Negrophobia, which is manifestly the pathological of a bifid psyche: part of her Self



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(her white mentality) is destructively pitted against her black corporeality as Other. Fanon discusses Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise in tandem with Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini published in Présence Africaine. If the only concern of the Negress is to become white, that of the mulatto Nini is to avoid ‘slipping back’ into blackness.21 Although Mactar is educated, has passed his baccalaureate, has a job as an accountant and is better off than Nini, he is not good enough for the position of stenographer he is pursuing. The mulatto Nini rejects Mactar’s marriage proposal, which she perceives as an outrageous ‘insult’. She feels superior to him because ‘[s]he is almost white’. She is the epitome of mulatto girls in the Antilles who dream to marry but white men. The great dream that haunts every one of them is to the bride of a white man from Europe. One could say that all their efforts are directed to this end, which is almost never attained. Their need to gesticulate, their love of ridiculous ostentation, their calculated, theatrical, revolting attitudes, are just so many efforts of the same mania for grandeur. They must have white men, completely white, and nothing else will do. Almost all of them spend their entire lives waiting for this stroke of luck, which is anything but likely. And they are still waiting when old age overtakes them and forces them deep into dark refuges where the dream finally grows into a haughty resignation.22 Black and mulatto girls like Mayotte and Nini, wishing to marry white men, suffer from an inferiority complex. White love – that is, the fantasy to be white and to marry white Europeans – is a manifestation of such a complex. Fanon captures the process of overcompensation by evoking the case of the Negro medical student he knew while serving in the Second World War. This Negro was convinced that neither his colleagues nor his patients would take him seriously in his profession. So he decided one day to enlist in the army as a medical officer. He explained to Fanon that ‘[h]e wanted to have white men under his command’.23 He wanted to be the boss, he wanted to be feared and respected by the white. He wanted ‘to make white men adopt a Negro attitude toward him. In this way he was obtaining

102 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference revenge for the imago that had always obsessed him: the frightened, trembling Negro, abased before the white overlord.’24 The medical student who enlisted in the French Army to serve in the colony with the sole intention of subjecting the white to a Negro treatment, and Mayotte and Nini who want to espouse the white and deprecate the black, represent two sides of the same coin. Their Negrophobic attitudes converge in the same inferiority complex. The medical student invokes the trajectory taken by Fanon but in the opposite sense: Fanon, the decorated corporal, becomes the medical student who now psychoanalyses in Black Skin, White Masks the behaviour of those who encounter racism and suffer from an inferiority complex in white love. Perceptible parallels could be established between Capécia’s and Fanon’s attempts to find love in a white world and seek avenues of flight from their blackness. Similar parallels could be also drawn between Fanon and Jean Veneuse. Unlike the latter, Fanon had no inhibition or hesitation about transgressing taboos preventing the fulfilment of sexual relations with white partners, about desiring white flesh, about espousing whiteness. It is this apparent contradiction which feminists criticize in Fanon. It is rather simplistic to argue that in his discussion of mixed-race relationships, Fanon attempts to analyse his own sexual behaviour with white partners. His discussion centres not so much on mixed race relations but on the Negrophobic attitude which such relationships express. My project in this chapter is twofold: first, to analyse the elements of the family romance in these narratives; and second, to assess the romance, or rather the ambivalent relationship, Fanon had with his mother France. In Un Homme pareil aux autres, René Maran describes the dual subjectivity (or what W.E.B. Du Bois calls ‘double-consciousness’) of the protagonist in The Souls of Black Folk. Chidi Ikonné identifies ‘the uncomfortable feeling of twoness’ of Jean Veneuse (alias René Maran). He is a character struggling to reconcile ‘two warring ideals in one dark body’.25 Maran holds an ambivalent view of French colonialism and culture. In his Preface to Batouala, he does not really reject colonialism, but denounces its failure to promote a genuine fraternity between black and white, between colonizer and colonized. He presents the colonial relationship in terms of a ‘family romance’,



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a relationship in which an older brother helps his younger, adolescent, less-developed brother evolve and attain cultural maturity. He attacks colonialism in the name of humanism and universal brotherhood. Maran expresses a Negrophobic and misogynistic view vis-à-vis women of colour. An abandonment neurosis complex is at the origin of such a view, a complex which is complicated by a teenage relationship with a woman which almost drove him to suicide. He is invariably cold to all women but prefers white ones to women of colour. He distrusts the former and is disgusted by the latter. He described a casual affair he had with a black woman as nothing more than a ‘contact d’épiderme’ and considered the black woman as an ‘inerte et simple réceptacle de spermes désenchantés’.26 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon presents a selective reading of Un Homme pareil aux autres which focuses on René Maran’s abandonment neurosis but glosses over his misogynistic views. In parochial Lyon or Bordeaux, mixed-race relationships were beyond the pale; they were an open sore for Negrophobic feelings. Veneuse warns white women who flirt with him: Courage is a fine thing, but you’re going to get yourself talked about if you go on attracting attention this way. A Negro? Shameful – it’s beneath contempt. Associating with anybody of that race is just utterly disgracing yourself.27 Born in the Antilles but bred in Bordeaux, Veneuse’s education and right of abode make him European. His identity as a French Negro is, however, experienced as a conflict between his physical appearance and his cultural self, or more specifically between his body and subjectivity. Through this ambivalent character, Fanon conveys the dilemma of the Negro and raises one of the key issues of acculturation: ‘The Europeans in general and the French in particular, not satisfied with simply ignoring the Negro of the colonies, repudiate the one whom they have shaped into their own image.’28 The figure of Veneuse embodies the central problematic of Black Skin, White Masks: the Negro is repudiated because s/he ‘looks’ different. Echoing Sartre in Black Orpheus, Fanon portrays Veneuse as an ‘anxious man who cannot escape his body’.29 Unable to change his

104 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference outer appearance or hide the facticity of his blackness, unable to assimilate and ‘pass unnoticed’, Veneuse becomes ‘introverted’ and shuts himself in his inner world. His ‘sentimentality’, or better still his ‘romanticism’, is the outcome of his melancholia and split identity. This split is occasioned by the disjunction between the outer appearance of his racialized body and his inner self, between his inside and outside, between his public face and private self, between his whiteness and blackness, between his culture and race. Veneuse suffers from two interrelated psychological complexes: an inferiority complex coupled with melancholia resulting from an ‘abandonment-neurosis’. Ostracized and degraded because of their colour, Negroes have only one thought on their minds the moment they land in France: ‘to gratify their appetite for white women’30 and be their masters. Veneuse loves Andrée Marielle but fears that his love, tainted by racism and corrupted by the temptation of white flesh denied to Negroes, might be nothing but the subconscious desire to avenge the centuries of humiliation to which the Negroes were subjected.31 Veneuse’s neurosis is at one and the same time the manifestation of a personal and racial problem. To fathom the depth of self into which Veneuse withdraws, Fanon draws upon Germaine Guex’s description of the ‘abandonment-neurotic’: the abandonment-neurotic is aware of this secret zone, which he cultivates and defends against every intrusion … he views everything in terms of himself … His retreat into himself does not allow him to have any positive experience that would compensate for his past. Hence the lack of self-esteem and therefore of affective security is virtually total in such cases; and as a result there is an overwhelming feeling of impotence in relation to life and people, as well as a complete rejection of the feeling of responsibility. Others have betrayed him and thwarted him, and yet it is only from these others that he expects any improvement in his lot.32 Veneuse feels betrayed not only by the mother who abandoned him as a child but also by France, which subjected him to its culture while at the same time repudiating him because of his blackness. This feeling of betrayal becomes all the more painful when he goes to the Antilles, the land of his birth, his mother country, to serve his adopted country,



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France: he comes to the realization that he is accepted by neither and rejected by both.33 As we will see, this ambivalence is also at the centre of Capécia’s narratives. Like Veneuse, Fanon identified with, and espoused the causes of, mother France in the Second World War, but subsequently felt disillusioned. Was Fanon projecting his disillusionment on Veneuse’s abandonment neurosis? The abandonment neurosis from which Veneuse suffers could be best understood in the broader historical context of slavery as the manifestation of a thwarted ‘family romance’. It is worth reiterating that Fanon’s reading of Un Homme pareil aux autres is selective, obfuscating René Maran’s misogynistic views. In Fanon’s account, Veneuse does not consider women of colour as ‘passive receptacles of disenchanted sperm’ but fears that by marrying a white woman, he is refusing – and therefore expressing contempt for – women of his race. Feminists excoriate Fanon for presenting a positive and sympathetic view of Jean Veneuse in contradistinction to his negative portrayal of Capécia. However, in their discussion of Fanon, feminist critics such as Gwen Bergner discount the interplay of gender and race; more problematically, they turn a blind eye to Capécia’s Negrophobia and misandry towards black men. Arguably, they de-emphasize the intersectionality of gender and race and gloss over the fact that Negrophobia feeds on misogyny and misandry. The Martinican specificities are of paramount significance and, in order to grasp them, it is important to go beyond a strictly Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of gender and sexual politics, exploring notions such as the ‘family romance’ and ‘in the name of the father’ in the light of colonial paternalism and slavery. Gender and colonial politics Bergner identifies an ‘assumed incongruity between psychoanalysis and the politics of racial difference’ in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.34 This ‘incongruity’ stands as a strawman for the putative unpopularity of his work in psychoanalysis and postcolonialism. She asserts, however, that his text ‘can serve as the cornerstone of an inquiry into the intersections of racial subjectivity and social power.’35 In his psychoanalysis, Fanon underscores the interplay of language and sexuality, demonstrating that the Symbolic is marked by the dimension of race. He contrasts

106 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Freud’s autogenesis and sociogenesis, the Lacanian idea of the ‘constitutional’, and what he calls ‘structure’ he conceives of in Sartrean phenomenological terms as the ‘environment’ or rather the ‘situation’ which overdetermines the psychological makeup of the individual. In his words: The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences.36 Fanon clearly grounds psychoanalysis historically, politically and economically, analysing the power relation between black and white and ‘the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the environment’.37 Fanon’s analysis is at variance with Freudianism, in that the subject of his analysis is not the individual per se but society as a whole. Clearly, the focus of his analytical inquiry is not Mayotte, Nini and Veneuse, but the Martinican cultural environment. However, Bergner critiques both Fanon and Freud for holding theoretical views that are normative. ‘Fanon,’ she writes, ‘does not ignore sexual differences altogether, but he explores sexuality’s role in constructing race only through rigid categories of gender.’38 These categories, she contends, mediate a gender bias. In Black Skin, White Masks, the notion of ‘man’ is not a universal term referring to mankind but it is a referent to black men ‘lusting after white women, and competing with white men for intellectual recognition’.39 Indeed, the colonial encounter is expressed in Hegelian and sexual terms. ‘[Fanon’s] account of normative raced masculinity,’ she writes, ‘depends on the production or exclusion of femininities.’40 Nevertheless, in her avowed project to explore the intersectionality of race and gender, she seems to subsume the colonial specificities of Fanon’s work into a broader discussion of subject formation and sexual/gender difference. Arguably, her theoretical formulation forestalls the colonial/postcolonial critique. Similarly to Bhabha, Bergner establishes a correlation between Fanon’s question ‘What does the black man want?’ and Freud’s ‘What does woman want?’, contending that while the latter question places white women and white men in opposition, the former pits black



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men against white men.41 The site of difference – racial in Fanon and sexual in Freud or Lacan – is determined by the gaze (sight) of the Other. In Freudian and Lacanian theory, women’s sexual difference is apprehended by the child/boy visually and differentiation is symbolic of lack of power expressed in phallocentric terms as castration. In Fanon, the corporeal schema of the black (i.e. racial difference) is determined by the gaze of the white/child. Castration (lack of power of the black) is interpreted as a disempowering ‘amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that splattered [the] whole body with black blood’.42 Bergner conflates Freud and Fanon, the castrated white woman and black man, sexual and racial differences, and in so doing she goes against the grain of her own analysis, obfuscating the interplay of these differences. According to Bergner, ‘whereas for Freud the penis or its absence serves as the visual cue of difference or castration, for Fanon skin colour is the most notable cultural sign of racial difference’.43 In her attempt to displace and overturn the symbolic association of penis and phallus and complicate this association with racial difference, Bergner overlooks the racist and Negrophobic discourse which disempowers and represents the Negro as genital. As has been argued in Chapter 2, the interpellation of the Negro by the white child does not bring about his entry into the symbolic order but rather his degradation and exclusion from that order. Freud and Fanon clearly operate within two different methodological frames: psychoanalytical for the former; sociological (mainly racial) for the latter. In psychoanalytical terms, gender identity politics is determined by castration anxiety in the male and penis envy in the female. In this regard, Freudian theory is phallocentric, positing the superiority of men and the inferiority of women. Castration – that is, the loss of masculinity – is a source of anxiety for men, while women suffer from resentment over not having a penis. Freud asks the question ‘What do women want?’ but leaves the answer in abeyance. Unlike Freud, Fanon hazards an answer to his own question ‘What does the black man want?’: as we have seen in Chapter 1, he formulates his response in Sartrean existential phenomenological terms: the black man wants to be ‘a man amidst other men’. Fanon ventriloquizes Freud as he contends that he knows nothing about the sexuality of the black woman – which Freud characterizes

108 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference in Orientalizing terms as a ‘dark continent’. As Hélène Cixous remarks, Freud’s question is rhetorical: To pose the question ‘What do women want?’ is to pose it already as answer, as from a man who isn’t expecting any answer, because the answer is ‘She wants nothing’ … ‘What does she want? … Nothing!’ Nothing because she is passive. The only thing man can do is offer the question ‘What could she want, she who wants nothing?’ Or in other words: ‘Without me, what could she want?’ Old Lacan takes up the slogan ‘What does she want?’ when he says, ‘A woman cannot speak of her pleasure.’ Most interesting! It’s all there, a woman cannot, is unable, hasn’t the power. Not to mention ‘speaking’: it’s exactly this that she’s forever deprived of. Unable to speak of pleasure = no pleasure, no desire: power, desire, speaking, pleasure, none of these is for woman. And as a quick reminder of how this works in theoretical discourse, one question: you are aware, of course, that for Freud/Lacan, woman is said to be ‘outside the Symbolic’: outside the Symbolic, that is outside language, the place of the Law, excluded from any possible relationship with culture and the cultural order. And she is outside the Symbolic because she lacks any relation to the phallus, because she does not enjoy what orders masculinity – the castration complex. Woman does not have the advantage of the castration complex – it’s reserved solely for the little boy. The phallus, in Lacanian parlance also called the ‘transcendental signifier,’ transcendental precisely as primary organizer of the structure of subjectivity, is what, for psychoanalysis, inscribes its effects, its effects of castration and resistance to castration and hence the very organization of language, as unconscious relations, and so it is the phallus that is said to constitute the a priori condition of all symbolic functioning. This has important implications as far as the body is concerned: the body is not sexed, does not recognize itself as, say, female or male without having gone through the castration complex. What psychoanalysis points to as defining woman is that she lacks lack. She lacks lack? Curious to put it in so contradictory, so extremely paradoxical, a manner: she lacks lack.44



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The Freudian/Lacanian assumption is that without man [‘the AbsoluteFather’] woman ‘would be indefinite, indefinable, nonsexed, unable to recognize herself: outside the Symbolic’. Pedagogy, as theory and practice of teaching, and the entire philosophical discourse which informs it mediate masculine desire. Like Fanon, Cixous contends that to speak is to speak for the Other and the notion of Being is henceforth bound up with language: ‘we are born into language and language speaks (to) us, dictates its law […] it lays down familial model, lays down its conjugal model’.45 The binary opposition Man/Woman cuts across the gender and racial divides, affecting all the conceptual binaries that structure culture. In Cixous’s words: In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems – everything, that is, that’s spoken, everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language, everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us – it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference posed by cultural discourse as ‘natural,’ the difference between activity and passivity. It always works this way, and the opposition is founded in the couple. A couple posed in opposition, in tension, in conflict …46 The crux of the matter in Black Skin, White Masks is not the couple per se – the tension and opposition inherent within it – but interracial desires in mixed-race relationships. Such desires are not simply phallocentric, they are also marked by the dimension of colour and ethnicity. In Martinique, Fanon shows how colour as a signifier determines the processes of individuation and orders the symbolic functioning of Martinican culture and society. In Nini, for example, castration acquires a different symbolic significance. Phallic envy is posited in terms of colour – the Negro is genital and the black/mulatto woman expresses resentment for the Negro’s blackness and wills his castration: physical castration of the sexual organ and the symbolic excision of blackness. To Freud’s question ‘What does woman want?’, Fanon formulates an answer: the black/mulatto woman wants to whiten her world and her desire to be white smacks off Negrophobia. The language she speaks is white and racist; it annihilates the very being of Negroes. In Nini’s

110 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference language, castration – the symbolic excision of blackness – strikes at their biological reproductive function; it is genocidal and means the disappearance of the Black. In terms reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss, Bergner draws parallels between the incest and miscegenation taboos: on the one hand, the incest taboo regulating the passage into the symbolic and social order institutionalizes the trafficking in women and their oppression; on the other hand, the miscegenation taboo gives white men access to black women but denies black men access to white women.47 ‘Both incest and miscegenation taboos,’ she writes, ‘enforce culturally dictated categories of permitted and prohibited sexual relations.’48 She attributes the objectification of women to phallocentric power relations, promoting the trafficking in women.49 In ‘The Woman of Colour and the White Man’, Fanon is scathing in his critique of Mayotte. However, his critique does not, as Berger claims, really restrict black women’s sexuality and their economic autonomy. Her reading of Fanon is rather selective, as it overlooks the centrality of his critique: Mayotte’s Negrophobia. For Bergner, Mayotte’s submission to racist ideology is ‘perceived’ but not real. In effect, she provides an apology for Mayotte’s racist views: Although Capécia sometimes – but not always – lapses into valorizing whiteness in her aspirations to privilege, her sociosexual behaviour is largely influenced by the economic and sexual politics of a racist, patriarchal society.50 Bergner tells us nothing about the sexual politics of this racist society, the crux of Fanon’s critical inquiry in Black Skin, White Masks. According to Bergner, Fanon’s discussion of mixed-race relationships replicates the Manichaean discourse which produces the binary opposition of black and white, female and male, working-class and well-to-do, sexuality and intellectuality. She writes: ‘In Fanon’s terms Capécia – as a working class woman – can aspire to an unattainable whiteness only by aligning herself with a white man, whereas Veneuse has successfully internalized a white European identity through intellect, acculturation and class privilege. Veneuse’s racial self-alienation is forced upon him by whites who insist that he is different despite his “white” identity.’51



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The crux of the issue for Fanon is not so much whether the black woman can make the same claim to intellectuality as the black man, but whether this claim is alienating if it is expressed in Negrophobic terms. Fanon is explicit in denouncing René Maran as a ‘sham’, for ‘attempt[ing] to make the relations between two races dependent on an organic unhealthiness’.52 Fanon does not present Veneuse as an ‘unraced and ungendered individual’. He warns against extrapolating a universal theory from the specific cases of Veneuse and Mayotte by abstracting their relations from the economy of a racist society which determined their Negrophobic attitudes. ‘Just as there was a touch of fraud,’ writes Fanon, ‘in trying to deduce from the behavior of Nini and Mayotte Capécia a general law of the behavior of the black woman with the white man, there would be a similar lack of objectivity … in trying to extend the attitude of Veneuse to the man of color as such.’53 Fanon chooses to discuss only the specificities of racist discourse which corrupt healthy sexual relations between black and white, men and women. He evidently couches his discussion of these specificities in humanist terms, invoking the gift of love, in order to restore the health of these relations and ultimately their universality. Bergner’s project is twofold: first, she criticizes Bhabha for glossing over Fanon’s elision of gender and for privileging race over gender; second, she also excoriates Fanon for formulating black and white relations in homosocial terms and for ‘commodify[ing] women according to race’.54 In her attempt to explore the ways in which race and gender are mutually constitutive, she reproduces the same hierarchy of differences that she criticizes in Fanon and Bhabha, privileging gender over race. Bergner confuses the objectifying white/male gaze. Thus, in her account of Fanon’s ‘third-person consciousness’, the white gaze interpellating the Negro is used to nuance and complicate feminist film theory definitions of femininity.55 Put crudely, Fanon’s text (Black Skin, White Masks) is deployed to colour these definitions by ‘infus[ing] questions of race into feminist psychoanalysis discourse’.56 Conceived in such terms, however, these definitions and this brand of feminism obfuscate the history which oppresses black women and men. Adding a bit of colour to theory does not really help us grasp the history of colour oppression and slavery, and much less the marginalization and alienation of women of colour.

112 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Family romances While engaging with women and men of colour and their interracial desires, Fanon never addresses the issue of gender parity in patriarchal society. Clearly, his focus is on the interplay of sexuality and racism. The universal grammar he adopts in Black Skin, White Masks (particularly in the introduction to chapter 2 and at the conclusion of chapter 3) is undoubtedly marked by the specificities of gender. In the opening of chapter 2, Fanon – drawing on Sartrean existential phenomenology and Hegelian dialectics – elaborates his approach to the universality of ‘love’ and ‘gift of self’.57 Does this contradiction imply that Fanon’s text is inherently sexist and misogynist? Is his discussion of racial difference at odds with sexual difference? Does Fanon present interracial desires in homoracial terms? It is easy to dismiss Fanon’s narrative as sexist and misogynistic, ignore the broad historical and cultural context which determined his narrative and overlook the intersectionality of colonial, gender and sexual politics. To address these complex questions, it is instructive to focus on the problematic of racism at the core of France’s republican and democratic institutions and its interplay with gender discrimination. As I have noted, the neurosis at the core of Capécia’s and Maran’s narratives is symptomatic of a ‘family romance’58 which harbours deep-seated racism. Misandry (the fear and hate of black men in Mayotte Capécia) and misogyny (the denigration of black women in René Maran) are two sides of the same coin. Arguably, these two interrelating structures of sexist feeling are products of this family romance. In the Freudian family romance, the neurotics disavow their parents in order to better their social standing. This disavowal, nonetheless, does not, as Freud argues, reaffirm the idealized view they hold of their parents and their childhood. It is not her parents Mayotte disowns but the facticity of her father’s colour. She denigrates his and her own blackness and racial origins and the family romance provides her with avenues of flight from her colour and ethnicity. On the face of it, the narrative of Un homme pareil aux autres is at variance with the Freudian family romance. The neurosis is manifestly that of abandonment; it is not the child that rejects the parents but the latter who disown and abandon Jean Veneuse as a child. A closer reading (as, for example, Lynn Hunt’s)



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enables the identification of some elements of the family romance, representing not the individual’s standing in the social order but ‘the collective political unconscious … structured by narratives of family relations’.59 In Fanon’s parlance, these paternalistic and patronizing relations pertain to a colonial discourse which infantilizes and puts the colonized subject in a relation of subservience vis-à-vis a putative mother country. Mayotte discovers that her grandmother was white and the family romance in her particular case, argues Fanon, smacks of Negrophobia. Fanon introduces for the first time the term ‘Manichaeism’ to discuss interracial desire and black-and-white sexuality, specifically analysing Mayotte’s infantile fantasy ‘to avoid falling back into the pit of niggerhood’.60 Her mixed-race mother, almost white but not quite, married a black man, Mayotte’s father; their marriage represents a regression for Moyatte. In this family romance, there is clearly a correlation between kin and skin, her blackness and social standing. Colour and ethnicity are superstructural: one is white above a certain financial level. ‘One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent.’61 In the introduction of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon maintains that Mayotte’s destiny is white.62 From an early age, she makes the conscious choice to marry a white man. As an adolescent, she is infatuated with the Jesuit priest; an ordained figure whose whiteness is the signifier of divine beauty and absolute power. She then has a sexual liaison with a Vichyite soldier, André, with whom she has a son. After the capitulation of Robert and his sailors, André leaves Martinique and ultimately abandons Mayotte. She applies for a travel visa to Guadeloupe to join him, but French officials remind her of her status as a woman of colour and of the illegitimacy of her child. In his description of the love child of Mayotte’s relationship with André, Fanon alludes to Vichy France and its fascism: Meanwhile, André has departed to carry the white message to other Mayottes under other skies: delightful little genes with blue eyes, bicycling the whole length of the chromosome corridor. But, as a good white man, he has left instructions behind him. He is speaking of his and Mayotte’s child: ‘You will bring him up, you

114 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference will tell him about me, you will say, “He was a superior person. You must work hard to be worthy of him.”’ What about dignity? He has no need now to achieve it: it was injected now into the labyrinth of his arteries, entrenched in his little pink fingernails, a solidly rooted, white dignity. And what about the father? This is what Etiemble has to say about him: ‘A fine specimen of his kind; he talked about the family, work, the nation, our good Pétain and our good God, all of which allowed him to make her pregnant according to form. God has made use of us, said the handsome swine, the handsome white man, the handsome officer. After which, under the same God-fearing Pétainist properties, I shove her over to the next man.’63 The subject of Fanon’s criticism is not interracial sexuality per se but the ‘white message’ – the eugenic discourse of the ‘well-born’ from ‘good white stock’ – inseminating Vichy France with fascism. There are many parallels which can be drawn between Capécia’s two works Je suis Martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche. The latter work’s title aptly describes the double-consciousness of the two protagonists: both Mayotte and Issaure are ‘white Negresses’. Like Mayotte, Issaure is a Negrophobe: she admits that she has never slept with a Negro and finds black men disgusting and frightening. Through the same racist prism, she views women of colour as oversexed slaves and regards their sexuality as bestiality. Like Mayotte, Issaure has a child with a white man; treated as a sexual object, she never feels respected by white men. Although she comes to consciousness as an oppressed black, she is ostracized from black Martinicans because of her mixed-race heritage. La Négresse blanche evokes the radicalization of Martinique, that Fanon describes as the proletarianization of the Negro, which coincided with the Vichy occupation of Fort-de-France and the advent of negritude. However, negritude does not in fact displace the terms of the binary opposition. After the Second World War, the white béké and mixed-race elements of Martinique who identify with the white are ostracized. Like Mayotte, Issaure finds herself in a society which imposes on her a choice to be either white or black. Caught betwixt



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and between the two poles of this binary, and held to authenticity, Issaure seeks avenues of escape from the facticity of her blackness and longs to find a country where she can ultimately overcome the stigma of racism and escape the curse of ‘being neither black nor white’.64 Women writers like Mayotte Capécia bucked the trend of negritude as epitomized by Césaire’s poetic ‘return to the native land’. As E.A. Hurley shows, they eschewed the political engagement of the exponents of Négritude, Antillanité and Créolité that challenged Martinique’s cultural accommodation with France through the medium of a committed literature.65 Hurley considers their ‘cultural betrayal’ as transgressive but fails to see the misogyny and misandry at the centre of this racism which consigns Antillean women to marginality in terms of social class. ‘What has been ignored, to date,’ Cheryl Duffus writes, ‘is the importance of the historical context of Capécia’s novels.’66 Both Je suis Martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche are set in a Martinique occupied by Vichy France, and this historical detail is crucial to any analysis of these two works. The blockade of Robert brought about a mutation in Martinican society, a change of attitude, a move away from the idealization of colonial white culture towards an espousal of negritude which had thus far been denigrated.67 The blockade engendered conflict and racial tensions between the Vichyite white sailors and the black Martinicans; both non- and consensual sexual relations were at the source of these conflicts. As Fanon maintains, negritude was a coming-into-consciousness of Martinicans as a result of the occupation and the sailors’ racist behaviour. Duffus proposes that ‘Mayotte does not experience this transformation of value’.68 Although they both refer to the dire economic conditions endured by Martinicans under the Occupation, neither Je suis Martiniquaise nor La Négresse blanche mediate this change of attitude in Martinican society and seem oblivious to the role played by the Robert administration in creating these conditions. Mayotte’s rejection of Horace, her Martinican lover who joins the dissidence to fight fascism, and her sexual liaison with the Vichyite sailor André represent her adherence to the Robert racial hierarchy. Fanon establishes a correlation between Mayotte’s relationship and the Vichy occupation in France and Martinique. She identifies with the racist and fascistic rhetoric of Pétain (le père du

116 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference peuple), whose conception of family and politics ran counter to the republican tradition. Duffus is right to argue that both Je suis Martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche articulate the same textual attitudes that Fanon analyses in Black Skin, White Masks and ‘West Indians and Africans’. Mayotte internalizes the views of a racist society which valorizes whiteness and denigrates blackness, a society which sees itself as white and disavows its blackness. In Black Skin, White Masks and ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon examines Martinicans’ ambivalent views with regards to negritude. By psychoanalysing the neurosis of a society infatuated with whiteness, Fanon problematizes the political relation of Martinique with mainland France. In the post-Second World War period, when the political mood changes from occupation to independence to departmentalization, from a valorization of whiteness to a celebration of negritude, the love child of Mayotte’s failed relationship becomes the symbol of her ostracization. Her son – the offspring of Vichy occupation – comes to epitomize Mayotte’s betrayal of her race. If her son separates her from her black race, he does not yet provide her with a white one. Abandoned by André, Mayotte is also rejected by her own black community. Much like Jean Veneuse, she identifies with the white and French but is spurned by both. This narrative of abandonment, which constitutes a neurosis in the family romance, recalls that of Jean Veneuse. In his discussion of black and white interpersonal relations, Fanon interweaves the themes of language and sexuality to underscore that both are marked by the dimension of ethnicity, history and ideology. He interprets the family romance through a Lacanian perspective, defining the mirror stage as an identification in the fullest sense of psychoanalysis. As has been argued in Chapter 2, in the mirror stage, the child becomes conscious of itself and of its body as a separate entity from its mother. The specular function of the mirror establishes a relation of reciprocity between the image of the child’s body and its reality. It is worth reiterating that the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is akin to Althusserian interpellation: through the speculum – gaze – of the Other, the individual defines itself and loses its abstract characteristics to become subject. In other words, the subject is born with its entry into the symbolic order, and Lacan describes the insertion of the subject



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into this order (or what he calls ‘the order of signifiers’) as a passage from the world of nature to that of culture. This passage from the natural to the conceptual is mediated by the authoritative and legislative power of language – the rules and taboos which govern society ‘in-the-Name-of-the-Father’. Two defining moments in Fanon’s life determined his take on the Lacanian mirror stage. In the Second World War, he was called upon in the name of patriotism to defend the republican ideals of mother France threatened by fascism. However, this patriotism, shaped by the legal fiction of French citizenship, proved to be alienating. In the postwar period, he came to the realization that he was an acculturated Martinican but not French. In Black Skin, White Masks, he invokes his encounter with the racist gaze of the white child. Fanon turns Lacan’s theory on its head: the mirror stage loses its constitutive function; the gaze of the Other shatters the psychological constitution of the Negro. Fanon represents a regression in the process of individuation which Lacan adumbrates in the mirror stage; a regression brought forth by racism degrading the Negro to the level of genitality. The Lacan gaze brings into sharper focus the ‘collective Bovaryism’ (Aimé Césaire’s term) that hypostatizes the acculturation of the black Antilleans.69 Like the colonized countries in Africa, Martinique was divided along colour lines: it was an old colonial society whose history was marked by slavery and genocide, a compartmentalized society in which blacks and mulattos lived side by side with the white békés who held the reins of power and controlled the island’s economy. Black Skin, White Masks psychoanalyses this society which was made to believe in the legal fiction of its Frenchness and the values of French republicanism. Conclusion To grasp Fanon’s take on the Lacanian symbolic order – the authoritative power of language which legislated ‘in-the-Name-of-the-Father’ – it is instructive to review the history of Martinique’s relation with ‘mother’ France. The French Revolution changed the symbolic role of the King in the political imaginary of the French. The Revolution displaced the paternalistic structures of the ancien régime, and henceforward mère patrie (Mother France) was to be governed by the new principles

118 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which curbed the authority of the Father and invested the State with regulatory powers to protect its citizens. A ‘family romance’70 was thus constructed through the symbolic relation, according to which the State (Mother country) guaranteed the inalienable rights of its children and protected them from the tyrannical rule of the Father (King). Citizens were henceforward bound together by the ties of fraternity. It must be said that these new principles, as French history demonstrates, did not endow women, blacks, Jews and other excluded minorities with the same rights as the white French bourgeoisie. The symbolic matrix is crucial in defining Fanon’s relation to the history of slavery and his affiliation to Frenchness. The statue of Joséphine in La Savane Park, Fort-de-France, embodies this history and captures a structure of feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Eight years after the National Convention voted to abolish slavery on 4 February 1794, Napoleon (at the behest of the béké Joséphine) reinstated it in 1802. It is true that the Revolution substituted the tyrannical figure of the Father with the symbolic figure of mère patrie. However, the figure epitomized by Joséphine disavowed her black children. The Revolution displaced, but did not replace, the old colonial structures which kept the Negro shackled by the irons of slavery. It is instructive to note that paternity was denied to the Negro child and that its subjugation was maintained through the filiation it had with a black/slave mother who was owned by the white Master.71 For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the relationship that the Negro slaves had with their colonial mother was paternalistic. As Fanon explains, ‘the white man is not only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary’.72 Hegelianism is not an abstract theory for Fanon but has very real phenomenological implications for the Negro. It is important to bear in mind that Fanon was the grandson of a registered slave and that this lineage was determined by the history of a society which had been ‘enslaved, freed, re-enslaved, colonized, assimilated and “departmentalized”’.73 Fanon’s take on Hegel is historically bound up with the specificities of this context. He attempts to transcend the history of slavery and white colonial genocide, but it was this history that stared him in the face in Black Skin, White Masks. It is simplistic to argue, as Memmi does, that Black Skin, White Masks is the



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autobiography of a neurotic who has disavowed his negritude and Frenchness. Black Skin, White Masks, written as a critique of the republican tradition that failed to deliver on the promise of universal fraternity, is a complaint against racism. In its concluding section, Fanon reminds his readers that he risked his life in the Second World War to uphold this tradition and that he fought for the ideals of universal brotherhood. Yet he felt amputated by white racism. His feeling of bereavement was akin to Jean Veneuse’s complex of abandonment: in this particular family romance Fanon was orphaned, and the feelings of loss were experienced as separation from his mother (country), rejection occasioned by his experience of racism, and disillusionment with his adoptive ‘mother France’. Notes 1 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 17–18. 2 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 36. 3 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 18. 4 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 111 and p. 11. 5 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 124. 6 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 25. 7 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 35–36. 8 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 31–33. 9 L.G. Damas, ‘Hoquet’, in Leopold S. Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948), pp. 15–17. Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 20. 10 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 61. 11 Jean Amrouche, ‘La Culture peut être une mystification’, Vie intellectuelle, VIII–IX, (1952). 12 Jean Amrouche, ‘Colonialism et langage’, a speech given at the ‘Congrès Méditerranéen de la Culture’ (Florence, October 1960), p. 115. 13 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 44. 14 Mayotte Capécia Je suis Martiniquaise (Paris: Corréa, 1948). René Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres (Paris: Editions Arc-en-Ciel, 1947). 15 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 43. 16 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 42. 17 Capécia, Je Suis Martiniquaise, p. 150. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 43. 18 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 44.

120 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 45. 20 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 47. 21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 54. 22 Abdoulaye Sadji, ‘Nini’, Présence Africaine (1947), p. 489. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 57–58. 23 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61. 24 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61. 25 Chidi Ikonné, ‘René Maran, 1887–1960: A Black Francophone Writer between Two Worlds’, Research in African Literatures, 5:1 (Spring 1974) p. 6. 26 René Maran, ‘Hommage à René Maran’, Présence Africaine (1965), p. 139. Cited in Ikonné, ‘René Maran, 1887–1960’, p. 12. 27 Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, pp. 45–46. Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 66. 28 Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, p. 11. Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 64. 29 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 65. 30 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 69. 31 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 69–70. 32 Germaine Guex, La Névrose d’abandon (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1950), p. 13. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 73–74. 33 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 74. 34 Gwen Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks’, PMLA, 110:1 (1995), p. 75. 35 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 76. 36 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 81. 37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 30. 38 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77. 39 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 76. 40 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77. 41 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77. 42 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. 43 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 79. 44 Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, Sign 7:1 (1981), pp. 45–46. 45 Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, p. 45. 46 Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, p. 44. 47 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81. 48 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81. 49 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81. 50 Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 83. 51 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 84.



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52 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 80 53 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 81. 54 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, pp. 84–85. 55 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 85. 56 Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81. 57 In French, the term ‘homme’ is not gender neutral, but Fanon’s point of view is ostensibly masculinist affirming through such a gift manhood (‘virilité’). 58 Freud coins the expression ‘family romance’ to describe the neurosis of the child that ‘becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing.’ Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 222–223. ‘If we examine in detail the commonest of these imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people, we find that these new and aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows today to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again’ (pp. 224–225). In Freudian theory, the family romance is a fantasy about the neurotics’ place in the social order. 59 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. xiii. Drawing on Freudian theory, Hunt argues that the French Revolution expressed the wish of the whole people to get rid of the monarchy as an imagined family by replacing the Father/King with a different parent, the Republic as a political entity. The King represented the entire social order, his execution represented radical mutations: the power embodied in the figure of the King became invested in the Constitution whose legitimacy rested on the sovereignty of the people (p. 3). Hunt raises these perceptive questions: ‘If absolutism had rested on the model of patriarchy authority, then would the destruction of absolutism depend on the destruction of patriarchy, what the French called “la puissance paternelle”? How far should the moderation of paternal authority go? Would the restriction of paternal authority make everyone in the

122 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference political family equal, brother with brother, brother with sister, and children with parents? In other words, what kind of family romance would replace the one dominated by the patriarchal father? If paternalism was to be replaced by a model of fraternity, what were the implications of that new model?’ (p. 5). The Revolution opened up serious debates about the rights of women and other minority groups – ethnic and religious – in the newly established social order. 60 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 47. 61 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 51–52. 62 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 12. 63 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 52. 64 Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36. 65 E. Anthony Hurley, ‘Intersections of Female Identity or Writing the Woman in Two Novels by Mayotte Capécia and Marie MagdeleineCarbet’, The French Review, 70:4 (1997), pp. 575–576. 66 Cheryl Duffus, ‘When One Drop Isn’t Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capécia’, Callaloo, 28:4 (2005), p. 1091. 67 Duffus, ‘When One Drop Isn’t Enough’, p. 1091. 68 Duffus, ‘When One Drop Isn’t Enough’, p. 1094. 69 Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, p. 13. 70 Lynn Hunt uses the term to analyse the conceptual language underpinning the French Revolution. In Monsters and Revolutionaries, Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Françoise Vergès elaborates on Hunt’s notion of the ‘family romance’ to conceptualize the subject positioning of Negro slave in the republican discourse. Taking my cue from Hunt and Vergès, I consider that that the ‘family romance’ narrative is of immense critical suggestiveness in the work of Fanon, hypostatizing not ‘fraternal’ love for the Negro slaves but their infantilization. 71 Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries, pp. 38–39. 72 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138. 73 This is an adaptation of the following citation taken from William F.S. Miles: ‘Kidnapped, Transported, Enslaved. Freed, Re-enslaved, Refreed. Colonized, Decolonized. Assimilated. “Departmentalized”’ in Elections and Ethnicity in French Martinique, A Paradox in Paradise (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), p. 1.

4 The North African syndrome: madness and colonization

Introduction Fanon concludes Black Skin, White Masks with an exclamatory statement: ‘Oh my body make a man that questions!’ This enigmatic statement is at odds with his critique: while interrogating, he still espouses an assimilationist discourse which is at the origin of the Negro’s acculturation and alienation. However, in his article ‘The North African Syndrome’ (1952) and in his critical appraisal of the School of Algiers of psychiatry in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), he refutes France’s assimilationist policies, policies which impacted negatively on Algerian society, on its economy and its mental health. As we shall see in Chapter 5, not only did they lead to the expropriation, marginalization and acculturation of the Algerian people, they also precipitated the breakdown of their social structures and culminated in the emergence of a lumpenproletariat. Arguably, madness and what Fanon dubs the ‘North African syndrome’ were nothing but manifestations of colonial assimilation and the attendant violence to which it gave rise as it brought about the pulverization of traditional society. In this chapter, I will focus my attention on Fanon’s critique of the institutions of medicine and psychiatry and their complicity with colonialism in ‘The North African Syndrome’, ‘Medicine and Colonialism’ (1959) and ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ (1961). These three texts overlap and intersect; it is therefore very difficult to treat them as discreet articles. However, I will engage with them chronologically, taking into account their date of publication. The first two texts

124 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference engage with medicine and colonialism, the third with colonialism and psychiatry. In ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, as he brings into focus the colonized Algerians’ fear and rejection of Western medicine, Fanon exposes the medical establishment’s collusion with the army in the Algerian War. From the outset, he asserts that Western medical science was an integral part of colonial oppression, but he does not elaborate on how ‘the French medical service in Algeria could not be separated from French colonialism’.1 There are glaring gaps in his analysis, as he dwells on the complicity of the medical establishment with the army during the Algerian War and ignores the history of this complicity. It is my intention to explore these lacunae by examining a body of works at the intersections of medical science, ethnology, philology and education. Medicine was introduced into Algeria with the colonial conquest and flourished at a time when racial theory reached its apogee. It is against this development that I will endeavour to read Fanon’s ‘Medicine and Colonialism’. To start with, and to nuance his critique of medicine’s implication with colonialism, I examine the work of Dr Eugène Bodichon, as it epitomizes the racism that coloured medical discourses. As we will see over the course of this chapter, Bodichon represents a structure of racist feelings shared by the laissez-faire economist and politician Yves Guyot, the philosopher Alfred Fouillée, the polymath Gustave Le Bon and the sinologist Léopold de Saussure. Consideration will thereafter be given to Fanon’s research into the condition of North African immigrants in Lyon and his diagnosis of the ‘North African syndrome’. Significantly, the influence of Professor François Tosquelles is perceptible in the lines of his argument that take into account the relationship between mental health and the historical and cultural discourses which determine mental illness. Fanon throws into sharp relief the involvement of medicine with the corporate institution which colonized Algeria. Finally, I will focus on ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’, the fifth and final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. This chapter is rather disjointed, consisting of the case studies Fanon carried out at the height of the Algerian War when he was working at the Blida-Joinville Hospital, and also of his critique of the School of Algiers of psychiatry. The context of his material spans the history of Algeria’s colonization and decolonization. I will situate Fanon’s case



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studies within the historical and political context of the Algerian War. I will also interpret his critical intervention within a broader perspective, engaging with Moreau, Boigey and Porot. As I will demonstrate, there is convergence between psychiatric and medical doctors such as Baudens, Bodichon and Warnier. A seamless line connects their colonial stereotypical views with Orientalizing trends in literature, philology and anthropology. Patricia Lorcin documents the very close relationship between scholars, academics and military personnel, as well as the key role played by the 176 surgeons who accompanied the army which conquered Algeria in 1830.2 To appreciate Fanon’s critical appraisal of the duplicitous relationship the medical establishment had with colonialism in ‘The North African Syndrome’ and ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, l have chosen to concentrate on the intersectionality of the writings of Dr Bodichon with (ethno)psychiatry, education, politics and the impact medicine had in shaping France’s colonial policies. My project is twofold: in the first instance, I will analyse his views on assimilation, shedding light not only on the contradictions inherent within the universalist rhetoric used to legitimate colonialism but also on the racist discourse that coloured the writings of Alfred Fouillée, Gustave Le Bon and Léopold de Saussure; second, I will show how these views are identical to those held by alienalists such as Moreau, Boigey and Porot. Medicine, colonialism and ethnology In Relations de l’expédition de Constantine, Dr Baudens provides a taxonomy of Algerian society classifying its ethnicities into five distinct groupings and sketches a negative portrait of the Arab as lazy, thieving and violent. In Considérations sur l’Algérie, Bodichon establishes a correlation between the physiognomy of Arabs and their moral characteristics. Like Baudens, he asserts that Arabs are lazy and indulge in vices such as thieving and rape; these vices are, in his view, determined by climactic and hereditary factors. As military personnel and settlers encountered epidemics and difficulties in acclimatizing, doctors like Baudens, Bodichon and Warnier were mobilized to determine the viability of the colonial project. For Bodichon, climate is an important element in defining race, and the idea of race is inextricably linked to

126 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference moral hygiene.3 He clearly establishes a link between race and disease and the containment of disease to maintain not only an epidemiological cordon sanitaire between Europeans and Arabs but also a hierarchy subordinating inferior races to the agents of progress and civilization. According to Bodichon, humanity comprises several species which in their development follow the laws of evolutionary biology. Creation of the races, he contends, came at different moments: the ‘inferior’ and ‘disinherited’ races were created first; the later ones were more ‘developed’, ‘superior’ and ‘privileged’.4 In his polygenist theorizing, differences are not just biological but the product of physical and moral organization which shapes the notion of civilization; the evolution of human species progresses from ‘simplicity’ to ‘complexity’, from a state of ‘imperfection’ to ‘perfection’.5 Drawing on the ideas of social Darwinism, he affirms that early primitive races form a link in the evolutionary chain between the chimpanzee and humankind.6 Creation is therefore an evolution from animality to humanity, and without the white races, he maintains, the other races would remain in a primitive state, hostile to one another and without common human ties.7 Bodichon, envisaging the disappearance of inferior races through the work of miscegenation, maintains that superior and privileged races alone make history in their encounter with primitive races by assimilating them.8 He presents white and other races in binary terms, contrasting the rationality of the former to the irrationality of the latter.9 He acknowledges only to deprecate the brown races’ contribution to the development of the humanities. He claims that the brown races advanced the arts, poetry, literature, theology and metaphysics, while the white ones were pioneers in the privileged fields of sciences, positivism, mathematics, cosmology and ethics, and also developed universal humanism and the institutions of democratic government.10 He hails the North for producing philosophers, thinkers and researchers and disparages the South for indulging in the work of fantasy: the North was governed by rationality and discursive reason, the South was driven by instincts and desire, by fiction and fanciful imagination. The development of civilization, contends Bodichon, took two opposing directions: one moving from the South to the North was led by the brown races and delivered to the West metaphysics, the occult and works of the imagination; the other, led by white races, travelled



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from the North to the South, bringing in its train the development of rationality, positivism and universality to the rest of humanity, enlightening the underprivileged and disinherited races.11 He establishes a hierarchical relation subordinating the animal to the human, the South to the North, peoples of colour to the white races. He supplements cultural Darwinism with utilitarianism to justify the subjugation of peoples of colour for ‘the greater good of humanity’. Colonialism, avers Bodichon, acted legitimately to reach its final end: ‘democracy’ and the advent of the métis race.12 Bodichon contends that the ‘inferiority’ of brown and Negro – or what he calls ‘disinherited’ – races is determined by their cerebral constitution and by their environment.13 It is worth reiterating that, for Bodichon, climate is a factor in determining the destiny of mankind and that both the brown races and their environment should be colonized, dominated and transformed to enable racial crossovers and intermixing (métissage), and to accomplish one of the key aims of creation: universal humanity governed by the ideals enshrined in French democratic institutions.14 Bodichon – a eugenicist avant la lettre – argues for the annihilation of ‘inferior races’ he considers useless and harmful to the progress and perfection of humanity. He envisages the development of the human race through the work of miscegenation; in his proto-fascistic pronouncements, he maintains that anthropological progress will culminate in the destruction of racial difference and in the unity of races.15 He announces that the future of North Africa will belong to white Europeans, and proposes a programme of forestation to overcome the obstacle which the desert poses to Europeanization and to European settlements.16 Bodichon stresses that colonialism and human progress go hand in hand and that this progress is embodied in France and its social, cultural and political institutions.17 His idea of progress means the annihilation of the colonized Algerians via miscegenation and effectively gives the go-ahead to Dr Warnier to expropriate them and realize the Europeanization of Algeria by promoting colonial settlements. Bodichon is a republican and democrat at home, a colonialist and pro-fascist in the colony. He embodies the contradictions of a republican France which became a colonial power. In Chapter 5, I will attempt to explode these contradictions; contradictions which later become

128 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference central to the political debate over France’s policies as these moved away from the doctrine of colonial ‘assimilation’ to ‘association’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At first glance, his idea of anthropological progress culminating in miscegenation is at variance with the anti-assimilationist views of Alfred Fouillée, Gustave Le Bon and Léopold de Saussure. On closer inspection, however, it is in accordance with such views, expressing the same structure of racist feelings and forming a coherent corpus of writings which informed late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnology. An examination of this corpus is beyond the scope of my study. Before engaging with the contradictions inherent within the universalizing rhetoric of France’s assimilationist doctrine, it suffices to note that these racist feelings were at the intersection of medicine, psychology, education, anthropology and philology. Elaborating on the doctrine of assimilation, in Lettres sur la politique coloniale, Yves Guyot writes: In France, we confuse assimilation and uniformity. We are still in the old Platonic idea of the type: and we want to fashion all the people on our own, as if we had reached absolute perfection, and as if all the French were alike.18 Assimilation was bound up with France’s national myths and with the putative universality of its culture and political institutions. Its history goes back to the Enlightenment and its celebration of the indivisibility of the natural rights of the individual, rights that became enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In its first article, the Declaration stipulates that ‘men are born and live free and equal in rights’. In 1794, the National Convention abolished slavery in France and all its territories. The January 1798 Law on the constitutional organization of the colonies was part of a legislative programme which aimed to promote these rights in the colonies since they were considered constitutionally and administratively an extension of French territory.19 The constitution of 22 Frimaire adopted in December 1799 declared this law null and void and instituted separate laws regulating the colonies. Three years after the 18th Brumaire coup, in May 1802, Bonaparte reinstated slavery. ‘The Charter of 1814 and that of 1830,’ Betts remarks, ‘scarcely changed the underlying premises of the



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Napoleonic program, the few colonies remaining under French control being governed generally by royal ordinances and separate laws.’20 There was a clear disjunction between the universality of the philosophical discourse on human rights – on the issue of the inalienability of the natural rights of the individual – and the particularity of France’s colonial policies which worked to alienate the colonized subject. The French Revolution was influenced by the Enlightenment, but its course was also motivated by economic and political factors. Marx, arguably, the most prominent analyst of the French Revolution, shows how ideology worked to obscure the contradictions inherent within its universalistic outlook serving the interests of the dominant class. However, colonialism, which developed in tandem with the Revolution, did not seek to hide the contradictions between revolutionary universalistic rhetoric and the workings of a rampant industrial capitalism which endeavoured to exploit and colonize. Capitalist exploitation manifested itself not only in colonialism overseas, but also in the administrative centralization and linguistic unification which aimed at suppressing indigenous cultures overseas and regional patois in mainland France. The Revolution did not represent a paradigm shift that broke clearly with the past, rather it represented its crowning moment. France had, Betts explains, ‘a penchant for administrative centralization. Already an active force during the ancien régime, as Tocqueville has admirably shown, centralization increased with the Great Revolution when it seemed politically desirable as a means by which to stave off the reactionary forces of provincialism.’21 The drive for centralization was motivated by the necessity of establishing a market economy. Regionalism was not conducive to capitalism and the imposition of French as a universal language sounded the death knell for regional dialects. Centralization paradoxically went hand in hand with imperialist expansion and linguistic unification, both of which presented a threat to regional patois and indigenous cultures. The revolutionary Abbé Grégoire had no qualms about discounting regional dialects when he affirmed that French alone could shape a community of free people. As a matter of fact, the French language did not create such a community, but it surreptitiously carried out the function of ideology and was also used as an instrument of overt colonialism. It brought about centralization, ideologically cementing France and its colonial empire. In short:

130 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference the French language consolidated France’s capitalist economy and her colonialist project. Assimilation was used as a stratagem to legitimize French colonialism. As I will show over the course of Chapter 5, its contradictions were at the core of the sénatus-consulte. In his letter to Pélissier, one of the most ruthless generals who ‘pacified’ Algeria, Napoleon III announced the idea of establishing the ‘Royaume arabe’ to demonstrate that France’s political motives were not to exploit the native Algerians but rather to bring the benefits of civilization to them. On the pretext of indexing indigenous property, the sénatus-consulte of 1863 expropriated the colonized Algerians. As for the sénatus-consulte of 1865, it stipulated that they could naturalize provided they relinquish their Islamic status. These two laws effectively assimilated an Algeria voided of its subjects and their history. It is important to underscore that naturalization amounted to nothing: the Arabs and Berbers were excluded from the corps legislatives in 1871, a year after the promulgation of the Crémieux Decree which naturalized the Algerian Jews. Two pointers help to explain the ambivalence at the core of the theory of assimilation and the contradictions inherent within universalism: first, universalism was ideological in as much as it was determined by an emergent economy which aimed to serve the interests of a specific class in the name of an abstract humanity. Second, universalism was colonial. Sartre explains how the colonial system developed with emergent imperialist capitalism. If Enlightenment philosophers celebrated the indivisibility of the rights of the individual – rights that became enshrined in the constitution of the Republic – social Darwinism appeared in the mid-nineteenth century to undermine these rights. Let us now turn our attention to Fouillée, Le Bon and de Saussure, who deploy a pseudo-scientific discourse to jettison the Enlightenment project and its discursive reason, to legitimize the colonial project morally and to argue against the assimilation of the colonized people. In Psychologie du peuple français, Alfred Fouillée argues that universality was an integral component of France’s cultural DNA: it had evolved from Latinity and Christianity to shape fraternal equality, an ideal that became one of the cornerstones of Enlightenment thinking and French spiritual life, law and politics. ‘Order’, ‘logic’ and ‘justice’ were intrinsic parts of what constituted Frenchness; the particularity



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of French culture represented the very universality that justified France’s colonial endeavour and civilizing mission.22 Put at the service of this mission, universality was used as an alibi to provide moral justification for the collusion of humanism with colonialism. Echoing Ernest Renan in De l’origine du langage, Fouillée maintains that the march of humanity is not even in all its parts, which means there are inequalities between the races; but these inequalities could be overcome by education and miscegenation. However, he warns that education will be a slow process and cannot guarantee success. He disapproves of miscegenation, arguing that interracial marriages can have pernicious consequences.23 Like Fouillée, Gustave Le Bon rejects the Enlightenment project and the assimilationist doctrine. Just as Bodichon in De l’humanité (1866), Le Bon examines the origin of creation and the development of the human species in his first book entitled L’Homme et les sociétés, leurs origins et leur histoire (1881). In Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples (1894), he maintains that ‘race’ is a stable construct which determines the moral and intellect traits of a given individual.24 According to Le Bon, these traits are fixed and indelible, and therefore cannot be altered by education. Drawing on Le Bon’s later book, Léopold de Saussure affirms that heredity plays a preponderant role in the evolution of people and that the acquisition of common mental characteristics defines what he calls ‘psychological race’.25 For de Saussure, language and race are inextricably linked; language is the signifier – the exterior manifestation – of mental characteristics which are inherently racialized. Like Le Bon, de Saussure conceives of ‘national character’ or ‘mentality’ in essentialist terms as a universal structure that is impervious to the vicissitudes of history. In his article ‘Language and Psychological Race’, John E. Joseph compares the two de Saussure brothers, drawing a parallel ‘between Léopold’s ideas about “psychological race”, derived from Le Bon’s “historical race” and Ferdinand’s notion la langue’.26 Joseph argues that the idea of ‘race’ in Le Bon and Léopold is coterminous with Ferdinand’s definition of language as a signifying system, as a structure having abstract rules and conventions pre-existing its individual users. Joseph quickly goes on to establish a concordance between Ferdinand’s parole and the individual users of language in Léopold and Le Bon. In Ferdinand, the notion of parole describes the

132 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference usage of language as spoken or written in everyday culture and therefore determined by the diachronic movement of history, whereas in Léopold’s concept of ‘psychological race’ or Le Bon’s concept of ‘historical race’, the individual users’ utterances (parole) are as fixed and unchanging as Ferdinand’s langue. The parallel Joseph draws between the Saussure brothers is rather misleading. Ferdinand’s terms langue and parole do not really elucidate the ethnocentrism at the core of Le Bon’s and Léopold’s speculative framework. However, Ferdinand’s couplet signifier/ signified could help us better grasp the hierarchical couplings governing the binary opposition at work: non-European/European, black/white, inferior/superior, colonized/colonizer, other/same and so on. As has been noted, in Le Bon’s and Léopold’s xenophobic theorizing, ‘race’ determines both language as a signifying system and its individual users; the appropriation of (French) language by non-European people of colour creates a diremption between the French ‘national character’ and cultural institutions as a signified on the one hand and language which is nothing but the outer signifier of this character and these institutions on the other. Put simply, Le Bon and Léopold consider this character and these institutions as having an ‘inside’ core that is essentially homogenous and an ‘outside’ – that is, a fixed language which is impervious to the vicissitudes of history and racial and ethnic difference. Léopold is therefore adamant that the natives must be allowed to evolve within the confines of their culture and that imposing on them French can only lead to superficial assimilation. ‘[T]he frog can never become the equal of the ox’, writes de Saussure, dismissing assimilation as a utopian project because of the mental make-up of the colonized natives.27 To all intents and purposes, Léopold prefigures the debate in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks but takes a racist stance. Echoing Le Bon, he contends that education might impart the French language to a Negro but this sort of assimilation is a sham. Le Bon describes it as a sort of ‘varnish’ having no impact on the mental constitution of the Negro.28 Simply put, Léopold, as well as Le Bon, warns against the ‘Frenchification’ of inferior races, and argue against the pernicious effects of assimilation on France’s colonial policies – policies that brought about ‘the disorganization, financial deficits and the lowering of morality’.29 He bemoans ‘this sterile and costly attempt at mental assimilation’.30



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He is of the view that inferior races – that is, those endowed with what Lévy-Bruhl labels ‘pre-logical mentality’ – do not have the same mental and psychological constitution as white Europeans. He dismisses the universality of humankind and the principles of equality as an empty abstraction. At the origin of Léopold’s rejection of France’s assimilationalist policies – always proposed but never promulgated by the colonial administration – is the fear of miscegenation. The same fear haunts Bodichon, for whom ‘assimilation’ means the total annihilation of cultural difference and ‘miscegenation’ is tantamount to genocide. As he puts it brutally and without any moral scruples in Revue de l’Orient: Without violating the laws of morality, we will be able to fight our African enemies with powder and iron joined to famine, intestinal divisions, war, alcohol, corruption and disorganization.31 In Bodichon, Le Bon and de Saussure, the notion of racial intermixing is impregnated with racism. As we saw in Chapter 3, Fanon provides a different perspective on the issue of miscegenation and an acerbic critique of the nefarious effects of assimilation on the Antilleans in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon describes the ‘varnish’ of assimilation as an ‘artifact’ – better still as a mask – and shows how the Negro internalizes the racial ideology inherent within the discourse of assimilation and reproduces white Negrophobia in language and sexual relations. With the figure of Bodichon, I have started to outline an interpretative context for Fanon’s ‘Medicine and Colonialism’. After having taken a long detour, let me now turn to Fanon’s text. As has been noted, Fanon focuses on the ambivalent relationship of the colonized native vis-à-vis Western medicine and the way in which this medicine became complicit in the actions of the army during the Algerian War. He intimates that this complicity has a long history harking back to the conquest of Algeria. In Affrontments culturels en Algérie au XIXe siècle, Yvonne Turin shows how medicine, just like education, was used as an instrument of colonization.32 A number of medical doctors recruited in the colonial army in the nineteenth century expressed an Orientalizing attitude vis-à-vis the colonized Algerians. Overt racism marked a medical

134 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference discourse that utilized the objectivity of biology to affirm the inferiority of the natives. Medical doctors, in their attempt to establish a correction between soil, climate and vegetation, found themselves dabbling in ethnography and acted as special advisors to the colonial administration and army. These military doctors were cognizant of their political role in the promotion of Western hygiene and French culture; from then on, the chief task of medicine was to supplant the witch-doctor with learned doctors schooled in Western medicine. As Alphone Bertherand, founder of the Gazette Médicale de l’Algérie and head of the Medical School of Algiers, declared loudly in Orientalizing terms, the role of his fellow doctors in Algeria was to claim the honour of restoring among Algerians an antiquated medicine which persisted throughout the darkness of the Middle Ages and which their ancestors bequeathed to the West.33 Bertherand affirms that medicine must play its part in the civilizing mission of Algeria’s degraded people and in the conquest of its ‘infidel’ and ‘barbarian soil’. In Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, Émile Bertherand – the brother of Alphone – presents the colonization of Algeria not only as a military conquest, but also as a moral crusade against ‘prejudice’, ‘ignorance’ and material and intellectual poverty. He concurs with General Bugeaud’s view that France must endeavour to assimilate the Arabs by gradually modifying their traditions. Assimilation meant colonial governance and administration. Bertherand, representing the official political discourse, maintains that medicine can provide a key role in the ‘great civilizational work’ of French colonialism.34 In the 1845 Congrès medical, the Minister of Education affirmed that France relies on the dedication and professionalism of medical doctors in Algeria and on their moral influence in consolidating French colonial domination in Africa.35 During his visit to the Hôpital du Dey, 4 July 1846, the same minister commended military doctors for the important role they played in the colonization of Algeria. In February 1838, Doctors Méardi, Trolliet and Bodichon provided free healthcare to the natives at the Hôpital Caratine. Founded in 1844, the Bureaux Arabes also provided medical care.36 In 1847, the Ministry of War stipulated that the natives would receive free medical care. Medicine was deployed by the Ministry of War as a tool in the colonization of Algeria. Bertherand considers medicine as one of the crucial instruments of France’s civilizing mission, an instrument which



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has multiple functions – political, humanitarian and scientific. In his parlance, medicine is not just the ‘art of healing’, but also a mediating agency reconciling two peoples – the colonizer and the colonized. ‘[The doctor],’ writes Bertherand, ‘draws public attention to the wonders of a useful and humanitarian science above all, and will be the most sensitive missionary of civilization.’37 He considers that medicine has a dual role, offering to the natives ‘the most beautiful religious sentiments’ – namely the feelings of ‘fraternity’ and ‘solidarity’ – while dealing silently ‘the harshest blow to [their] superstitious and absurd beliefs’.38 ‘In short,’ he concludes, ‘the intervention of medicine will have the immediate and certain effect of mitigating [France’s] hateful domination and of being a clear proof of [its] intellectual and moral superiority.’39 Clearly, Bertherand advocates a ‘medicine of propaganda’ which he presents at the forefront of civil-state administration, not only ensuring public hygiene but also acting as an ideological instrument of colonization.40 It is not by forcibly imposing its rules but instead by improving the health and well-being of the colonized individual that France will ensure its cultural domination.41 In Bertherand’s schema, to fulfil its functions, medicine must situate itself at the intersection of an ethnology and an anthropology involved in the studies of the colonized’s customs, traditions and languages.42 Military doctors were at the service of France in the guise of its colonial army and administration. In ‘Médicine et colonization en Algérie au XIXe siècle’, Jacques Léonard points out that they did not come to Algeria as ‘philanthropists’ but were part of the corporate institution which colonized it, and that if they inoculated Arab children it was primarily with a view to protecting French settlers from infectious diseases and ensuring that the Algerian climate and hygiene were favourable to their political existence. As Fanon observes, doctors were part of the corporate institution that installed the colonial system in Algeria. Baudens participated in the conquest of Algeria in 1830 and served in the African army for the best part of a decade. Dr Auguste Warnier, a military surgeon, arrived in Algeria two years after its colonization. In the 1860s, he abandoned Saint-Simonianism and left the army to devote himself to politics, working as a colonial administrator. Like Baudens and Bodichon,

136 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference he used racial arguments to legitimize land expropriation and colonial settlements.43 Implicitly referring to Warnier (the prime mover in passing the 1873 bill which led to the expropriation of the native Algerians) and describing medicine as the hobby horse of colonial landowners in Algeria, Fanon writes: Colonial society is a mobile society, poorly structured, and the European, even when he is a technician, always assumes a certain degree of polyvalence. In the heart of every European in the colonies there slumbers a man of energy, a pioneer, an adventurer. Not even the civil servant transferred for two years to a colonial territory fails to feel himself psychologically changed in certain respects. The European individual in Algeria does not take his place in a structured and relatively stable society […] The differences between craftsmen, civil servants, workers, and professionals are poorly defined. Every doctor has his vineyards and the lawyer busies himself with his rice fields as passionately as any settler. The doctor is not socially defined by the exercise of his profession alone. He is likewise the owner of mills, wine cellars, or orange groves, and he coyly speaks of his medicine as simply a supplementary source of income.44 Unlike doctors in mainland France who left the land to take up positions in ‘the economic sector defined by [their] profession’, doctors in colonial Algeria were rooted to the land. Fanon is keen to emphasize that, in order to maintain their privileges, doctors acted in the colonial conquest as ‘pioneers’ or rather as ‘cowboys’, and deployed their knowledge of medical science as an instrument of torture during the Algerian War. Medical technology was not neutral: it was used as a means to an end in the justification of French colonialism. In ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, Fanon indicts the medical establishment for its collusion with the army. ‘The colonized,’ he writes, ‘perceive[d] the doctor, the engineer, the schoolteacher, the policeman, the rural constable, through the haze of an almost organic confusion.’45 In his rounds to the douar, the doctor was always accompanied by the police and military personnel. Fanon demystifies the benevolent character of the physician in colonial



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society, contending that medicine was no longer considered just a technique for healing humanity, but also an instrument of coloniality. He affirms that the doctor was a colonial figure – ‘a member of a dominant society and enjoying in Algeria the benefits of an incomparably higher standard of living than that of his metropolitan colleague’.46 Alluding to Warnier, Fanon maintains that the doctor belonged to the same stratum of people as the police, the caïd47 and the notable,48 that he was first and foremost a settler, and that ‘in centres of colonization [he was] nearly always a landowner as well’.49 Medical technology, Fanon argues, was deployed as an instrument of domination and exploitation. He regards the patient/doctor relationship as an extension of the power relationship involving European settlers and native Algerians. In this dynamic, he affirms that the colonized were made to feel that they were ‘prisoner[s] of the entire system, and that the medical service in Algeria could not be separated from colonialism’.50 Implicitly, he denounces the historical complicity of the medical institution in the colonization of Algeria and explicitly accuses it of its involvement in the Algerian War. He deplores the fact that doctors and chemists were made to report wounded combatants to the local authorities.51 More significantly, he castigates the medical profession for providing an alibi for the practice of torture.52 In BlidaJoinville, he came to the realization that the psychiatric institution could not help the patient because: first, it was complicit in the colonial project; and second, madness was the sickness of colonialism. In his letter to Robert Lacoste, Fanon explains that he resigned from his job because psychiatry was no longer the art of healing but had become implicated in the suffering of the patient. The North African syndrome and communal therapy When Fanon returned to Martinique in February 1952, he became a member of the Ordre des Médecins de la Martinique which allowed him to practise medicine in Le Vauclin. The French government, undertaking to eradicate epidemics such as tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, malnutrition and so on, put in place a voucher scheme providing free medical assistance (AMG) for the deprived Martinicans.53 His medical practice in Le Vauclin was short lived: the scheme was open to abuse

138 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference and corruption, which disillusioned him, and after a period of two months he left Martinique. No soon did Fanon return to France then he applied for an internship at the Saint-Alban Hospital. The Occupation was experienced as a sort of asylum, incarcerating individual and national freedoms. The liberation of occupied France went hand in hand with the liberation of the asylum. As David Macey remarks, Paul Balvet and Nicole Guillet spearheaded the psychiatric revolution which began with the Resistance.54 The reforms undertaken by Tosquelles to disalienate the asylum were inscribed within a larger liberationist project. At Saint Albans, the intern Fanon joined the team of Tosquelles, the exponent of thérapeutique institutionnelle (communal therapy), and worked with him until 1953.55 As a veteran of the Second World War, Fanon endorsed the views of these Resistance fighters. In the BlidaJoinville Hospital, he not only adopted Tosquelles’s communal therapy in his treatment of the patients, but also appropriated some of Belvet’s and Guillet’s political views by coming to view colonialism as the incarceration and depersonalization of the individual and by providing a sanctuary there for Algerian freedom fighters. Fanon, like Tosquelles, criticized psychiatry for incarcerating and ‘alienating’ patients. The asylum did not help them recover and reintegrate into society. On the contrary, it aggravated their condition and perpetuated their marginalization. The question was not just to remove the subject of madness from the asylum to a hospital, but to reshape the latter in the image of the community.56 While it helped to ease the problem of overcrowding and therefore overcome the lack of resources available, partial hospitalization enabled them to retain the sense of self and dignity denied to them in the asylum. One of Fanon’s chief aims was to shift the emphasis from the asylum to hospitalization, from incarceration to treatment, from cure to rehabilitating the patients in society. Fanon, a Foucauldian avant la lettre, did not subscribe to the practice of incarcerating the subject of madness. For some critics, Fanon diverged from Tosquelles’s communal therapy in his experiment of day hospitalization – carried out at the psychiatric hospital of Manouba in Tunis after his expulsion from Algeria – but for others, he continued the innovative work he started in Blida-Joinville by setting up the Centre Neuropsychiatrique de Jour de Tunis.57 In collaboration with Charles Geronimi, he worked on day-care treatment



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to maintain the link between the asylum and the outside world, a link which he considered significant in rehabilitating and reinstating the patient within the community. More significantly, day-care treatment protected them from the dehumanizing and degrading effects of longterm hospitalization in the asylum. With day hospitalization, the patients could attend treatment for the day and then return home to resume their family life, which could protect them from the loneliness that the institution would otherwise impose on them. Day hospitalization maintained the bond between the patients and the family which was so important to North African society. In 1952, while still in residence, Fanon published ‘The North African Syndrome’ in Esprit. The article clearly shows that prior to his appointment as a chef de service, he had an interest in Algeria. The influence of Tosquelles is discernible in the lines of his argument. The article also shows that he was attentive to Algeria’s history and politics, and that he was cognizant of the racism and colonial oppression endured by its people. His interest in politics before going to Algeria is in evidence, demystifying the view that Algeria radicalized him. ‘The North African Syndrome’ is an incisive critique of racism in society generally; more specifically it provides an appraisal of the medical establishment, throwing into sharp relief its failure to comprehend the North African patient and to take into account the factors that gave rise to this syndrome. This failure is symptomatic of the racism to which the North African immigrants were subjected in mainland France. After the measures taken by the Popular Front to restrict immigration from North Africa, the reconstruction period in France saw the number of immigrants swell not only in Lyon but all over the country. Criminality and violence were allegedly rife within the Algerian immigrant community,58 largely made up of single men that lived in substandard conditions; it was in the Lyon hospital that Fanon encountered patients suffering from what he diagnoses as the ‘North African syndrome’. This syndrome, contends Fanon, challenges the axiomatic thinking in medical discourse that pain comes from a lesion, and that once the right diagnosis is made cure becomes possible. The pain experienced by the patients, albeit psychosomatic, is not feigned: it is a manifestation of a tormented existence; it is occasioned by their exploitation and

140 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference cultural dislocation, as well as by the tissue of negative stereotypes that inflict them in their body and soul. For Fanon, it is not just a question of diagnosing the symptoms but of removing these patients from an insufferable situation. Like Tosquelles, Fanon practises a type of psychiatry which takes into account the historical and sociocultural determinants of illness and pain. The originality of his work lies in the fact that he establishes a conceptual relationship between psychiatry and politics, between the integrity of the mind and the health of the body on the one hand, and the socio-cultural life of the patient on the other: in short, a link between the biological, the social, the cultural and the historical. Fanon is adamant that therapy aims to restore the integrity of the individual flagrantly undermined by colonialism. It is convenient for Françoise Vergès to imagine Fanon entering the wards of Blida-Joinville, donning his white coat, walking with the authority of a chef de service, freeing the wretched from their chains.59 This gesture takes on a symbolic significance considering the fact that Fanon was the descendent of a registered slave.60 Did Fanon return to North Africa in order to challenge and dismantle the ‘hierarchical cosmopolitanism’ he experienced while serving in the Second World War? His critique of the School of Algiers aptly demonstrates this intention. It was a commonplace practice in Blida-Joinville to use sedatives, put patients in straitjackets or chain them.61 When Fanon arrived in the hospital, he ordered his nurses to release his patients from their chains. Algeria was a segregated society and the lines of demarcation between natives and Europeans were determined not solely by economic factors but also by the facticity of race and ethnicity. As Fanon points out in The Wretched of the Earth, race was one of the factors which governed the Manichaean economy of this divided and compartmentalized society. Blida-Joinville Hospital reflected this economy. Racial discrimination was a defining characteristic of this society and the hospital was not immune from the practice: the native Algerians and Europeans were kept separate.62 When Fanon started work he abolished this sort of discrimination. He implemented instead a different sort of segregation, one which was based not on the patients’ ethnic and racial origins but on their aggressiveness: those who presented a threat to themselves or to others were kept in closed wards, non-violent



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patients in open wards.63 Each section was divided into small living and working groups and the therapeutic environment consisted ultimately in helping the patients move from closed to open wards and from the asylum to society. In Blida-Joinville, Fanon put into practice the theory and experience he acquired in Saint Alban: he adopted an approach which humanized care by taking into account the totality of the lived experience of the patients. Like Tosquelles, he believed in psychiatry as a practice based on an anthropological definition of the subject as a totality composed of the biological, the sociological, the historical and the psychological.64 Communal therapy works to ‘disalienate’ the patients in the clinical and social sense of the terms, by facilitating their entry into the symbolic exchange as they become active participants in society.65 This sort of psychotherapy takes an approach that considers the social and cultural habitus of the patient. As in Saint-Alban, he encouraged doctors to work in teams of two or three with groups of ten to twelve patients living and working together. Like Tosquelles, he organized the ward in such a way as to reproduce quotidian cultural practices. In this therapeutic environment, he maintained a link between the hospital and society by recreating cultural spaces and activities corresponding with those in the outside world: he set up a café and a cinema; he created a football pitch and encouraged patients to contribute to the publication of the weekly newspaper Notre Journal. Woodwork, needlework, gardening, entertainment and sport and the celebration of religious holidays brought some normalcy, a measure of ordinariness and balance to the daily life of the patients within the institution. The changes proved beneficial for European patients and helped them recover. Notre Journal provided a useful platform for the discussion of therapy work undertaken by the staff, and the patients’ contributions made therapy work enabling and very rewarding. However, it became apparent that the changes Fanon implemented did not achieve the desired outcome with male Algerian patients. In ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, an article written in collaboration with Azoulay and published in L’information psychiatrie in 1954, Fanon provides an appraisal of the Blida-Joinville experiment. Fanon and Jacques Azoulay came to the realization that the therapeutic environment did not take into account the background of

142 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference their North African patients. In fact, this environment replicated their marginalization and exclusion in colonial society. The root cause of the problem lay not just in the therapeutic milieu but in the broader context of Algerian society – in its history, culture and politics. As Gendzier remarks, ‘it was far beyond the hospital complex that [Fanon and Azoulay] had to go in order to discover the roots of their difficulties’.66 Communal therapy failed to integrate Muslims with Europeans. Fanon noticed that Muslims were not interested in group activities and paid little attention to the entertainment and cultural activities which were organized in the wards. He also noticed that communal therapy did not ameliorate their condition. He conceded that his methodological approach was flawed. By attempting to integrate Muslims with Europeans, he replicated the problems which were inherent in the assimilationist policies undertaken by the colonial administration. The problem was not that he treated Muslims like Europeans or that he imposed ‘European solutions on Muslim problems’,67 as Geismar claims; the issue was that Fanon overlooked the cultural context which determined mental illness in Algerian society. In ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, Fanon throws into sharp relief the shortcomings of his methodological framework that imposed Western psychiatry on Muslim patients, providing an auto-critique of structural analysis which bracketed out the significance of geographic, historical, cultural and social factors in psychiatry. Fanon replicated in his practice at Blida-Joinville the mechanisms of colonial assimilation which did not take into account the cultural specificities of the patients, but put the onus on them to conform to a cultural model imposed on them. ‘Assimilation, in this instance,’ writes Fanon, ‘does not suppose a reciprocity of perspectives. There is an entire culture that must disappear to the profit of another.’68 As has been noted previously, there is a corpus of thought in medical sciences, ethnopsychiatry, anthropology, philology, literature, education and politics which determined France’s colonial policies and worked to alienate (in both the political and medical sense of the term) rather than assimilate the colonized subject. The problem is not just methodological, it is also political. Assimilation was the root cause of the alienation of the natives; and as has been argued above, influenced by social and cultural Darwinism, colonial psychiatry was implicated in this process.



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Moreover, communal therapy failed to take into account the theocratic and gerontocratic character of Algerian society, the extended family as the most important sociological unit, the attachment of the Algerian to land and agricultural life and the significance of religion.69 In their report, Fanon and Azoulay identified three interconnected issues which impaired the therapeutic environment of the male Algerian patients. First, the language barrier impeded communication between patient and doctor.70 As Gendzier points, Fanon made the fundamental mistake of replicating in his methodology the colonial assimilationist policies which put under erasure the cultural specificities of the natives.71 Throughout Algeria’s colonial history, the assimilationist laws, namely the sénatus-consulte of 1865, the Loi-Jonnart of 1919 and the Blum– Viollette Bill of 1935 attempted with relative success to neutralize Algerian culture and identity. Likewise, Fanon’s initial approach ignored the cultural specificities of the native patients. The specificities of the therapeutic environment were European and Christian; the language used in this environment was French. Cultural and linguistic barriers, ironically, posed a problem for Fanon who seemed oblivious to the issues of ethnicity and gender in therapy. French language did not help establish a positive rapport between patient and doctor. In addition, the use of interpreters was problematic: it hampered therapy; it destroyed the intimacy between patient and doctor and created a corrosive atmosphere of fear and distrust, as French was considered an instrument of coloniality. Second, the assimilationist policies had a devastating impact on the political and economic structures of traditional society. I will discuss the ramifications of this impact in Chapter 5; at this stage, I simply note that these policies were implemented by none other than Dr Warnier, the prime mover behind the bill which bore his name (Loi Warnier 1873). These policies expropriated the land and precipitated the breakdown of the extended family, the most important sociological unit in the Algerian society. Colonization dispossessed and displaced the fellahs, forcing them to seek their livelihood in Algeria’s urban centres. The uprooting of the colonized was the root cause of their alienation.72 The conclusions of the joint report that Fanon published with Azoulay led him to write a damning critique of colonial assimilation as a factor in the mental health of the colonized subject. In The Wretched

144 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference of the Earth, he elaborates on some of the issues he raises in ‘The North African Syndrome’, contending that Algerian criminality and violence were not symptomatic of an innate mental deficiency, (as Porot and the School of Algiers intimated), but were features of colonialism. The dispossessed Algerians, he asserts, constituted a lumpenproletariat composed of hordes of vagrant people, the jobless, the drunken, the petty thieves and prostitutes. Like Bourdieu, he decries the dangers of sanitation and moral health in the bidonville population created by French colonization.73 As we will see in Chapter 5, he deems the lumpenproletariat, the masses of people that exited at the margins of colonial society, as the most revolutionary class because they had nothing to lose but the chains of colonialism. Third, the radical mutations of Algerian society that took place before the Algerian War were a crucial factor. The research Fanon carried out in collaboration with Azoulay clearly paved the way to his Studies in a Dying Colonialism where he analyses the ramifications of these mutations. Colonialism led to the collapse of the extended family; these structural changes undoubtedly had a profound impact on the psychological constitution of the colonized Algerian and had to be taken into account in the therapeutic environment of the male Algerian patient understood as an uprooted, dispossessed, alienated and emasculated individual in a society which had lost its theocratic and gerontocratic character. Islam, madness and colonial ethnopsychiatry Fanon’s psychiatry was bound up with his politics, or at least was determined by the dimension of French colonialism. Vergès is absolutely right to situate his critique of the School of Algiers in a context where psychiatric practice colluded with colonial racism. It is important to adumbrate very briefly the contours of this context. As has been argued, a direct line of thought expressing an ethnocentrism that medicalized and pathologized racial difference connects Bodichon, Fouillée, Le Bon and de Saussure. A tissue of stereotypes was constructed at the intersectionality of medicine, psychiatry, anthropology, ethnography and philology. In the first part of this chapter, I explored the duplicitous relation the medical establishment had with colonialism. Let me now



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examine how psychiatry had the same relation with colonialism. My intention in this section is to establish affinities between Bodichon and Moreau de Tours, critiquing their colonial characterology of the colonized Algerians in light of Fanon’s analyses. Jean-Michel Bégué identifies two trends which dominated colonial psychiatry: the first was influenced by Moreau’s assertion that Arabs/ Muslims have a different cognitive constitution from the European and that insanity was a manifestation of civilization; the second one ‘was marred by ‘the excessive “psychiatrization” of the Arab Muslims’.74 These two trends were not conceptually separate; they in fact converged on an ethnocentric discourse which defined the quasi-scientific nomenclature of colonial psychiatry. A coherent line of thought stretched from Moreau via Boigey to Porot, giving rise to an epistemology which was ostensibly informed by crude Orientalizing stereotypes, colonial prejudice, racism, socio-cultural Darwinism and evolutionary theory. It is, nonetheless, instructive to nuance the differences in this train of thought. In 1843, thirteen years after the colonization of Algeria, Moreau published Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, setting a trend in psychiatric literature that attempted to establish a correlation between civilization and madness. In Islamic societies, he observes, those who suffered from mental disorders were not alienated from, but kept in, the community.75 He characterizes Muslim people by their dogmatic thinking and fatalism, submission to absolutism, moral resignation and weakness, apathetic nature, carefree attitudes and addiction to drugs.76 Owning to cultural and climactic conditions, he contends, madness is less frequent in the Orient than in the West.77 He concludes that Muslim people do not suffer from mental illness because of their cognitive constitution. Moreau holds a post-Rousseauesque conception of madness as a disorder of the mind and those who suffer from it as subjects of cogitation corrupted by the effects of progress and civilization. Such a view is markedly racist, positing the superiority of these subjects as those of progress and civilization. His conception of colonial psychiatry is clearly governed by a duality which contrasts the West and Islam, progress and stasis, civilization and madness.78 Boigey appropriated Moreau’s Orientalizing binary couplets only to reverse them: Islam did not inoculate Algerians from madness; on the contrary, as a cultural

146 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference practice, it exacerbated fanaticism and mental disorder and aggravated moral and sexual perversion.79 Dogmatic thinking, fanaticism, superstition, apathy and moral resignation were not features of Islam per se but of Algeria’s political decline and its colonization. It is significant to note that Moreau’s Orientalist views obfuscate the fact that, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, Islamic medicine made great strides, with contributions from Rhazes, Avicenna and Averroes. The asylum was an invention which came about as a result of this progress in medicine, with the establishment of the moristan (asylum) where those suffering from mental disorders were treated. As Bégué points out, before Algeria was colonized in 1830, patients suffering from mental health issues and needy people were cared for in charitable institutions usually affiliated to the mosque and the moristan in Algiers.80 Customarily, these patients were not incarcerated, for Algerians held superstitious views of insanity as ‘mal sacré’,81 views which determined the discourse of alienists such as Moreau in the late nineteenth century. After Algeria’s colonization, and the attendant expropriation of the habous82 which funded charitable institutions such as the moristan, there was no care provision for those who suffered mental illness. To provide care, an agreement was made as early as 1845 between Algiers and the asylum of Marseille, and subsequent conventions were signed with Nice and Saint Alban; the referral of patients from the three departments in Algeria to the aforementioned hospitals lasted for a century.83 Bégué estimates that between 1850 and 1910, five thousand Algerians were transferred to France. Such transfers, which all too often separated patients from their families for good, were very undesirable, particularly for the Arab-Muslim patients. At the end of an extremely painful journey in the cargo holds of boats, the patients were admitted to asylums in France in an environment with different climate, food, clothing, language and religion.84 Before transferral to France, patients were kept in abject conditions similar to those incarcerated in prison. Treatment was tantamount to punishment: their referral to France was experienced as a sort of exile. The 1912 Régis-Reboul report denounced such treatment as ‘indecent



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and inhumane’. The 1912 Tunis Congress provided a turning point in the provision of care for mental illness, supporting Lwoff and Sérieux’s plans to build an asylum in Morocco, as well as Porot’s proposal to build a psychiatric hospital in Tunis. It took more than two decades after the Tunis Congress to put in place care provision for patients in Algeria; it was Viollette, the Governor General, who gave the green light for the development of two fifty-bed wards in Blida-Joinville, but these wards remained empty until March 1933. In November 1927, Porot was appointed as psychiatric advisor to the administration of Viollette. Two decades after Blida-Joinville opened its doors to its first patients, Fanon was appointed as a chef-de-service in 1953. Richard Keller inscribes the progressive rhetoric of colonial psychiatry within a modernist agenda which ‘testified to the ways in which colonialism was about science, modernization, development and progress as much as it was about exploitation: indeed, exploitation was inherent in the project of development of colonial space and managing colonial populations’.85 He argues that ‘colonial psychiatry employed the redemptive language of biopolitics, which linked it closely to the visions of administrators such as Maurice Viollette, who saw Algeria as the site for the advancement of an assimilationist agenda’.86 This agenda was driven by a brutal violence which destroyed the cultural agencies of the colonized people, imposing on them a European image. Colonial violence, argues Keller, was manifold in its manifestations: it was epistemological, structural and physical, and madness was one of its symptoms. As Keller puts it, mental illness was ‘the paradigmatic sickness of colonialism, whilst psychiatry operated as a biopolitical machine for the regulation of colonial order’.87 Drawing on his work experience in Algeria, Fanon shows the complicity of the medical establishment with the agents of a violent and dehumanizing colonialism. In Studies in a Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth, he contends that medicine and psychiatry were used as instruments of colonial violence. The lines of his argument are clearly laid out in ‘The North African Syndrome’, an article which he wrote while he was studying in Lyon. This syndrome, just as madness, was symptomatic of colonial violence and alienation. The asylum/hospital became a strategic terrain in the Algerian War and violence permeated every aspect of this establishment. For Keller,

148 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference colonial psychiatry and medicine created ‘an unbridgeable gap between European and North African cultures and societies’.88 In The Colonizer and Colonized, Memmi uses the same phraseology to describe how racism structured colonial society; in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon provides a theorization of its Manichaean economy. Just as madness and criminality were defining features of colonialism, violence was a manifestation of its economy. For Fanon, decolonization had a pharmaceutical function for a sick society. As Keller puts it: ‘A mind and a society shattered by violence could only find salvation in an equal and opposite violence, one directed at the cleansing liberation of […] colonial society.’89 It is important to underscore that violence does not constitute the crux of Fanon’s argument in The Wretched of the Earth; his project is to overcome it by announcing a new brand of humanism. It is crucial to point out that the infrastructural reforms as emblematized by the Blida-Joinville Hospital, that symbol of colonial modernity, lagged behind the theory of Porot and his team at the School of Algiers of psychiatry; a theory that was informed by nineteenthcentury ethnopsychiatry. One of the main preoccupations of ethnopsychiatry was the foreign Other – ‘alien’ in the sense of uncanny, strange, weird and mad. This dubious pseudoscientific research in psychiatry must be re-inscribed within an Orientalist discourse – in Said’s sense of the term as an ‘epistemology’ and ‘corporate institution’ that worked to legitimize colonialism. This Orientalizing research made statements about the natives’ mental health with a view to ruling over them. Psychiatric doctors like Boigey and Porot worked at one and the same time to ‘psychologize’ and colonize the natives, and it is no coincidence that they were part of the colonial army, the very corporate institution which conquered Algeria. It is important to reiterate that medical doctors such as Baudens, Bodichon and Warnier were part and parcel of this institution: they played a crucial role in constructing the negative stereotypes which characterized the native population and determined the colonial policies that governed the colonial relation. It is also instructive to underscore that the psychiatry of Porot – the exponent of the Algiers School of psychiatry and one of the founders of BlidaJoinville Hospital – emerged from a conjuncture dominated by the work of social Darwinists (such as Le Bon, de Saussure, Benedict



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Augustin Morel and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) that endeavoured to theorize the ‘pre-logical mentality’ of Negroes and the mental deficiencies of ‘psychological races’ such as Arab and Muslim peoples.90 It is against this background that Fanon’s critique of the Algiers School of psychiatry must be read. Deeply influenced by the aforementioned ethnopsychiatrists, Porot presented the Algerian as having the following traits: ‘Complete or almost complete lack of emotivity. Credulous and susceptible in the extreme. Persistent obstinacy. Mental puerility, without the spirit of curiosity found in the Western child.’91 Like Bodichon and Moreau, Porot infantilized the Algerian.92 At the Congress of Mental Specialists and Neurologists held in 1935, he maintained that the Algerian is a ‘primitive creature whose life, essentially vegetative and instinctive, is above all regulated by diencephalon’.93 Simply put, the Algerian does not have a cortex; his primitive constitution is essentially ‘a social condition which has reached the limit of its evolution; it is logically adopted to a way of life different from ours’.94 Just as with Le Bon’s ‘historical race’ and Léopold’s ‘psychological race’, Porot’s theory provided an alibi for colonial racism which prevented the assimilation of the natives into French culture and society. As Fanon writes: ‘There is thus neither mystery nor paradox. The hesitation of the colonist in giving responsibility to the native is not racism nor paternalism, but quite simply a scientific appreciation of the biologically limited possibilities of the native.’95 The Algiers School of psychiatry pathologizes the criminality of Algerians,96 characterizing it as a form of ‘melancholia’ driven by a congenital impulsiveness to extremes and to homicidal violence. Its pronouncements on Algerians as ‘lobotomized European[s]’ – without an unconscious and incapable of practising introspection – pose theoretical difficulties in dealing with the melancholic that does not turn against oneself but turns against others. The exponents of the Algiers School of psychiatry contend that Algerians do not experience melancholia and its attendant ‘auto-destructive’ tendencies, and that such tendencies take on ‘hetero-destructive forms’ in their case. Refuting the racist views of the Algiers School of psychiatry on the homicidal melancholia of Algerians, Fanon points out that ‘[their] criminality takes place in practice inside a closed circle. The Algerians rob each other, cut each other up and kill each other.’97 Algerians turn against

150 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference themselves and the French are seldom the recipients of such violence. Suicide and homicide – what Fanon calls the ‘auto’ and ‘hetero-destructive forms’ taking the ego or an otherness as an object to be annihilated – are manifestations of the objective conditions of French colonialism which deny the colonized psychologically and physically. The relation which the dispossessed and famished colonized have with history is a simple ‘relation with food’; their moral life is reduced to the basic level of subsistence.98 To steal from the neighbour a loaf of bread or a few dates does not mean the negation of the property of others or the infraction of the law, it is an ‘attempt at murder’.99 History under the yoke of French colonialism means the dispossession, expropriation and alienation of Algerians. ‘The French,’ contends Fanon, ‘are down in the plain with the police, the army and the tanks. On the mountains there are only Algerians. Up above there is Heaven with promise of a world beyond the grave; down below there are the French with their very concrete promises of prison, beatings-up and executions. You are forced to come up against yourself. Here we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies.’100 It is worth pointing out that Dr Warnier was the author of the legislative programme which dispossessed and alienated them. By expropriating land, colonial laws turned Algeria – to borrow Fanon’s metaphor – into a large farmyard where the strongest ‘gobble up the grains while the others grow […] visibly thinner’ and where the law of the ‘pecking order’ is settled by the law of the knife and the gun.101 The controversy over the supposedly pre-logical mentality of the Algerians brought Fanon into dialogue with Porot, the founder of Manouba and Blida-Joinville hospitals, two institutions where Fanon worked to challenge the orthodox thinking in psychiatric practice. After the Second World War, he returned to Algeria in order to overturn ‘hierarchical cosmopolitanism’ in society at large and break the chains that shackled the patients to their beds in Blida-Joinville Hospital. To his disappointment, he encountered a whole establishment which, throughout the history of colonialism, kept them locked in the prison house of the asylum and of colonial prejudice. Significantly, Fanon grounds his critique of Porot and the School of Algiers of psychiatry in the specificities of the Algerian War and its effects on the Algerians’ mental health. In ‘Colonial War and Mental



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Disorders’, he discusses case studies which he grouped under the following headings: Series A, Series B, Series C and Series D. In his analysis of the latter, he concludes by examining the ‘[c]riminal impulses found in North Africans which have their origin in the National War of Liberation’.102 In most of the cases he studies, torture is of singular importance. His most vehement critics with regard to the theme of violence dwell on the ‘incendiary’ language of the opening chapter but fail to refer to these case studies, which throw into sharp relief the impact that colonial violence in general and torture in particular had on the Algerian people. Fanon details some of the methods103 employed to extract information and notes two categories of people who were subjected to questioning: those who knew something; and those who knew nothing. The latter, after their traumatic experience, were referred to Fanon for psychiatric treatment. ‘We are speaking,’ writes Fanon, ‘expressly of those Algerians who do not belong to any organization, who are arrested and brought to police quarters or to farms used as centres of interrogation in order to be tortured there.’104 On the other hand, those who belonged to the FLN organization and knew something were never referred for psychiatric treatment; they were executed after interrogation.105 Fanon also identifies two sorts of questioning: the intellectuals were subjected to the psychological duress of brainwashing that was part of psychological action undertaken by the French army; and the non-intellectuals were not tortured psychologically – it was their corporeality that was targeted: ‘the body is dealt with: it is broken in the hope that the national consciousness will thus be demolished’.106 ‘Like all other wars,’ Fanon writes, ‘the Algerian war has created its contingent of cortico-visceral illnesses.’107 It is in connection with such illnesses that Fanon discusses the representation of the Algerian in the discourse of colonial psychiatry, namely the Algiers School. So long as the patient remained in the shadow of colonial hegemony, argues Fanon, cure was not possible. Colonialism was at the origin of madness. It impaired the health of the colonized by depersonalizing them and this depersonalization was experienced ‘in the collective sphere, on the level of social structures’. Simply put, colonialism impacted the psychology of the Algerian people in its totality and Fanon clearly conceives of decolonization as a crucial aspect of therapy ‘to overcome

152 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference the kernel of despair which was hardened in the native’s being’.108 Decolonization should thus aim to demystify the myths which attempted to instil in the colonized people an inferiority complex, to ‘explode the so-called truths which have been established in its consciousness by the colonial civil Administration, by the military occupation, and by economic exploitation’.109 Conclusion In sum, medical and psychiatric doctors such as Baudens, Bodichon, Moreau, Boigey and Porot were recruited by the army which colonized Algeria and were implicated in constructing myths which instilled in the Algerians an inferiority complex. The language adopted by these doctors to profile the natives’ characterology expresses similar mythic and stereotypical views to those held by the colonialist soldiers and settlers, maintaining that the Algerian is mad, indulges in vices such as thieving and rape, and kills savagely and gratuitously. ‘For over thirty years,’ writes Fanon, ‘under the constant direction of Professor Porot, professor of psychiatry at the faculty of Algiers, several teams worked with the aim of specifying the forms of expression of this criminality and to establish a sociological, functional and anatomical interpretation for them.’110 In keeping with a tradition in colonial psychiatry which established a link between the cognitive architectonics of the colonized Algerians and their religion, the School of Algiers of psychiatry maintained that there was a correlation between the ‘Muslim soul’ and criminality. The prevailing view amongst a number of magistrates was that the Algerian kills to satisfy a sadistic lust for blood. Against the institutional violence of colonialism, Fanon sets the violence of decolonization.111 Fanon, as the spokesman of the colonized, emerges as the indefatigable opponent of colonial psychiatry. Robert Berthelier criticizes him for abstracting the revolutionary subject in the same way as Porot abstracted the specificities of the alienated individual to justify an ideology. Fanon’s revolutionary Messianism is a mirror that reflected Porot’s colonial ethnocentrism. Arguably, Fanon responds to the colonial Manichaeism with his own revolutionary Manichaeism, and Berthelier identifies these two Manichaeisms as antagonistic and yet complementary.



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It is important to bear in mind that psychiatry and medicine worked to construct negative stereotypical representations of the Algerians. Inscribed in the collective imaginary was the view that the Algerians were liars and thieves and rapists. Berthelier criticizes Porot and his team of psychiatrists for using scientific means to justify colonial ends, thereby institutionalizing prejudice in the name of progress and civilization. In his critique of colonialism and of the Algiers School of psychiatry, Fanon shows the dehumanizing effects of French colonialism and colonial psychiatry. He clearly outlines the main lines of his critique of the medical establishment and psychiatry, and it is instructive to note that he initiates this critique in ‘The North African Syndrome’, a critique which he elaborates on in the joint report he writes with Azoulay. In his Blida-Joinville experiment, Fanon fails to take into account the impact of the laws which detribalized and dispossessed the natives. In spite of the fact that they led an impoverished existence, contends Fanon, they never constituted a proletariat. As we will see in the next chapter, the proletarianization of the Algerians had serious ramifications for what used to be a homogenous society. The breakdown impacted not only on the economy and political structure of the Algerian society, but also had negative effects on the mental health of its people. Implicitly and explicitly, Fanon accuses the exponents of the School of Algiers of psychiatry of acting as agents of a dehumanizing colonialism. In his critical appraisal of the School of Algiers in The Wretched of the Earth, just as in ‘The North African Syndrome’ and ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, he reiterates the same view that psychiatry – like the medical establishment – was employed as the instrument of coloniality. Psychiatry was not a technique for healing the Algerians, but was implicated in their alienation. It was cause rather than cure for their ailment. Notes 1 Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 123. 2 Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: J.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1995), p. 120. 3 Eugène Bodichon, Hygiène à suivre en Algérie (Alger: Imprimerie Rey, Delavigne et Compagnie, 1859), pp. 5–6.

154 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 4 Eugène Bodichon, De l’Humanité (Bruxelles: Librairie Internationale A. Lacroix Verboeckhoven et Cie édieurs, 1866), pp. 19–21. 5 Bodichon, De l’Humanité p. 21, p. 44 and p. 74. 6 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 43. 7 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, pp. 72–75. 8 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 29 and p. 35. 9 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 74. 10 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, pp. 77–79. 11 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 79. 12 Bodichon welcomes the French Revolution and the Haitian insurrection because they freed people from the domination of the aristocracy and the clergy. The French Revolution and the Revolution of SaintDomingue are legitimate because they ‘propose equality for all men’ (De l’Humanité, p. 306). Both seek the realization of the republican ideals enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to maximize the rights of the individual. Paradoxically, he considers the legitimacy of government is determined by the specificities of race. 13 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 87. 14 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 96, p. 303 and p. 306. 15 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, pp. 91–92. 16 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 337. 17 Bodichon, De l’Humanité, p. 349. 18 My translation of this quote: ‘En France, nous confondons assimilation et uniformité. Nous en sommes à la vieille idée platonique du type: et nous voulons façonner tous les gens sur le nôtre, comme s’il avait atteint une perfection absolue, et comme si tous les Français étaient des ménechmes.’ Yves Guyot, Lettres sur la politique coloniale (Paris: Reinwald, 1885), p. 215. 19 Marcel Dorigny (ed.), Les abolitions de l’esclavage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995). 20 Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1890–1914 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 17. 21 Betts, Assimilation and Association, p. 22. 22 Alfred Fouillée, Psychologie du peuple français (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903). 23 Alfred Fouillée, Tempérament et caractère selon les individus, les sexes et les races (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935), p. 342. 24 Gustave Le Bon, Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1894). 25 Léopold de Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899), p. 14.



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26 John E. Joseph, ‘Language and Psychological Race: Léopold de Saussure on French in Indochina’, Language & Communication, 20 (2000), p. 39. 27 de Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française, p. 108. 28 Le Bon uses the word ‘image’ to underline that representation is nothing but an ‘artifice’. In his words: ‘Les races supérieures ne se distinguent pas uniquement par leurs caractères psychologiques et anatomiques des races inférieures. Elles s’en distinguent encore par la diversité des éléments qui entrent dans leur sein. Chez les races inférieures, tous les individus, alors même qu’ils sont de sexes différents, possèdent à peu près le même niveau mental. Se ressemblant tous, ils présentent l’image parfaite de l’égalité rêvée par nos socialistes modernes. Chez les races supérieures, l’inégalité des individus et des sexes est, au contraire, la loi.’ Le Bon, Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples, p. 37. 29 de Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française, p. 108. 30 de Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française, p. 293). See also Betts, Assimilation and Association, p. 73. 31 To quote Bodichon: ‘Sans violer les lois de la morale, nous pourrons combattre nos ennemis africains par la poudre et le fer joints à la famine, les divisions interstines, la guerre, par l’eau-de-vie, la corruption et la désorganisation’. Bodichon, Revue de l’Orient (July 1841). Cited in Jean-Charles Boudin, La Colonisation et de la population en Algérie (Paris: Baillière, 1853), p. 21. Cited also in Jacques Léonard, ‘Médicine et colonisation en Algérie au XIXe siècle’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest, 84:2 (1977), p. 486. 32 Yvonne Turin, Affrontments culturels en Algérie au XIXe siècle (Paris: Maspéro, 1971). 33 Cited in Léonard, ‘Médicine et colonisation en Algérie au XIXe siècle’, p. 490. 34 Émile Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes (Paris: Baillière, 1955), p. 548. 35 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 549. 36 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 556. 37 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 551. 38 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 553. 39 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 553. 40 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 558 41 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 564. 42 Bertherand, Médecine et hygiène des Arabes, p. 556. 43 Like L.J. Adolphe C.C. Hanoteau, Warnier distinguished Arabs from Berbers; he was one of the exponents of Berberism and the Algerianist School.

156 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 44 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133–134. 45 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 121. 46 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133. 47 The Arabic word caïd means (tribal) leader; while the French word notable means a prominent, famous, distinguished person. 48 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 132. 49 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133. 50 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, pp. 122–123. 51 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, pp. 136–137. 52 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 137. Death certificates citing natural causes were provided in inquests of torture cases. In cases where the victims did not succumb to torture, European doctors concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that these victims were subjected to torture. Fanon takes issue with the complicity of European doctors with sadists who practised torture; he condemns those who contemptuously violated medical ethics by administering the ‘truth serum’ in the questioning of FLN sympathizers like Henri Alleg. 53 Fanon, Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique, p. 113. 54 Formerly a religious foundation, the hospital was run by the Catholic Church and headed by Paul Belvet, a staunch supporter of the Vichy regime. However, after the revelation that Vichy collaborated with the Germans in the prosecution of the Jews, he changed his political allegiance and joined the Resistance and the hospital became a sanctuary for Resistance fighters like Paul Eluard, Georges Canguilhem and François Tosquelles. See Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, pp. 148–149. 55 His collaborative research with Tosquelles culminated with a joint publication, ‘Sur quelques cas traités par la méthode de Bini’ at the Congrès de psychiatrie et de neurologie de langue française in 1953. 56 Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, pp. 100–101. 57 Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, p. 100. 58 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, pp. 121–122. 59 Françoise Vergès, ‘Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism’, in Read (ed.) The Fact of Blackness, p. 48. After completing the Médicat, he was offered a position in Martinique, which he rejected. He wrote to Senghor to enquire about the possibility of practising psychiatry in Senegal. Senghor, one of the founders of negritude movement, a Deputy in the French National Assembly before he was elected President of Senegal in 1961, never replied to his letter. In September 1953, Fanon was appointed at the Pontorson Hospital; in November of the same year, he took a position as chef de service at Blida-Joinville which he held until January 1957. According to Geismar, when Fanon arrived



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at the hospital he assured his patients that ‘there would be no strait jackets or chains in the future.’ Geismar, Fanon, p. 65. 60 Vergès, ‘Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism’, p. 48. 61 Geismar, Fanon, p. 64. 62 Geismar, Fanon, p. 66. Also see Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, pp. 64–65. 63 Geismar, Fanon, p. 64. 64 François Tosquelles, Le Travail thérapeutique àl’hôpital psychiatrique (Paris: Editions du Scarabée, 1967), p. 7. See Geismar, Fanon, p. 54. 65 Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, pp. 150–151. 66 Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, p. 80. 67 Geismar, Fanon, p. 85. 68 Frantz Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, in Jean Khalfa and Robert Young (eds), Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), p. 305. 69 Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, pp. 307–308. 70 Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, pp. 309–310. 71 Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, pp. 80–85. 72 Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, pp. 308. 73 Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, pp. 308–309. 74 Jean-Michel Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962): From Colonial to Transcultural’, History of Psychiatry, 7 (1996), p. 541. 75 Jacques-Joseph Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient (Paris: Imprimerie de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1843), p. 14. 76 Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, pp. 18–19. 77 Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, p. 18. 78 Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, pp. 20–21. 79 Dr Boigey, Psychologie morbide, Etude psychologique sur l’Islam, in Annales médico-psychologiques (Paris: Masson, 1908), p. 8. 80 Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 534. 81 Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 534. See also Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, p. 13. 82 A type of property in precolonial Algeria: an inalienable charitable endowment. 83 Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 535. 84 Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 535. 85 Richard Keller, Colonial Madness, Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 80.

158 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 86 Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 80. 87 Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 162. 88 Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 167. 89 Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 165. 90 Vergès, ‘Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism’, p. 53. 91 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 242. 92 In Considérations sur l’Algérie, Bodichon contends that humanity would be in a permanent state of infancy if its destiny were entrusted to the brown races, people driven by animal instincts (p. 136). Under the tutelage of the white races, who represent for Bodichon the driving force of progress, people of colour are to become its instrument (p. 140). 93 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 243. 94 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 243. 95 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 244. 96 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 241. 97 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 241 and p. 247. 98 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 249. 99 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 249. 100 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 249–250. 101 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 248 and p. 249. 102 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 236. 103 These are some of the methods used in questioning: a) injecting soapy water into the anus at high pressure accompanied with injection of water into the mouth; b) forcing the prisoner to sit on a bottle with a broken neck; placing the prisoner in awkward, hard-to-maintain positions and punishing the slightest movement with blows. 104 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 227. 105 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 226. 106 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 233. 107 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 235. 108 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 237. 109 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 237. 110 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 240. 111 Robert Berthelier, L’Homme maghrébin dans la liltérature psychiatrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), pp. 120–121.

5 The Wretched of the Earth: the anthem of decolonization?

Introduction In ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, Fanon claims that psychiatry failed to take into account the importance of colonial politics in its analysis of madness. The assimilationist laws were at the origin of the alienation – in its psychiatric and socio-political sense of the term – of the colonized subject. As has been ascertained in the previous chapter, the assimilationist laws expropriated and displaced the colonized people, thereby negatively impacting on their psychological constitution. Fanon also critiques Marxism. In The Wretched of the Earth, he claims that Marxism failed to take into consideration colonial politics. He is emphatic that ‘Marxist analysis should always be stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem’.1 However, as we will see in this chapter, he overstates his case when he argues that Marx’s study of pre-capitalist society must be completely rethought: Marx’s analysis of the political ramifications of these laws on Algerian society prefigured Sartre’s analysis of the development of colonial capitalism in ‘Colonialism Is a System’. It is my intention to show that Marx’s and Sartre’s analyses constitute a continuum; a line of argument which is central to Fanon’s theorizing in The Wretched of the Earth. My discussion of Fanon’s views on Marxism falls into three stages of development. First, focusing on the dual economy of colonial society and the pitfalls of nationalism, I will examine his assertion that in the post-independence state the bourgeois phase – as a necessary step

160 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference towards the advent of a classless society in orthodox Marxist theory – is useless and that the lumpenproletariat is not a reactionary class but rather is the most revolutionary, an assertion which reverses the roles Marx assigned to the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat and radically subverts Marxist theory. Second, I want to chart the historical development of what Fanon refers to as the lumpenproletariat in The Wretched of the Earth by examining Marx’s and Sartre’s analyses of the impact which French colonialism had on the emergence of this class of people, as well as on France’s democratic and republican political institutions. Third, I will endeavour to read Fanon and Marx contrapuntally, engaging with Peter Stallybrass and Ranjana Khanna and with the political role they assign to the lumpenproletariat. In ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Stallybrass takes Marx to task for his Orientalizing and homogenizing view of the lumpenproletariat and for dismissing it as a class which exists outside the play of history and politics. In ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, Khanna also levels the same criticism against Marx. She addresses the issue of the apatrides who exist as spectral figures in the field of politics by establishing an equivalence between on the one hand those who suffer from psychiatric alienation and on the other the lumpenproletariat; or, more precisely, between those who are alienated and those who seek political asylum. Both Stallybrass and Khanna throw Marx’s crude abstract economism into sharp relief, prefiguring the significance of politics and psychoanalysis. However, it is my project to establish here that both Stallybrass and Khanna overlook the historical specificities of Fanon’s lumpenproletariat. To be sure, Fanon holds views which do not subscribe to Marxist orthodoxy. He clearly diverges from Marx in his discussion of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat in colonial society. Numerically small and relatively pampered – argues Fanon – the African proletariat is reactionary. His unconventional views depart from Marx’s theory and suggest the proletariat is not the most radical and revolutionary class. Nonetheless, these views point to a thorny theoretical issue which orthodox Marxists eschew, but which Marx himself attempted to address in his Critique of the Gotha Program: the role of the peasantry in the revolution.2 According to Fanon, ‘the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to



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lose and everything to gain’.3 Engendered by French colonial policies, the lumpenproletariat, as an incipient class, was made up of the landless peasants who were expropriated and forced to seek a livelihood in Algeria’s urban centres. He considers the lumpenproletariat as ‘an extension of the peasantry, its urban arm’;4 if not mobilized, this class of people would be deployed by the colonialists to thwart the revolution. I concur with Tony Martin’s remarks that Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth echoes Marx’s description of the lumpenproletariat in the Communist Manifesto, yet it is important to underline that there are discernible differences between the two; it is rather simplistic to overlook the historical specificities of the lumpenproletariat in both Fanon and Marx. The ‘lumpenproletariat’ is not a homogenous and universal category. It is not a question of imposing a Marxist reading on the work of Fanon by claiming that ‘if the word “peasantry” could be substituted for “proletariat”, then Fanon’s position here is, surprisingly, identical to Marx’s early position as articulated in the Communist Manifesto’.5 The question is how to read Marxism from the perspective of Fanon’s critique of colonialism. National bourgeoisie and the tribalization of politics According to Lyotard, the conditions of exploitation in Algeria did not allow the emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie: the only wellto-do class was constituted of the native elite and of shopkeepers. In the colony, Fanon observes, a genuine bourgeoisie involved in the creation of capital was absent. In ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, he cautions against orthodox Marxist theory which conceives of the bourgeois phase as a necessary step towards the advent of classless society. He also warns against ‘the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people’.6 He dismisses the national middle-class for its ‘intellectual laziness’ and ‘its spiritual penury’.7 This class, which comes to replace the bourgeoisie of the former colonialist country, does not have its attributes. The national middle class lacks capital and, more significantly, does not have an ideology. ‘The national bourgeoisie of under-developed countries,’ he explains, ‘is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor Labour; it is completely canalized into activities of

162 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference the intermediary type. Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket.’8 This class is ignorant of the economy of its own country which developed under the shadow of colonial hegemony, in the hands of the colonialists and outside the ‘limits of [its] knowledge’; the ‘paucity of its managerial’ skill is also a factor. ‘After independence,’ Fanon contends, ‘this under-developed middle class, reduced in numbers and without capital, which refuses to follow the path of revolution, will fall into deplorable stagnation.’9 The national middle class uses the rhetoric of nationalization and the slogan of nationalism to swap positions with the former European settlers.10 Nationalization does not mean putting the economy at the service of the nation but ‘the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period’.11 By identifying itself with the Western bourgeoisie, this class follows their path without emulating its successes, without inventing, without producing and accumulating capital. The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as the broker of postcolonial capitalism. The role it assumes as an intermediary ‘consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism’.12 By cutting itself from the masses, this class paradoxically takes on the role of caretaker and procurer of Western enterprise.13 It becomes the business agent of the West, rather than the servant of the masses. Fanon identifies pernicious vicissitudes as a result of the emergence of this national under-developed bourgeoisie; vicissitudes which reproduce old colonial attitudes. As the wave of decolonization sweeps across the African continent, he discerns a change from the rhetoric of African unity to a despicable return to chauvinism in its most contemptuous manifestations.14 ‘From nationalism,’ he writes, ‘we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism.’15 Elaborating on the divisive rhetoric of the national bourgeoisie and its ultra-nationalism, he adds: we observe a falling back towards old tribal attitudes, and, furious and sick at heart, we perceive that race feeling in its most exacerbated form is triumphing. Since the sole motto of the bourgeoisie



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is ‘Replace the foreigner’, and because it hastens in every walk of life to secure justice for itself and to take over the posts that the foreigner has vacated, the ‘small people’ of the nation – taxidrivers, cake-sellers and shoeblacks – will be equally quick to insist that the Dahomans go home to their own country, or will even go further and demand that the Foulbis and the Peuhls return to their jungle or their mountains.16 Furthermore: Colonialism pulls every string shamelessly, and it is only too content to set at loggerheads those Africans who only yesterday were leagued against the settlers. The idea of a Saint Bartholomew takes shape in certain minds, and the advocates of colonialism laugh to themselves derisively when they hear magnificent declarations about African unity. Inside a single nation, religion splits up the people into different spiritual communities, all of them kept up and stiffened by colonialism and its instruments. Totally unexpected events break out here and there. In regions where Catholicism or Protestantism predominates, we see the Moslem minorities flinging themselves with unaccustomed ardour into their devotions. The Islamic feastdays are revived, and the Moslem religion defends itself inch by inch against the violent absolutism of the Catholic faith. Ministers of state are heard to say for the benefit of certain individuals that if they are not content they have only to go to Cairo. Sometimes American Protestantism transplants its anti-Catholic prejudices into African soil, and keeps up tribal rivalries through religion.17 Interracial, ethnic and regional tensions come to the surface. ‘African unity takes off the mask, and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself.’18 The putative African unity created in the anti-colonial struggle breaks down or retreats into the enclave of tribalism; religious tension boils over and is articulated in racial terms. The rhetoric of nationalism underlying the grand narrative of African unity is mythic but not in the sense that Barthes describes myth: as a vacuous signifier. Barthes argues that ideology (or more precisely

164 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference mythology) strives to attain universality by neutralizing the history which underpins class conflicts. Western democratic and republican institutions are maintained by the work of ideology. Ideology has a negative and positive function: first, ideology serves the interests of the ruling class by masking the contradictions and inequalities in society, it is therefore a process of mystification that gives rise to false consciousness; but second, ideology is also the mortar which cements differences and brings about social cohesion, it functions positively to create common sense. Colonialism is, on the other hand, tactless and never works to mask the contradictions. It is narrow minded and divisive. It gives vent to the excesses of universalism in the colony, excesses which republican capitalism suppresses at home. Colonialism has no qualms about abetting anti-republican practices in the colony, practices which can never be tolerated in Europe. It is Fanon’s view that one of the most difficult problems that arises in the post-independence period is the lack of an ideology. Fanon employs the term not in its vulgar meaning of ‘doctrine’ but in a positive sense to describe the productive work of ideology in creating social and cultural cohesion. The national middle class comes to power ‘in the name of a narrow nationalism and presenting race’.19 Unlike the Western bourgeoisie, the prejudice of this class is neither nuanced nor subtle. One of its manifestation is ‘vulgar tribalism’.20 It is brought about by a feeling of fear; it is ostensibly reactionary and always on the defensive.21 This sort of narrow nationalism undermines the unity of Africa, a unity which ‘can only be achieved through the upward thrust of the people, and under the leadership of the people, that is to say, in defiance of the interests of the bourgeoisie’.22 Clearly, this sort of ‘tribal’ nationalism is pernicious to the foundation of democracy. ‘In a certain number of under-developed countries,’ Fanon argues, ‘the parliamentary game is faked from the beginning.’23 By setting up a single-party state, these countries effectively institute ‘the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical’.24 The leader, who until now has embodied the people’s aspiration for liberation, becomes a dictator. He now uses the party as an instrument of power to contain the masses, installing himself as ‘a screen between the people and the rapacious bourgeoisie’.25 ‘In the absence of a parliament,’ Fanon adds, ‘it is the army that becomes the arbiter:



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but sooner or later it will realize its power and will hold over the government’s head the threat of a manifesto.’26 Fanon dismisses Marxist orthodoxy which calls for the bourgeois phase as a necessary step in the march towards universal history. The bourgeois phase must be skipped; the revolution can take place without it. As he explains: The bourgeois phase in under-developed countries can only justify itself in so far as the national bourgeoisie has sufficient economic and technical strength to build up a bourgeois society, to create the conditions necessary for the development of a large-scale proletariat, to mechanize agriculture and finally to make possible the existence of an authentic national culture. A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe is able to elaborate an ideology and at the same time strengthen its own power. Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular, has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a maximum of prosperity. In underdeveloped countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature.27 Fanon concludes that the bourgeois phase leads ‘the nation up blind alleys’28 and not to a classless society as envisaged in the Marxist eschatology. Formal colonialism ends with the national bourgeoisie displacing the former colonial settlers, but effective decolonization does not take place. One of the contradictions of this phase is that formal decolonization does not bring about any changes: the national bourgeoisie ‘take[s] over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought and the institutions left by the colonialists’.29 Two salient problems hamper the emergence of an authentic bourgeoisie ‘with all the economic and industrial consequences which this

166 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference entails’:30 first – as I have noted – the absence of an ideology cementing the fabric of the postcolonial nation; second – and more significantly – the lack of capital. Orthodox Marxism considers the contradictions created by capitalism as a necessary step in a dialectical logic culminating ultimately with class struggle. Fanon warns against such a logic in postcolonial society, insisting instead on the nationalization of the means of production. In order to bring the economy out of stagnation, it is crucial that the postcolonial state takes possession of the intermediary sector controlled by the national middle class and nationalizes it.31 He clearly establishes an equivalence between capitalism and colonialism, an equivalence which maintains a relation of dominance between centre and periphery, city and country, colonizer and colonized. Fanon’s critique points to the dangers of a centralized, or perhaps more appropriately of a ‘globalized’, economy which subordinates the latter to the former. By ‘nationalization’, Fanon means ‘de-centralization’, in the sense of decentring ‘capital’ not only as a site of economic and political power, but also as a geographical location.32 The decentralization of power is one of the cornerstones for the establishment of political institutions that represent the interests of ‘the interior, the back-country [which] ought to be the most privileged part of the country’.33 For Fanon, in order for them to be able to lead, the party and the leader must be behind the people and at its service. Only a revolutionary leadership can empower the people to play a constructive political role in the postcolonial state, that is, to come of age politically and enter ‘the scene of history’.34 He sees in the emergence of a national bourgeoisie a danger to the political emancipation of the masses. To emancipate the people is to educate them politically by making the reality of the nation a tangible concept within their grasp. Their political education is clearly bound up with their political participation in the business of government. ‘Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national consciousness,’ affirms Fanon, ‘ceases to be individual, limited and shrunken and is enabled to open out into the truth of the nation and of the world.’35 He warns against the army becoming a ‘school of war’ that ‘tribalizes’ politics, divides the nation and fails to create a national culture. His cautionary remark must be read in the political context of an emergent neo-colonialism which, by co-opting



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the national bourgeoisie and elite, attempted to thwart the revolutionary movement in Africa and threatened its unity. The assassination of Lumumba is a case in point of this sort of politics. The proletariat and lumpenproletariat A contradictory economy – feudal and capitalist – governed colonial society; its duality determined the conflict between city and country, as well as the class structure which was made up of four strata, namely: the national bourgeoisie, an incipient proletariat, the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry. The first two classes were based in the city; the latter two had the same cultural affiliations, having both originated from a rural background. As we will see, the specificities of the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry are of immense significance to Fanon’s analysis of colonial Manichaeism. While the working class was socially, economically and politically integrated into the capitalist system of production, and was therefore corrupted by the material contact it had with the colonial society, ‘the country people had more or less kept their individuality free from colonial impositions’.36 As Fanon observes, ‘[t]he peasant’s pride, his hesitation to go down into the towns and to mingle with the world that the foreigner had built, his perpetual shrinking back at the approach of the agents of colonial administration: all these reactions signified that to the dual world of the settler he opposed his own duality’.37 He describes the dual world of the settler as an apartheid, a world cut into two compartments, inhabited by two different species and governed by a Manichaean logic, a world marked by the dimension of colonial violence and racism. In Chapter 2, we saw how Bhabha misread this logic. The duality with which the peasantry confronts this Manichaean world points to the character of the country people, revolutionary in its impetus and untainted by the corruption of colonial city life. Contrary to Marx, Fanon considers the lumpenproletariat – ‘the landless peasants’ that were uprooted and displaced by the colonial settlers – as the most revolutionary class. In his words: It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen-proletariat that the rebellion will find

168 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference its urban spearhead. For the lumpen-proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.38 Furthermore: The shanty-town sanctions the native’s biological decision to invade, at whatever cost and if necessary by the most cryptic methods, the enemy fortress. The lumpen-proletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the ‘security’ of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood.39 Fanon’s glorification of the lumpenproletariat as ‘stout working men’ contradicts Marx’s characterization of this class. For Marx, the lumpenproletariat (the hordes of vagrants, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, swindlers, beggars, thieves and so forth and so on) does not belong to the labouring class. Nor it does represent the revolutionary potential of the working class. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he is scathing of the ragbag of déclassés – those who live at the margins of society and outside the market of wage-labour. The lumpenproletariat is beneath class and has no revolutionary potential at all; it is in fact counter-revolutionary. If anything, it plays a reactionary role. In The Communist Manifesto, he describes the lumpenproletariat as the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat – the vagrants, criminals and the unemployed, those who lack class consciousness. The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.40



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In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he describes it as the ‘scum, offal, refuse of all’.41 Fanon’s description of the lumpenproletariat is at variance with Marx’s and, as we will see, it is at the point of disjunction between these two thinkers that Peter Stallybrass and Khanna examine its heterogeneity, focusing on its potency in shaping the notion of the ‘political’ and its significance to Marxism and psychoanalysis. In his article ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Stallybrass considers the political in Marx’s work (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire) as a formative process that ‘fashion[s] classes out of radically heterogeneous groups’,42 namely the bourgeoisie, the finance aristocracy, the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. However, because of the complex nature of class alliances, Stallybrass argues, Bonapartism is a ‘scandal’ for Marxism, bringing about ‘a break with the notion of class representation’.43 He concurs with Jeffrey Mehlman that Bonapartism represents a state which is empty of its class content, but takes issue with his view that the binary logic of Marxist theory is disrupted by a ‘third term, the lumpenproletariat, a term that resists the totalizing and the teleological pretensions of the dialectic’.44 Stallybrass is adamant that this term constitutes its tactical manoeuvring.45 The central plank of Stallybrass’s argument rests on two key issues: first, the lumpenproletariat – as a site of heterogeneity – is homogenized by an Orientalizing bourgeois view; second, Marx’s homogenizing representation of the lumpenproletariat – as nomads, ‘déclassés’ and ‘refuse of all classes’ – reproduces such a view. According to Stallybrass, the interplay of heterogeneity and homogeneity constitutes the field of politics through an ongoing process of conflict and negotiation, a field within which power becomes concentrated in one figure: Bonaparte. Influenced by Bataille’s analysis of homogenizing populist movements, Stallybrass astutely argues that Bonapartism is a manifestation of fascism avant la lettre and Bonaparte, as figurehead of the lumpenproletariat, is a proto-fascist leader. However, while drawing a parallel between populism and fascism, Stallybrass seems oblivious to the historical connection these movements had with colonialism. It is worth noting that the colonial army which was deployed to break the Revolution consolidated the power of Bonaparte as ruler of the Second Empire.

170 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference By tracing the etymology of the term ‘proletariat’, Stallybrass draws attention to the fact that it refers not only to the working class but also to the poor, the ragpickers and the nomads, as well as to beggars, thieves and prostitutes: it designates the lowest class; that is, ‘those without capital’.46 Ostensibly, Marx splits this class by distinguishing ‘the purified subject of the working class’ from ‘the “rotting mass” of paupers and criminals’; that is, the proletariat from the lumpenproletariat.47 He contrasts the working class as the subject of history to the lumpenproletariat ‘as the very negation of historicity’.48 Marx and Engels invert the term to describe the ‘proletariat’ not as a parasitic element but as an exploited mass. ‘It is as if,’ Stallybrass writes, ‘the bourgeois fantasy of a nameless other that must be obsessively named, expelled from Marx’s concept of the proletariat, finds a new home for itself in the concept of the lumpenproletariat.’49 Stallybrass chides Marx and Engels for their Orientalizing views which tend to ‘abstract the lumpenproletariat from any specifiable historical relation and to treat them (as most bourgeois commentators did) as a distinct race’50 or better still as ‘a nomadic tribe, innately depraved’.51 ‘There is something of this racial definition in Marx’s description of the Mobile Guard in Paris after the February Revolution.’52 Ironically, Stallybrass appropriates a language pertaining to colonial discourse to describe an ‘Orientalized’ lumpenproletariat but overlooks the role that this class played in France’s colonial endeavour. It is true that ‘Marx tended to split the bourgeois notion of the “proletariat” (…) into two: the active agents of struggle (the proletariat proper) and the “rotting mass” in the “lowest strata” of society’53 that live outside the relations of production. It is equally true that Marx’s description of the lumpenproletariat, the ‘social scum’, refers not just to the lowest strata but also to the ‘finance aristocracy’. The 1848 Revolution fractured the bourgeoisie as a class: one faction supported the Second Republic; the other, Louis-Philippe. The propertyless class was also split: the insurgent proletariat was vanquished by the lumpenproletariat, the Mobile Guard recruited from the urban poor of Paris. According to Marx, it was not the bourgeoisie that ruled under LouisPhilippe but one faction of it: the so-called finance aristocracy. Marx establishes a conceptual correlation, a sort of unholy alliance, between the finance aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat: both were parasitic,



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unproductive and degenerate. Put in Marx’s terms: ‘the finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society’.54 Even though it shared propertied status with the bourgeoisie, Marx argues, the finance aristocracy resembled the lumpenproletariat in that it was degenerate and unproductive. In the July monarchy, power moved from the Palace to the Stock Exchange and Louis-Philippe ruled with the help of the finance aristocracy which would ultimately consolidate the power of Bonaparte.55 His popularism was bolstered by the lumpenproletariat – by those who had capital and those who were capital-less, by the finance aristocracy and the Mobile Guard recruited from the urban poor, by the high and the low. It is in the interplay of ‘high’ and ‘low’ that the political was articulated and power became consolidated in the figure of Bonaparte. Stallybrass is astute to point out that ‘the lumpen seems to figure less a class in any sense that one usually understands that term in Marxism than a group that is amenable to political articulation’.56 Bonapartism brought about a crisis in Marxism, for it did not represent any specifiable class. Bonaparte came to hypostatize ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’. However, the nullity of Bonaparte did not suggest ‘the imminent dissolution of his hegemony’57 but rather its consolidation through the ideological work of neutralizing class specificities and differences. Homogeneity – or to put it in Barthes’s term, ‘universality’ – was achieved through the neutralization of heterogeneity. Bonaparte came to embody the mythology of republicanism which defaulted on the principle it proclaimed: equality is a sham. The bourgeois rhetoric of universality was vacuous; it was – to put it in Barthes’s term – ‘mythic’ and empty of any specific content. Echoing Barthes, Stallybrass remarks that this rhetoric, voided of its social content, was ‘a fraud: under the guise of the common interest, the state guarantees a political equality that leaves social inequality untouched’.58 It is important to emphasize that this problem of representation was not specific to Bonapartism but characteristic of the French Revolution. Despite proclaiming the inalienability of the rights of the individual as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the Revolution did not enfranchise women or ethnic minorities such as Jews, blacks and colonized people: slavery was abolished only to be reinstated by Napoleon

172 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Bonaparte on 20 May 1802, the colonization of Algeria coincided with the July Revolution of 1830, and France’s colonial endeavour reached its pinnacle with Bonapartism. I agree with Stallybrass that the heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat constitutes the political unity of Bonapartism rather than its antithesis. Indeed, Marx’s Orientalizing view of the lumpenproletariat is a scandal, and so is his assumption that it was the very negation of history and politics. As agents of colonial endeavour, the lumpenproletariat shaped the political field of Bonapartism by helping Bonaparte establish the Second Empire and realize his imperialist ambition. Nevertheless, this scandal prefigures the significance of ‘the political’, a notion which Stallybrass deploys to rescue Marxism from crude economism. He is also keen to stress that Fanon, unlike Marx, considers the lumpenproletariat as the vanguard of revolutionary praxis. Although he departs from Marxism, ‘Fanon’s politics seem surprisingly close to the politics that Marx attributes to Louis Bonaparte: the heterogeneity of the lumpen is the very condition for political articulation’.59 In The Wretched of the Earth, the term lumpenproletariat is central to the formation of national culture and to the process of decolonization. Stallybrass identifies in Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ an account of the uncanny return of Bonapartism, the spectre of the lumpenproletariat, the army, the police, the party and the leader turning against the masses and re-enacting a bourgeois hegemony. Stallybrass seems oblivious, however, to the fact that if Bonapartism represented the crowning moment of French colonialism, the colonial fascism which manifested itself in the period of Algerian decolonization was arguably nothing more than its by-product. As we shall see, Sartre identifies in de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 the reactionary policies of the Restoration and of the Second Empire, the uncanny return of Charles X and Bonaparte. Two points of criticism can be applied to Stallybrass’s analysis: first, he does not spell out the historical specificities of the colonized lumpenproletariat in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or what Sartre calls ‘sub-proletariat’. Stallybrass’s characterization of the sub-proletariat reproduces the Orientalizing discourse which he critiques in Marx, a discourse which shaped this class of people in Western bourgeois society generally and in Marxist theory specifically. His analysis does not



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nuance the heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat. In his discussion of Fanon, he lumps together the European lumpenproletariat and colonized sub-proletariat without taking into account the historical specificities which fashioned this substratum in colonial society. Second, and most importantly, he seems oblivious to the European lumpenproletariat’s role in consolidating bourgeois colonial hegemony. As I have established, the European lumpenproletariat was made up of both the finance aristocracy, which promoted colonial endeavour as capitalism became colonialist, and the lowest strata – the dregs of society, the ‘classes dangereuses’ – that threatened the internal security of mainland republican France. As a disposable, supplemental and surplus populace to be kept at the colonial margins, the lumpenproletariat was initially mobilized in the colonial army and subsequently deployed as agents of colonial settlement. Stallybrass’s discussion of the political is relevant only inasmuch as it takes into account the contradictions inherent within the universalizing rhetoric of republicanism and even more so of the Bonapartism that paved the way to France’s colonial conquests and buttressed the Empire and the ideological manipulations which belied the notion of ‘representation’. What Stallybrass apparently fails to see is that Bonaparte and Fanon represent two opposing extremities of France’s colonial history: its crowning moment (the Second Empire) and its collapse (the demise of the Fourth Republic). Stallybrass draws a rather simplistic parallel between two different historical moments, namely Bonapartism and Algeria’s decolonization. Heterogeneity in his critique obfuscates the specificities of these two distinct moments and elides the difference between the agents of colonial endeavour and those who are engaged in the process of decolonization. This heterogeneity is vacuous in Stallybrass’s analysis, emptying history of its colonial content – namely the annexation of Algeria under the Second Republic and Bonaparte’s imperialism. Let us now turn to this history by applying Marx’s discussion of the interplay of the political and the legal to Algeria’s colonization as expressed in his article on Bugeaud, commentary on the work of Kovalevski, La propriété collective du sol and finally letters written while recovering from a bout of pleurisy in Algeria between 20 February and 2 May 1882. It is my argument that Marx’s views here prefigure

174 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Sartre’s in ‘Colonialism Is a System’ and represent a critique of French colonialism which Fanon develops in The Wretched of the Earth. Marx and Sartre: the lumpenproletariat and French colonialism in Algeria Marx and Engels characterize Bugeaud as figurehead of the lumpenproletariat. To put this characterization in its context, it is instructive to make a cursory reference to the Foreign Legion which was under his command during his conquest of Algeria. Formed by the Royal Ordinance of 10 March 1831, the Legion served exclusively overseas and enlisted Polish, Italian, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and German volunteers.60 Two years later, it comprised three Swiss and German battalions, as well as an Italian one in Algiers; a Spanish battalion in Oran and a German and Belgian one in Bône. The colony was considered an asylum for those who lived at the margins of society and the Legion was perceived less as a military tool than an outlet for surplus populace. ‘Scum’ of the European armies, the Legion drafted murderers and thieves; its soldiers, unscrupulous and untrustworthy, were prone to desertion.61 In 1832, the battalions of African Light Infantry were created and, in 1838, three battalions – each of 1600 men – were recruited from inmates of military prisons. The cynical nickname for these soldiers – the ‘Merry Ones’ (‘Les Joyeux’) – referred to the fact that they were only happy when wreaking havoc wherever they went in their colonial conquest of Algeria. It is important to stress that the Legion was not a homogenous entity: it included a squad of Turks and Koulouglis, the Spahis, the Chasseurs d’Afrique and the Zouaves. Formed in 1830, the Zouaves recruited a small number of Kabyle volunteers. However, after the July Revolution, recruits from the so-called ‘classes dangereuses’ – that is, the lumpenproletariat of Paris – came to bolster the Zouaves. The monarchy was clearly keen to rid itself of these pernicious elements; a number of these recruits were destitute, in rags, flee-ridden and went barefoot. Bugeaud led the African Legion, this army in rags recruited to deploy the most brutal methods of warfare in the conquest of Algeria. One of these methods that Bugeaud instituted and justified as a military strategy to break the resistance of the natives was the technique of



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the razzia, namely destroying the means of the natives’ subsistence and subjecting them to famine and ruin.62 The brutality perpetrated against the Algerians was unspeakable. In the conquest, French soldiers plundered, burnt and looted silos of grain and livestock, murdered and raped. La Moricière and Pélissier were the most ruthless leaders of the African Legion and the most callous technicians of the razzia. Charles-André Julien aptly characterizes La Moricière as a ‘virtuoso of the razzia’, Montagnac as a ‘paranoiac’ and Yûsuf as a ‘professional butcher’.63 In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx contends that the technology of warfare was learnt in the colony and that the army as an instrument of repression in the 1848 Revolution and in the Commune was formed in colonial Algeria.64 With Bugeaud, we witness the boomerang effect: he who was responsible for the massacre of the rue Transnonain went to Algeria in order to hone his military skills and pacify Algeria; but after vanquishing Abdelkader, he once again turned his colonial might against the revolutionaries in France. Bugeaud, head of the lumpenproletariat, acted as an agent of repression at home when he offered to deploy his colonial army to break the revolutionary movement in 1948. Engels laments the blood spilt by French soldiers, the pillage, the razzias and violence perpetrated against native Algerians; Marx also denounces the atrocities of Pélissier, who burnt alive Arabs sheltering in a cave.65 As Engels observes, Algeria provided a harsh and difficult terrain for the prosecution of war and did not impart discipline to the French soldiers who spent more than four decades conquering Algeria: they engaged in acts of brutality and pillage; they were very poor soldiers intoxicated with alcohol and prone to desertion. The Crimean War exposed the shortcomings of the French colonial army. Faced with an organized German army in the Prussian War, French officers lacked discipline and strategy; they led France to a humiliating defeat culminating in the collapse of the Second Empire. Algeria was a school where war was taught badly, apparently, and Bugeaud did not hesitate to marshal this army to quell the revolutionary class in France, treating the revolutionaries in the same way the Arabs were treated; in Marx’s words, as ‘ferocious and brute beasts’.66 As I have noted, Stallybrass criticizes Marx for reproducing the Orientalizing characterization of the lumpenproletariat as a distinct race. However,

176 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference he overlooks the Orientalizing attitudes vis-à-vis the colonized Arabs of the Mobile Guards led by Bugeaud and Pélissier. In ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, René Gallissot rightly underscores the complexity of the colonial process which determined Algerian culture and society, its economy and politics: the French state with its judicial, civil and military apparatuses worked both to dismantle the traditional structures which governed pre-colonial Algeria and to change the prevalent mode of production. In ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie au moment de la conquête française’ (written in response to Kovalevski’s book), Marx analyses the implications of French colonial laws – namely the sénatus-consulte of 1863 and the Warnier Law of 1873 that expropriated the native Algerians of their landed property and made it available for colonial settlements. These laws precipitated the parcelization of collective property, a process which went hand in hand with its privatization. The breakup of tribal property was accompanied by the promotion of individualism and capitalist ideology.67 Prior to its colonization, Algerian society retained an archaic form of land ownership. The predominant type of property was collective, belonging to the aarch (the tribe or extended family).68 Blood relations bounded the members of the aarch together and rooted them to the land. This sort of property was handed down from generation to generation. As Marx observes, only the extended family was the subject of law that defined land tenure: the homestead was indivisible and so was the land. This principle of land indivisibility was introduced by the Arabs and survived centuries of Arab and Turkish domination but came under serious attack in 1863 and 1873. Marx concludes that these laws had as their aim the dismantling of the tribes as sociological units and the destabilizing of their economy. Pre-colonial Algeria – a tightly knit society – was governed by gerontocracy. Property was communal and the family provided the tools of work benefiting all its individual members. Work consolidated the bonds of kinship and the family was not just a union of individuals but also the aggregate of all objects owned by the group. Individual property was brought about by the parcelization of tribal property. This process of decomposition was set in train by France’s colonization of Algeria. In nineteenth-century bourgeois France, the individual was the subject of law and the institution of private land ownership was



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considered a prerequisite to social and political development. In 1851, Didier, a député to the National Assembly, announced to the Parliament of France that ‘we have to activate the destruction of communities which are based on blood relations and whose leaders are opposed to our rule’.69 Under the pretext of protecting tribal property from unscrupulous speculation, the sénatus-consulte of 1863 instigated its parcelization. Appointed to implement the recommendations of the sénatus-consulte of 1863, General Allard endeavoured to pulverize the tribe and weaken the power of tribal leaders. In the debates which introduced the Warnier Bill to the National Assembly on 30 June 1873, deputy Humbert reiterated General Allard’s view that the purpose of the proposed legislation was to parcelize tribal land. He made it clear to the National Assembly that the introduction of the bill meant the implementation of individual property. The Warnier Law handed collective property over to market speculation and precipitated the collapse of the traditional family; it sought to break the resistance of the tribe, expropriate indigenous property and promote colonial settlements. The sénatus-consulte and the Warnier Law were part of a programme of social engineering that had serious ramifications: they triggered the breakdown of the economic, political and cultural structures that governed traditional society; and they destabilized the foundations of a society founded on blood relations and on the principle of the indivisibility of land and homestead.70 As Marx remarks, paternal authority was substituted by legal (political and official) authority. The caïd, in the pay of the colonial administration, stood in lieu of the tribal leader as a figure of symbolic and political authority. The advent of bourgeois ideology in the form of the parcelization of collective property impacted negatively on traditional society, bringing about its atomization. The aarch was replaced by the douar (village), and the extended family as the most significant sociological and political unit in Algerian society was supplanted by the ‘individual’ as the embodiment of legal, political and official authority. Algerian society underwent a process of dislocation. As Ferhat Abbas puts it, the collective strength of traditional sodality was replaced by ‘individual particles’ that could not withstand colonialism: collective strength surrendered to the forces of a capitalist economy and was replaced by an ethos of bourgeois ideology promoting individual egotism.

178 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference The sénatus-consulte and the Warnier Law, by instituting the alienability of property, destroyed the traditional structures of Algerian society. These laws dispossessed and uprooted the tribes, they also thwarted anti-colonial resistance. Marx’s analysis goes beyond crude economism, nuancing an approach that takes into account the interplay of the legal and the political in determining the economy of colonial Algeria. The introduction of private property created small unsustainable holdings of 1 to 4 hectares that could not feed the native Algerians and put them at the mercy of unscrupulous speculators who expropriated them.71 However, Marx did not live to witness the impact which these laws had on the economy of Algerian society. The intersectionality of politics and law is the centre of Marx’s analysis of French colonialism and the destabilizing impact it had on the economy of Algerian society. Before I turn to the colonial legacy of Bonapartism (which climaxed in the Algerian War), let me hasten to say that Sartre and Fanon are indebted to Marx. As Marx in ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie au moment de la conquête française’, Sartre, in ‘Colonialism Is a System’, shows how the Algerian peasantry was turned into a sub-proletariat. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon elaborates in a similar way by arguing that in colonized countries like Algeria, the lumpenproletariat was the urban arm of the peasantry that was dispossessed and displaced by the settlers. In ‘Colonialism Is a System’, Sartre argues that colonial Algeria was an inchoate idea in the aftermath of the July Revolution; colonialism, as a system, ‘took more definite shape during the Second Empire as a result of industrial and commercial expansion’;72 and this system was governed by the logic of capitalism as capitalism itself became imperialist. The colonial laws (namely the sénatus-consulte and Warnier Law) obeyed the logic of a rapacious capitalism, expropriating the natives, uprooting them from their land and ultimately turning them into a sub-proletariat. Colonization is not a random occurrence: it is a system which was put in place in the early nineteenth century and reached its zenith in the 1880s when capitalism was in full expansion; it started to decline in the early 1900s and became bankrupt in the 1950s.73 Sartre analyses its internal logic; a logic ostensibly determined by capitalism.



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To start with, it is important to emphasize the role played by the lumpenproletariat in consolidating France’s colonial project in Algeria. Colonial expansions relied on the lumpenproletariat – the finance aristocracy and the ‘rabble’74 population which was considered disposable surplus. While this expendable surplus populace was encouraged to leave the country, surplus capital was not allowed to migrate to the colony. As an emergent capitalist nation, France was ‘awash with capital’75 and surplus capital was invested to develop French industry rather than the colonies. Industrial growth meant that France needed new outlets for its industrial products. A number of crucial decisions – at the level of politics, economy, jurisdiction and military strategy – were taken to manage both surplus capital and populace and establish these new outlets. Initially, colonialism attempted to manage surplus population or, in Sartre’s words, channel ‘the overflow of the European countries, the poorest of France and Spain’.76 Settlements were created for this ‘rabble’ that was decimated by disease. With the advent of the Second Republic in 1848, Algeria became an integral part of French territory; and to the three newly created departments in Algeria, colonization brought the quarante-huitards – the classes dangereuses; in other words, the lumpenproletariat that lived at the margin of the productive forces, the ‘unemployed workers whose presence worried the “forces of law and order”’.77 As we have seen, legislation was passed to determine the status of the colonized natives and their property, and it is no coincidence that the Société de Crédit Foncier et de Banque (1863) and the Société Marseilleuse de Crédit, the Companies des Minerais de Fer de Mokta as well as the Société Générale des Transports maritimes à vapeur (1865) were established at the same time as the sénatus-consulte of 1863 and 1865 were promulgated. It is the nexus of this relationship between surplus capital and populace that gave rise to the notion of the lumpenproletariat as a mass of parasitic elements and as a force of capitalist expenditure which motivated colonialism. These elements were heterogeneous and included the finance aristocracy that promoted colonial expansion and the rabble that conquered Algeria, the high and the low, the mercantilist and the mercenary. Imperialism was not a manifestation of late capitalism but developed in tandem with an emergent capitalism. The internal necessity of colonial

180 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference settlements in Algeria was governed by the logic of industrial capitalism. This logic follows two steps. First, as I have argued, capitalism needed to find new outlets for its products. Colonialism artificially created new consumers with buying power and these consumers were not the dispossessed natives but the settlers. However, the latter did not have capital to purchase the industrial goods manufactured in mainland France. In order to ‘capitalize’ them, the French state extracted huge sacrifices from the natives by expropriating their property. As Sartre writes, ‘the French State gives Arab land to the colonists in order to create for them a purchasing power which allows French industrialists to sell them their products; the colonists sell the fruits of this stolen land in the markets of France’.78 The second step of this logic forced the expropriated fellahs (peasants) to ‘join the urban proletariat’.79 Capitalism made of the European lumpenproletariat an embourgeoized class and turned the native peasantry into a lumpenproletariat. It is important to note that Stallybrass obfuscates the specificities of colonial history and politics which gave rise to this sub-proletariat – which Fanon considers to be the most revolutionary class in colonial society – in a universalizing Marxist critique of the European lumpenproletariat. As Sartre remarks, ‘the French state had brutally and artificially created the conditions of capitalist liberalism in an agricultural and feudal country’.80 ‘The story of Algeria,’ he writes, ‘is the progressive concentration of European land ownership at the expense of Algerian ownership.’81 It is also the story of the co-option of the European lumpenproletariat and the recruitment of the classes dangereuses by bourgeois capitalism. The ‘rabble’ entered the productive force but their capitalization did not promote the industrialization of the colony. Colonial capitalism maintained a dual economy: an agricultural/feudal economy developed alongside European capitalism. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon demonstrates that this dual economy helped the latter thrive on the parasitic relation it developed with the former. Sartre underscores the significance of politics82 in shaping the colonial relation by analysing the decisions taken by the state to expropriate the Algerians, to promote settlements and to put in place the financial system and the network which allowed the settler to be a viable consumer for industrial capitalism. However, in his critique of colonialism as a system which developed in tandem with industrial capitalism in the



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nineteenth century, Sartre overlooks the significance of nationalism and the collusion of republican institutions with colonialism. In the events which culminated with the collapse of the Fourth Republic and which brought de Gaulle back to power, Sartre defended these institutions. It is true, as he maintains, that the story of Algeria was shaped by industrial capitalism; it is also true that the historical and political development of the French Republic went hand in hand with France’s colonization of Algeria and its consolidation of the Second Empire. Algeria’s colonization was incontrovertibly bound up with the history of the French Republic. One can trace the main lines of this story back to the foundation of First Republic. Algeria was one of very few countries that supported France when it was in the grip of dire economic conditions by providing vast quantities of grain. Paradoxically, this economic aid was at the origin of Algeria’s colonization, which took place as the July Revolution was unfolding. The constitution of the Second Republic annexed Algeria to French territory. The coup d’état of February 1852 which led Bonaparte to create the Second Empire represented a moment of rupture in the history of the Republic. Algeria was nonetheless the crowning moment of the Second Empire. After the capitulation of El Mokrani in 1871, France established its colonial hegemony; and the ‘passification’ of Algeria coincided with the end of Bonaparte’s reign and the advent of the Third Republic. Significantly, the Algerian War contributed to the political instability of the Fourth Republic and was a crucial factor in its collapse and the circumstances that led to the emergence of the Fifth Republic in June 1958. Notwithstanding the universalistic rhetoric, republican institutions developed alongside France’s colonial expansions. The political difficulties France experienced in the late 1950s stemmed from the historical relation which such institutions had with colonialism and the Second Empire. Two key moments in the Algerian War changed the internal dynamics of French politics: the Battle of Algiers and the political events which brought de Gaulle to power, culminating in the collapse of the Fourth Republic. The socialist Guy Mollet campaigned in the legislative elections of January 1956 to form a coalition government on the basis of a commitment to negotiate with the FLN and restore peace. However, after facing the ultras who pelted him with rotten tomatoes on his visit to Algiers, 6 February 1956, Mollet went back on his election

182 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference pledges and instead pursued a policy of pacification by deploying scores of conscripted soldiers to quell the FLN rebellion. This change of direction marked the beginning of the Battle of Algiers. On 12 March 1956, he passed the Special Powers Act implementing a programme of actions which bypassed the National Assembly and ultimately ceded power to the military – a course of action that was of dubious legality under French law and that went against the grain of the republican tradition. On 7 January 1957, the civilian authorities relinquished power to the military and Massu was given special powers to crush the FLN organization. As Lyotard observes, from that moment power was held by Massu and the ultras rather than Lacoste; the political agenda of mainland France was determined by Algiers rather than Paris. The army and civil government in Algiers were in cahoots. This collusion undermined France’s republican principles and political institutions. The Algerian War created a power vacuum which gave rise to colonial fascism. The Sakhiet crisis (8 February 1958) and the attendant putsch of 13 May 1958 brought to the fore the internal contradictions inherent in the colonial structures as well as in France’s republican institutions. Fascism reared its head with the putsch, but its specificities must be sought at the level of colonial history, which harks back to that Bonapartism which Stallybrass considers to be a proto-fascistic movement. General de Gaulle – dubbed by Sartre the ‘President Prince’ – returned to power to bring the deteriorating situation in Algeria under control but ended up curbing the powers of the National Assembly and undermining the republican tradition, creating a confusion with regards to political representation. In this respect, was the putsch of 1958 a manifestation of Bonapartism? Were the generals plotting in the 13 May putsch re-enacting the excesses of nineteenth-century French colonialism? Was this a manifestation of the return of the repressed? The boomerang effect Sartre talks about in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth? The collapse of the Fourth Republic and the rise of the Fifth Republic from the ashes of the Algerian War must certainly be inscribed within the history of French republicanism and its flawed universalism which proclaimed the inalienability of individual rights and yet instigated a murderous colonialism. It must be inscribed not only within the history of the July Revolution of 1830 that led to the



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colonization of Algeria days before Charles X reign came to an end, but also within the history of the Second Republic that annexed Algeria to French territory. The failure of representation which Stallybrass discusses with regards to Bonapartism must be sought at the level of this history, with its contradictions and disjunctions, at the level of a republicanism that betrayed its universal aspirations and became colonial. In his analysis, Stallybrass fails to discern how capitalism led by finance aristocracy – or to put it in Marxist term ‘the lumpenproletariat’ – played a crucial role in helping Bonapartism realize its colonial ambitions and consolidate the Second Empire. Colonialism was an important factor in the problem of representation raised by Stallybrass: the heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat lies in the fact that this category represented not only the poor, the ‘déclassés’, the ‘Mobile Guard’ and the mercenaries hired in the colonial army, but also the finance aristocracy which established one of the cornerstones of French Empire. Stallybrass does not grasp the fact that this lumpenproletariat differed in its cultural and historical specificities from the one Fanon discusses in The Wretched of the Earth. He seems to confuse the European lumpenproletariat as agents of colonial endeavour in the nineteenth century with the native sub-proletariat Fanon regards as the most revolutionary class in Algeria’s decolonization. In his articles published in L’Express campaigning against the referendum, Sartre argues that the changes to the constitution proposed by de Gaulle were a threat to civil liberties and to France’s republican institutions. He deplores the fact that ‘[t]he officers and European civilians have designated him to exercise, in the name of the colonists, an unconditional dictatorship over the people of mainland France’.83 Alluding to Charles X, who instigated the colonization of Algeria, Sartre refers to de Gaulle as Charles XI,84 the pretender who was brought back to power to preside over the demise of the Fourth Republic and the French Empire. Like Louis-Philippe, de Gaulle seemed to govern with the help of what could be described as the lumpenproletariat; that is, ‘the feudal landowners of Algiers and major financial capital’85 and the colonial army. Following in the footsteps of Louis-Philippe, he ‘packed his ministries with bankers’. Charles de Gaulle allowed ‘financial capital … to control the State’ by ‘freeing the executive from the play of Parliament’.86 The interest in Sartre’s analysis lies in its

184 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference immediacy and its ability to capture the dangers which colonial fascism posed to the sovereignty of the Republic that had degraded itself by ‘laying the sheaf of its freedoms at the jackbooted feet of the military’.87 For Sartre, the return of de Gaulle summoned up other turns and returns in French history: the July Monarchy and the spectre of Bonapartism. His return to power (as it signalled the collapse of the Fourth Republic) blackmailed France with the paras.88 One of the ironies of history is the rabble class of mercenaries that conquered and settled in Algeria – the European lumpenproletariat which colonialism capitalized, the ultras, the partisans of French Algeria – turned the army pacifying an insurgent Algeria against Paris and the French Republic. Clear parallels could be established between Bugeaud and Pélissier in the nineteenth century and Massu and Salan in the Algeria War. Much like Bugeaud and Pélissier, Massu and Salan threatened with the help of the colonial army to muzzle France and undermine its republican institutions. A great deal is said about the threat of colonial fascism in connection with the 13 May putsch, but very little about its historical roots. To grasp what the putsch represented in military terms, one has to go back to the history of the July Monarchy, 1848 and the Commune, when the colonial army was deployed to break the revolutionaries and the working class. Its origins are to be found in the history of a republican France which became colonial. Sartre presents the putsch which brought de Gaulle back to power as the spectre of Bonapartism. With the investiture of de Gaulle, the ‘prince pretender’, history arguably turned full circle to mark the end of Empire and expose the fascism inherent in republican discourse. Césaire had a field day exposing this fascism in his Discours sur le colonialisme. It is instructive to note that homogeneity and heterogeneity – constitutive of the dialectical manoeuvring – was determined by the interplay of the universal and colonial. From the moment of its inception, the universality of French republicanism was entangled with bourgeois and colonial ideology. A close scrutiny of the history of the French Republic shows that it was bound up with the history of Algeria’s colonization and the establishment of the Empire. Arguably, the threat of colonial fascism in connection with the 13 May putsch that brought de Gaulle to power was nothing but a manifestation of the excesses of republicanism and its universality. It is precisely this universality



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which Fanon rejects in the concluding pages of The Wretched of the Earth. The asylum and postcolony Drawing on Peter Stallybrass’s critique of Marx’s notion of the lumpenproletariat, Khanna attempts to rethink the interplay of politics and psychiatry. Like Stallybrass, she criticizes Marx for situating the lumpenproletariat outside history and the political manoeuvres of dialectics. She also takes him to task for reproducing the bourgeois moralizing and Orientalizing discourse which demonizes the lumpenproletariat thus: ‘the rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed [or the unoccupied, to give a more precise translation of Marx’s term die Unbeschäftigen], the starving, wretched and criminal workingmen – these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain’.89 Following Stallybrass’s lead, she argues that Marx, unlike Fanon, does not consider the lumpenproletariat as a political force, but rather as spectral figures situated outside the domain of political economy. She asserts that The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ‘threatens to question the understanding of the political function of representing heterogeneity’.90 Like Stallybrass, she presents fascism and Bonapartism as closely related movements, but fails to establish the resonance fascism has with colonialism, which reached its zenith in Bonapartism. She effectively supplements Stallybrass’s Marxist reading with deconstructive theory to nuance the notion of the political in Fanon. She reiterates Stallybrass’s claim that the interplay of homogeneity and heterogeneity is constitutive of the political, and that Fanon (unlike Marx) ascribes to the lumpenproletariat – ‘the waste products of colonial society’91 – an active political force akin to that which Marx gives to the proletariat. She considers the asylum as the ‘supplement of the colonial and the independent state – incommensurable with state politics and yet perhaps a site of the purely political’.92 Khanna finds faults with Cedric Robinson for claiming that The Wretched of the Earth represents a radical departure from psychoanalysis.93 She disputes his assertion that Fanon harnesses all his energies

186 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference to focus on the revolutionary impetus of the peasantry and jettison psychoanalysis: the fact that he concludes with a discussion of the asylum and the case studies at the Blida-Joinville Hospital supports her point of criticism. I agree with Khanna that The Wretched of the Earth does not necessarily take up the revolutionary struggle of the peasantry and ‘leaves the psychic life of decolonization behind’.94 Besides, I concur with her view that there is a tendency to interpret Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as a manifesto of decolonization and overlook the significance of psychoanalysis. The originality of his work, she argues, lies in providing a new definition of nationhood, one which takes into account the intersectionality of politics and psychiatry. She is right to maintain that Fanon does not move away from psychiatry in The Wretched of the Earth, and that the political and the psychoanalytical are inextricably bound up together. She inscribes his text within a broader movement of psychiatric work led by Foucault, positing the conceptual opposition between madness and civilization as ‘a mechanism of power in which the poor, the mad and the criminal are incarcerated’.95 She identifies the subject of this disciplinary exercise in the figure of the lumpenproletariat as the topos of the Derridean supplemental difference to be ostracized and excluded; she also reinscribes this supplemental difference within the theoretical perspectives of Gramsci’s and Spivak’s ‘subaltern’. Nonetheless, by conceiving of the asylum as a site of postcolonial radical indeterminacy, Khanna goes beyond the scope of Fanon’s conceptualization of decolonization. In the postcolony, she maintains, those seeking sanctuary will be the ‘wretched of the earth’, namely those who do not have any moral worth – like Marx’s lumpenproletariat ‘scum’.96 She establishes a correlation between the subaltern and the lumpenproletariat, and between the latter and those who are psychiatrically alienated, and in so doing she undertakes a ‘post-humanist reading’ of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a reading that enables her ‘to think continuity between the mad and the wretched – the mad as the wretched, and the wretched as mad, the mad and the refugee together in search of sanctuary or asylum’.97 Khanna uses the trope of the asylum to throw into sharp relief the marginalization of asylum seekers in the postcolony. It must be said, however, that the rhetoric she employs to draw attention to



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their expulsion from the political pathologizes rather than politicizes the lumpenproletariat. In her conceptualization of the postcolony, she neutralizes the historical specificities of heterogeneous discourses at work: those of colonialism, psychiatry and postcolonialism. By lumping together asylum seekers, hordes of vagrants, prostitutes and petty criminals and patients suffering mental health, she fuses heterogeneous social groups, and confuses political and cultural exclusion with mental alienation. By pathologizing the lumpenproletariat, she runs the risk of psychologizing asylum seekers, replicating the ethnocentric discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which conceived of difference as ‘alien’ and ‘mad’. Khanna’s 2013 article, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, anticipated the migratory waves that later arrived in Southern Europe. Arguably, the hordes of migrants from the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa landing on the shores of Italy and Greece could be characterized as the postcolonial lumpenproletariat, victims of historical colonialism, civil and ethnic wars and both manmade famines and those occasioned by climate change and industrial capitalism. By and large, this lumpenproletariat originates from a deracinated peasantry; its uprooting and displacement must be sought at the level of history and politics, rather than psychoanalysis. In Khanna’s view, Fanon’s call to abandon the chimera of Europe and to seek a new humanism necessitates a re-conceptualization of the notions of psychiatry and asylum. She considers his work with the Algerian refugees at the Ghardimaou camp as an extension of his psychiatric practice at the asylum; she merges his political activities with his psychiatric practice, thus conceiving of the postcolonial and postindependence state as a sanctuary for the stateless and the marginalized. It is important to recover the context from which Fanon intervenes to discuss the intersection of madness and (de)colonization. In ‘North African Syndrome’, he establishes a conceptual correlation between politics and psychiatry, positing that colonialism alienated the North African people politically, culturally and psychologically. In ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, he contends that their marginalization and exclusion in colonial society, their uprooting and their cultural dislocation, were the root causes of their alienation. In

188 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference The Wretched of the Earth, elaborating further on ‘North African Syndrome’, he maintains that Algerian criminality and violence were not symptomatic of an innate mental deficiency, but were manifestations of colonialism. As has been noted in Chapter 4, French colonial policies impacted negatively on the political and economic structures of traditional society, and on the psychology of the colonized Algerians. As we have seen in Marx’s analysis, French colonial policies expropriated and precipitated the destruction of the aarch, the most important sociological unit in Algerian society. With this breakup of the extended family came the promotion of individualism. In Le Déracinement, Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad concur with Ferhat Abbas’s view that individualism was alienating for the colonized Algerians. It fractured traditional family and gave rise to a large mass of dispossessed people – alienated from their land and traditional homesteads – who were banished to the margins of colonial society. The peasantry was forcibly uprooted from its land and displaced to constitute what Fanon calls the lumpenproletariat. This notion is confusing in Khanna’s account. Although there is a correlation between the political and psychological alienation of the Algerians, these two different sorts of alienation must not be conflated. Proletarianization indeed gave rise to madness. It is, however, erroneous to think that the latter (a medical condition) and the lumpenproletariat (a sociological substratum) are interchangeable categories. It is instructive to discern the multiplicity of meanings that the notion of ‘lumpenproletariat’ connotes. As has been discussed, the lumpenproletariat emerged historically from the context of industrial capitalist Europe as the supplemental Other of the bourgeoisie. It is also worth reiterating that elements of this class acted as agents of colonial endeavour and that this class has its own specificities and must not be confused with the colonized lumpenproletariat – the expropriated peasantry – Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. Arguably, this sub-proletariat is the Other of the bourgeois supplemental Other which colonialism capitalized in its conquest of Algeria. In Khanna’s critical appraisal, the lumpenproletariat is a monolithic concept that obfuscates Marx’s lumpenproletariat and Fanon’s sub-proletariat, confusing the former as colonial agents with the latter as subjects of anti-colonial resistance.



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Taking her cue from Derrida, Khanna conceives of the mad/ lumpenproletariat, in Derridean terms, as a supplement of the colonial state. However, this marginal figure emerges in her deconstructive critical agenda as a key player in determining the site of the political. Enunciating the mechanisms of power and the subject of exclusion in deconstructive terms, she contends that ‘[Fanon] understands the situation of colonialism to produce a supplementary and disposable population – those in asylums and those seeking asylums’.98 In her deconstructive theorizing, the supplement is at one and the same time ‘confinement and excess’; it is also a ‘critique’.99 Khanna conflates a number of issues here as she moves quickly from the colonial to the postcolonial, from the specific to the general, from history to theory. Let us pause for a moment and attempt to disentangle some of them. Khanna is adamant that ‘Fanon situated the mad as one of the futures of an independent postcolony through thinking the coming together of the asylum constituted through French democracy’.100 In her critical account, the asylum is, paradoxically, at one and the same time a site of marginalization and a sanctuary for those who bear the burden of abjection at the heart of French democracy. Khanna raises an incisive issue but does not really explain how French democracy both constituted the asylum and worked to alienate and incarcerate difference. French democracy, she argues, has created at its periphery the supplement of madness. However, it is worth noting that it is not French democracy per se but its excesses which engendered violence and gave rise to madness. She asserts, but does not explain, how historically ‘the frame of French democracy itself […] developed with and against colonialism’.101 Khanna evokes the violence perpetrated against an Arab boy who was forcibly made to witness the torture and brutal murder of his parents and sisters. In his Preface to Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Fanon alludes to the news report in which Mrs Christian Lilliestierna describes the story of this boy who vowed to cut his tormentors up into ‘small pieces, tiny pieces’.102 It is extremely difficult, Fanon writes, ‘to make this child of seven forget both the murder of his family and his enormous vengeance’.103 Fanon regrets that violence is the sole legacy

190 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference which French democracy bequeathed this little boy. The ‘apocalyptic language’ he uses to avenge the atrocities perpetrated against his family points for Khanna to an abstract view of democracy in the (post)colony. Fanon’s account of this story in Studies in a Dying Colonialism must be re-inscribed in the series D case studies that he investigates in The Wretched of the Earth. This language was determined by colonial violence and drew its significance from the Algerian War. Khanna conflates deconstructive criticism with Fanon’s colonial critique, confounding the history of colonial Algeria with what she terms the ‘Postcolony’. However, her insistence on the intersectionality of psychiatry with politics should not mislead us into accepting an easy equivalence between the inhabitants of the asylum and the lumpenproletariat. Fanon clearly establishes a correction between politics and psychiatry, between colonialism and alienation, between violence and the Algerian War and mental health. It is important to analyse the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, ‘Concerning Violence’, in tandem with his pronouncement on neo-humanism in the concluding chapter. He presents the ‘new man’ as a Sphinx-like figure that emerges from the ashes of the Algerian War. Violence, argues Fanon, has two opposing significations: on the one hand, it is colonial and dehumanizing; on other hand, anti-colonial and humanizing. The latter – because engendered by the former – must not be confused with the former. Moreover, the lumpenproletariat spearheading the revolutionary movement, those at the margins of colonial society, those who were dispossessed and displaced by French colonialism, must not be mistaken for the mentally ill treated by Fanon in the asylum. Khanna’s theorization of the supplement as ‘both confinement and excess and as critique’ obscures this difference by failing to differentiate between heterogenous discourses that engendered ‘alienation’ in its political and psychiatric sense of the term. The conceptual terms of these discourses are by no means coterminous. By conflating the critique with the mechanism of exclusion and its subjects, Khanna elides the specificities of the colonial narrative. The lumpenproletariat appears as a homogenous construct in her reading of Fanon. Despite his attempt to mobilize this class, not all its constitutive elements are revolutionary. Madness was undoubtedly a product of the colonial history but it is erroneous to think of it as revolutionary.



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By the same token, the asylum was, and still is, a site of disciplinary exclusion but could not really be conceived of as a state of postcolonial emancipation. The asylum – as an institution and mechanism of containment for subjects of mental illness – must not be confused with the political condition of the stateless and the apatrides. Moreover, it is misleading to infer from Fanon’s critique of the School of Algiers (which he initiated in ‘The North African Syndrome’) that the subject of madness is a revolutionary subject or that it is a postcolonial prototype. In itself, the subject of mental illness is neither revolutionary nor postcolonial. In sum, Khanna merges deconstructive poststructuralism with the history of madness occasioned by colonialism; she formulates her critique within an economy of supplementarity, confusing the process of exclusion and containment with the subjects engendered by such process. Conclusion The Fanonian conception of the ‘new man’ as outlined in The Wretched of the Earth has its roots in Studies in a Dying Colonialism. Two pointers help us grasp this conception. First, the mummified society is rendered dynamic by the revolutionary praxis – and the ‘reality of the nation’ gives rise to the new man; second, the tone of the book is conciliatory: in its attempt to consolidate the unity of the movement, the book glosses over the internal divisions, undertaking to reconcile ethnic minorities, European and indigenous, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. Fanon’s incendiary discourse in the preface announces the rhetoric of violence as a necessary conclusion to colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. A number of critics misinterpret Fanon’s point on violence: it is not the death of the European or the Frenchman that Fanon wills, but rather the symbolic death of colonialism, which he considers as the preamble of the new humanism which decolonization will usher in. In Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Fanon writes about the historical rupture that was taking place in colonial Algeria. He inscribes the Algerian Revolution within a teleology which marked the disruption of French colonialism within a perspective of before and after, separated by a radical disjunction that Fanon calls the ‘Revolution’. For Fanon,

192 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference the Algerian War represents a radical break with traditional society and its colonial past. The revolution announced the end of the colonial state and the advent of a new era. It constituted a historical process that empowered the colonized Algerians to enter universal society. The revolution helped them sever the web of colonial history which mummified their society. It provided a new language for the colonized Algerian and this language was instrumental in the historical process of nation building and in the transformation of colonial society. As we will see in the concluding chapter, the revolution made good what revolutionary France failed to deliver: universal brotherhood and humanism. Capitalist liberalism maintained an imperialist project which undermined France’s democratic and republican institutions, and the crux of my argument here in this chapter is that Fanon, following on from Marx, writes in The Wretched of the Earth not a communist manifesto, but the manifesto of decolonization. In this manifesto he envisages the decentring of capital(ism) and the empowerment of those who were uprooted and displaced by its colonialist politics, namely the peasantry. In short, Les Damnés de la terre is an anthem that draws its significance from the Internationale, but one that rethinks a Marxist orthodoxy that has overlooked the significance of the colonial question: the fact that capitalism developed alongside rapacious colonialism which displaced and uprooted an immiserated peasantry.

Notes 1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 31. 2 Tony Martin, ‘Rescuing Fanon from the Critics’, African Studies Review, 13:3 (December, 1970), p. 387. 3 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 47. 4 Martin, ‘Rescuing Fanon from the Critics’, p. 389. 5 Martin, ‘Rescuing Fanon from the Critics’, pp. 387–388. 6 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 119. 7 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 119. 8 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 120. 9 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 121. 10 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122. 11 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122 12 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122. 13 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 123.



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14 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 126. 15 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 125. 16 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 127. 17 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 129. 18 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 128. 19 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131. 20 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131. 21 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131. 22 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 132. 23 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 132. 24 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 132. Fanon contends that the leader comes to embody the manifestations of postcolonial dictatorship. As he puts it: ‘During the period of the struggle for independence there was one right enough, a party led by the present leader. But since then this party has sadly disintegrated; nothing is left but the shell of a party, the name, the emblem and the motto. The living party, which ought to make possible the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people, has been transformed into a trade union of individual interests’ (p. 136). 25 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 135. 26 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 140. 27 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 140–141. 28 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 142. 29 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 142. 30 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144. 31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144. 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 145. 33 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 150. 34 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 161. 35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 161. 36 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 110. 37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 110–111. 38 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 103. 39 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 103. 40 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 92. 41 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 65. 42 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Representations, 31 (Summer, 1990), p. 70. 43 Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 15. Cited in Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 80.

194 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 81. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 82. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 84. My emphasis. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 83. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 84. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 83. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 84. Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 70. ‘Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10.’ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 65. 52 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 84. 53 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 85. 54 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Work, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 51. 55 Roger Magraw, France 1815–1919: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 49. 56 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 88. 57 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 88. 58 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 70. 59 Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 89. 60 Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), pp. 270–279. 61 Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871), p. 271. 62 Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871), pp. 316–321. 63 Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871), p. 323. Algeria became a school which helped a number of generals graduate. As Julien perceptively notes, neither Pélissier and MacMahon in Crimea, nor Cousin-Montauban in China, nor Forey and Bazaine in Mexico proved themselves as great leaders (p. 330). It was these generals who led France in the Prussian War. 64 René Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, Le Mouvement social, 71 (April– June, 1970), p. 40. 65 Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, pp. 44–45. 66 Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, p. 44. 67 Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, p. 49.



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68 Karl Marx, ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie au moment de la conquête française’, trans. A. Gisselbrecht and A. TabouretKeller, in La Nouvelle Critique, 109 (September–October, 1959), pp. 73–80. Under Islamic law, the indigenous territory was declared as national wakuf and the Imam was its supreme ruler. Marx ironizes that Islamic law was misinterpreted to legitimize the appropriation of indigenous territory – namely the habous and aarch – on the grounds that Louis-Philippe was the successor to the Imam. Bonaparte also presented himself as the ruler of the royaume arabe with a view to consolidating French colonial rule in Algeria. 69 Marx, ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie’, p. 81. 70 Marx, ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie’, pp. 71–81. 71 Marx, ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie’, p. 84. 72 Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 32. 73 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 31. 74 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 32. 75 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 33. 76 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 32. 77 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 32. 78 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 36. 79 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 35. 80 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, pp. 35–36. 81 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, pp. 34–35. 82 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 31. 83 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 84. 84 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 89. 85 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 92. 86 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, pp. 92–93. 87 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 106. 88 Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 113. 89 Ranjana Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:1 (Winter, 2013), p. 135. 90 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 136. 91 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 137. 92 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 138. 93 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 134.

196 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 94 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 134. 95 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 130. 96 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, pp. 134–135. 97 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 138. 98 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 131. 99 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 131. 100 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 140. 101 Khanna, ‘The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum’, p. 133. 102 Fanon quotes the following extract from Mrs Christian Lilliestierna’s report: ‘The next in the line was a boy of seven marked by deep wounds made by a steel wire with which he had been bound while French soldiers mistreated and killed his parents and his sisters. A lieutenant had forcefully kept the boy’s eyes open, so that he would see and remember this for a long time … This child was carried by his grandfather for five days and five nights before reaching the camp. This child said: “There is only one thing I want: to be able to cut a French soldier up into small pieces, tiny pieces!”’ (Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 26.) 103 Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 26.

6 Tradition, translation and colonization

Introduction: radical Orientalism A radical Orientalism advanced the scope of the humanities: the interaction of the West with the East, the business of translation, the carrying across of knowledge from the East to the West; the movement of the sun from these two respective cultural locations as speculative endeavour is at the origin of what is called the Enlightenment. This sort of Orientalism at its moment of inception is at variance with the discursive formation Said describes in his seminal work Orientalism. This Orientalism represents the activities undertaken by the ῾Abbāsids to translate works from Greek and other cultures; it refers to an era in which knowledge flourished. At its zenith, Islamic civilization was genuinely a civilization of translation mediating between East and West, between the classical and our modern age. Western tradition assimilated without mediating the greatness of this civilization. What is perceived as Muslim fanaticism pertains to a different era, it ‘belong[s] to a subsequent age when Islamic civilization had sunk to dust and its creed had become transformed by Ash’ârite theology’.1 Europe tended to dwell on this fanaticism and underplayed the contribution of this civilization. ‘The debt of Europe to the “heathen dog” could, of course, find no place in the scheme of Christian history,’ writes Briffault, ‘and the garbled falsification has imposed itself on all subsequent conceptions.’2 Robert Briffault laments the fact that medieval history gives this civilization no more than ‘an off-hand and patronizing recognition’. This history is rewritten with the sole intention of

198 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference celebrating ‘the triumphs of the Cross over the Crescent’ and ‘the reclamation of Spain from the Moorish yoke’.3 Briffault reminds us that ‘[i]t was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, not in the fifteen century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe.’4 The Greco-Arabic translation movement represents an epochal stage in the history of the humanities and in the advancement of knowledge. Indeed, as Dimitri Gutas argues, it deserves the same recognition as that given to ‘Pericles’ Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it deserves so to be recognized and embedded in our historical consciousness’.5 Arguably, this movement not merely preserved and guaranteed the survival of Greek thought, but it came to define the very classicism upon which Europe of the Enlightenment founded modernity. Islamic culture is imbricated in the very foundation of Western epistemology. However, in the Western tradition, there is a sort of ‘intellectual fundamentalism’ that refuses to acknowledge the contribution of Islamic culture to the fields of sciences and to the humanities. The same ethnocentrism which conceals the fact that the Arabs made significant strides in the field of science (particularly in mathematics and medicine) is also at work in the study of the classics and philosophy. As a matter of fact, it created a diremption between Islamic culture and the classical heritage it helped preserve. It is important to deconstruct the ethnocentric underpinnings of the Western tradition which made Islam and classicism incongruous notions, as well as the foundational idea that the classics are inherited directly from ancient Greek and Latin. Arguably, this sort of intellectual fundamentalism and the religious fanaticism which putatively came to be associated with this culture represent two sides of the same coin: both are in fact sustained by an Orientalism which subjected the latter to the colonial rules of the former. Contrary to the Orientalizing characterization of Islam as a religion of fanaticism, I will show that through translation it in fact promoted rationalism. I will also provide a critique of Western colonialism which suppressed the contribution of the Arabs; through a consideration of Frantz Fanon, Abdelkabir Khatibi, Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, I will argue that a genuine decolonization must be sought at the level of European thought.



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The appropriative economy of Orientalism as a corporate institution of colonialism Translation was a vehicle which carried cultural artefacts from Greek and other traditions into Arabic. It was part of a complex infrastructure which helped develop the economy of the emergent Islamic Empire. It provided currency within an empire that connected major urban centres extending geographically from India, China and Byzantium to Black Africa and Christian Europe, thus establishing a very important bridge between these cultural locations and facilitating the circulation of cultural capital and productive exchange.6 From the eighth to the eleventh century, a syncretic culture developed in the Muslim Empire, with a network of urban cities, viz. ‘Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Kairouan, Fez, and Palermo, all of them important staging-posts on the route from Samarkand to Cordoba, [that] bore witness to the amazing unity of syncretic civilization with its vast movements of men, merchandise, and ideas, a civilization superimposed on the older regional, rural, or nomadic background’.7 Translation was bound up with trade: trade of ideas, but also trade of commodities. Maurice Lombard outlines the dynamics of the latter and its impact on the economy of Europe. Echoing the same view, Briffault maintains that with the introduction of the system of bills of exchange (i.e. the dinar), trade generated wealth in Moorish Spain and Sicily8 and had a major impact on the political economy of Europe. Not only did this new wealth establish trading posts, it also developed urban centres and created sites for cultural interchange. The strategic position of the Muslim Empire was advantageous to trade and translation, and the products of this intellectual endeavour were disseminated across a vast empire which impinged upon Southern Europe. The work of translation must not be understood in its strict sense as the rendering of a text from one language into another, but as movement of knowledge made possible thanks to the ‘caravans laden with manuscripts […] plied from Bokhara to the Tigris, from Egypt to Andalusia’.9 Nevertheless, Lombard identifies the eleventh century as a landmark that signalled a shift in power from East to West: ‘the centre of gravity of the Ancient World swung from one place to another. From now on, the nerve centres and centres of influence

200 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference of an expanding economy were no longer in the East, in the cities of the Muslim World. They moved westwards and became established in the mercantile cities of Italy and Flanders and, half-way along the great trade route linking them with each other, in the trade fairs of Champagne, where the products of Nordic lands and of Mediterranean countries were bought and sold.’10 This economic decline did not impact immediately on the intellectual influence of the Muslim Empire in the fields of philosophy and science. However, the Renaissance signalled a perceptible epistemological shift, marking the beginning of Europe’s dominance in these fields of intellectual endeavour. These epistemological shifts demonstrate that the Arabs edified an ‘intermediary civilization’.11 The translation movement – understood in terms of the cultural traffic which promoted cultural interchange between European and Islamic civilizations – can be characterized in Khatibi’s phraseology as a ‘radical Orientalism’. As we will see, this kind of Orientalism is at variance with the Orientalism Said describes. Western metaphysics wants to present itself as a coherent body of knowledge. Of course, this putative ‘closed’ system is nothing if not leaky; it is nothing but a mythic construction, a fabrication which seeks to hide its diverse sources of knowledge. To characterize this imposture and dishonesty, the epithet ‘plagiarism’ comes to mind. There is a great deal to be said about the implication of tradition in this business of plagiarism – that is, ‘appropriation’ as sort of ‘handing down’ of knowledge without acknowledgment or recognition. My aim in this chapter is to examine the ideological underpinnings of a foundational ‘Western tradition’ and its ‘classical’ texture, in order to deconstruct this (mis)conception of ‘Western’ metaphysics as the sole originator of modernity and all the ‘posts’ which have thus far come to critique it or to give credence to this fallacy. What is putatively designated as ‘Western’ has never been purely Western. Before I undertake this deconstructive project, let me first define concepts such as ‘classical’, ‘tradition’ and ‘translation’ as agencies implicated in this ideological mystification. The term ‘classical’ refers us to great works of ‘human imagination’ – to artefacts of literary and historical note which have enduring



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interest and value, in the sense that they are constitutive of the cultural heritage of ‘mankind’. Yet the humanities, as a discipline, is selective, since it purports to be a solely Western phenomenon, and my purpose here is to problematize the ethnocentrism inherent within it: the Western tradition boasts that it is the direct heir of the ‘classical’ body of literary works of ancient Greece and Rome, thus obfuscating the significance of other traditions which mediated these works. In other words, a direct, seamless and continuous line is deemed to connect Europe to ancient Rome and Greece, whence the light shone on the Renaissance that enlightened Europe. Before I question this classicist view of ‘Western tradition’, it is important to define the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘translation’ as its mediating agencies. Etymologically, ‘tradition’ originates from the Latin verb tradere: ‘to hand over or deliver’. According to Raymond Williams, the Latin noun connotes the following: first, ‘delivery’; second, ‘handing down knowledge’ or ‘passing on a doctrine’; third, ‘surrender or betrayal’.12 As we shall see, some of these connotations have complicit correlations with the term ‘translation’. But what I want to emphasize here is the ideological function of tradition as an agency of mediation in the sense that it is a transrelational process of selecting only significant aspects of one’s past and of handing these down through the generations. Tradition must not be thought of as the remnants of the dead past of history, but as an active process which shapes the future. Let me open a parenthesis to note that the concepts of translation and tradition both convey the idea of the delivery and handing down of meaning, but also the idea of treachery associated with ‘surrender’ and ‘betrayal’. A great deal has been said about the business of translation and treason; that is, the failure to render the original text without loss of signification. The Italian maxim captures this betrayal: traduttore, traditore. A great deal has also been said about the ideological mystification of tradition, in that certain cultural significations are obscured or relegated to marginality in the process of delivery. The parallel Robert Young draws between translation and postcolonialism is useful to throw light on the problematic nature of this process. In Postcolonialism, he establishes a connection between ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘translation’, a connection which could help us not only to define the

202 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference concept of translation better, but also to rethink the idea of classicism. In Young’s words: Nothing comes closer to the central activity and political dynamism of postcolonialism than the concept of translation. It may seem that the apparently neutral, technical activity of translating a text from one language into another operates in a realm very distinct from the highly charged political landscapes of postcolonial world. Even at a technical level, however, the links can be significant. Literally, according to its Latin etymology, translation means to carry or to bear across. Its literal meaning is thus identical with that of metaphor, which, according to its Greek etymology, means to carry or to bear across.13 In Post-colonial Translation, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi note that translation as metaphor denoting the function of ‘transposition’ and of ‘carrying across’ is spatial.14 Let me note in passing that the texture of classical Islamic civilization is patterned on a similar economy: translation as cultural transposition. The metaphorical displacement occasioned by the work of translation is governed by the rule of metaphor. Translation could be described as a means of transport: a mobile vehicle carrying meaning from place to place. This ‘taxing’ of meaning is, arguably, the very function of language, but one must be careful not to conflate translation as a function with its essential material of language. If the slippage from signifier to signifier gives rise to metaphorical displacement within a language, the ambivalence which characterizes the work of translation results from a movement between languages. It is a feature of bilingualism, or rather biculturalism. To grasp the semiological operation at work in translation, let me draw on Barthes’s definition of ‘connotation’ and ‘denotation’ and the very useful distinction he makes between the sign as constituted of signifier and signified at first-level signification, and the sign as signifier of mythology at second-level signification. With translation there is a third-level signification, for translation uses the whole linguistic system as signifier to vehicle the materiality of another linguistic system as its signified. Similarly to Barthes’s description of myth as a parasite



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that lives at the expense of the historical materiality of the sign, translation ‘cannibalizes’ the language which it translates. This cannibalistic appropriation smacks of plagiarism. In ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, Lori Chamberlain focuses on the issue of authority and on the ‘politics of originality’15 from a gendered perspective. In her account, the metaphorics of translation is not only marked by the dimensions of gender and sexuality, but also determined by the expropriating economy of colonial politics: The struggle for authorial rights takes place both in the realm of the family … and in the state, for translation has also been figured as the literary equivalent of colonization, a means of enriching both the language and literature appropriate to the political needs of expending nations.16 This view is similar to that of Bassnett and Trivedi, who argue: ‘Translation has been at the heart of the colonial encounter, and has been used in all kinds of ways to establish and perpetuate the superiority of some cultures over others.’17 For Chamberlain, translation is tantamount to the rape of the cultural resources of the colonized. Nietzsche held that ‘translation [is] a form of conquest’,18 and, similarly, Chamberlain considers translation as a ‘strategy of linguistic incorporation’.19 She describes translation as ‘rape’ and ‘pillage’ of another text with a view to ‘enrich[ing] the host language’.20 In the same vein as S. Gavronsky and G. Steiner, Chamberlain characterizes translation in sexual and colonial terms as ‘cannibalistic’ incorporation through assimilation, as an aggressive act of conquest or as ‘appropriative penetration’.21 Such ‘appropriative penetration’ is a manifestation of what Edward Said calls ‘Orientalism’. The three interrelating definitions of the concept that he provides could indeed help us comprehend its libidinous politics. First, Orientalism is a practice that cuts across several disciplines and that ‘lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental’.22 Second, it is an epistemology shaped by this academic practice, an ideology or a world-view which maintains an ontological difference between the West and its Oriental Other. Third, Orientalism is coterminous with colonialism, that ‘corporate institution’ which emerged in the eighteenth century and came to dominate the

204 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Orient. I will return to these three definitions later, it suffices to say at this stage that translation was an agency of this corporate institution. Through it, Orientalism was instrumental in interpreting the Orient, ‘dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’.23 Taking a cue from Foucault, Said contends that Orientalism as discourse, by translating the Orient, expresses power through the articulation of knowledge. Orientalism is therefore a by-product of translation; it is bound up with the history of a complex relation between two translation movements. The first movement under the ῾Abbāsids translated Greek and other cultural artefacts into Arabic, disseminated knowledge across the Islamic Empire and Medieval Europe and thus paved the way for the Renaissance. The second movement was represented by Orientalists who sought knowledge in the cultural institutions of this empire and embarked upon the translation of Arabic texts into Latin. Orientalism, which thrived in academe and which historically originated from this second movement, underwent a fundamental transformation. Translation, which until then had been an agency of cultural interchange between East and West, turned into an agency of political imposition. Orientalism brought about the closure of what is now perceived as the Western episteme by putting in place a Manichaeism which refuses to acknowledge the contribution of the Orient and which excludes it from its texture. It instituted what Said calls ‘a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’: a relationship in which the Orient is Orientalized.24 The domestication of the Orient was part and parcel of a process of translation as a textual domestification that endeavoured to assimilate the cultural materiality of the Orient, and more significantly to colonize it, without acknowledging its cultural referents. The heterogeneous history of the so-called Western episteme is neutralized through the appropriative economy of translation which obscures the specificities of its signifiers. In Les Hommes de l’Islam, Louis Gardet identifies three distinct periods in the history of the Muslims: first, a period of ascendancy which is characterized by the Muslims’ openness to other cultures; second, a period of decline and retreat into a culture which became



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inward-looking; third, a postcolonial period in which the Muslims sought to reconcile tradition with modernity.25 By being open to other cultures – and translation played a considerable role in this regard – the Arabs managed to cross-fertilize and diversify their culture. Many factors contributed to the achievements of classical Islamic civilization and to its humanist tradition. Significantly, as many scholars have remarked, what made Islamic culture great was its ‘selfconfident openness to what was of genuine value in the achievements of predecessors and contemporaries’. It is lamentable that this culture nowadays suffers from a ‘loss of confidence, a crabbed defensiveness and chafing chauvinism grounded in insecurity’.26 Western colonialism instigated its sclerosis. Ethnocentrism exacerbated (and continues to exacerbate) century-old tensions between Europe and Islam, the root cause of two sorts of fundamentalism: first, a European one that – though hiding under the cloak of universalism and the promotion of democracy – is governed by its colonialist impetus and bent on suppressing the Arabo-Islamic humanist tradition; and second, an Islamic reactive religious fundamentalism that goes counter to that which constituted this tradition – that is, its openness to, and translation of, other cultures. A cautionary remark is needed against the caricature – now so prevalent now in the West – demonizing this tradition. This reactive religious fundamentalism developed in tandem with globalization and arguably as a consequence of neo-liberalism. As has been suggested, decolonization must be sought at the level of European thought. Fanon, Laroui, Khatibi and Said engage with the decline and fall of this tradition but bring different approaches and solutions to this problematic. To start with Fanon, it is important to examine his views on decolonization, the pitfalls of nationalism and the essentialization of culture; it is also important to contextualize his misgivings about espousing the notions of Western humanism, development and progress, notions which were – and still are – implicated in colonial endeavour. Fanon: against the racialization of culture In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon establishes a parallel between men of culture who championed negritude and those who idealized the Arabo-Islamic past. Elaborating on the psycho-affective complexes

206 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference engendered in ‘men of culture’ – the advocates of negritude and AraboIslamism – who turned to a mythic past to counter colonialism, he writes: The example of the Arab world might equally well be quoted here. We know that the majority of Arab territories have been under colonial domination. Colonialism has made the same effort in these regions to plant deep in the minds of the native population the idea that before the advent of colonialism their history was one which was dominated by barbarism. The struggle for national liberty has been accompanied by a cultural phenomenon known by the name of the awakening of Islam. The passion with which contemporary Arab writers remind their people of the great pages of their history is a reply to the lies told by the occupying power. The great names of Arabic literature and great past of Arab civilization have been brandished about with the same ardour as those of the African civilizations. The Arab leaders have tried to return to the famous Dar El Islam which shone so brightly from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Today, in the political sphere, the Arab League is giving palpable form to this will to take up again the heritage of the past and to bring it to culmination. Today, Arab doctors and Arab poets speak to each other across the frontiers, and strive to create a new Arab culture and a new Arab civilization. It is in the name of Arabism that these men join together, and that they try to think together […] The living culture is not national but Arab. The problem is not as yet to secure a national culture, not as yet to lay hold of a moment differentiated by nations, but to assume an African or Arabic culture when confronted by the all-embracing condemnation pronounced by the dominating power. In the African world, as in the Arab, we see that the claims of the man of culture in a colonized country are all-embracing, continental and, in the case of the Arabs, world-wide.27 Colonialism denigrated the Negro, pronouncing that the whole African continent was inhabited by savages; it also disparaged the Arabs for their backwardness. It sought legitimation by claiming that its civilizing



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mission was to lighten the darkness of the Negroes and to lift the Arabs from their barbarity. Not only did colonialism establish its hegemony over the colonized people by dominating their present and future, but perversely turned to their past to distort it. ‘This work of devaluing pre-colonial history,’ argues Fanon, ‘takes on a dialectical significance today.’28 He observes that the native’s attempt ‘to rehabitate himself and to escape the claws of colonialism are logically inscribed from the same point of view as that of colonialism’.29 The demonization of pre-colonial culture was dialectically reversed by the natives’ racialization – or more appropriately mythologization – of their cultural past in the period of decolonization. The idealization of the pre-colonial culture represented a ‘psycho-affective equilibrium’ which sought to rediscover ‘beyond the misery of today, beyond selfcontempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regards to ourselves and in regards to others’.30 Clearly, Fanon reinscribes decolonization within a Sartrean existential phenomenology, apprehending the colonized’s beings-for-others beyond an abject and nauseating colonialism. However, he warns that the essentialism of Negro and Arab intellectuals in their attempt to rehabitate their past obfuscates the historical specificities of culture as national, and that the racialization of culture (qua negritude) and the confusion of culture with religion (qua Arabo-Islamism) can only lead to a blind alley.31 In ‘Lettre à Ali Shariati’ (written shortly before his death in 1961), Fanon characterizes the West and colonialism as two foes that dealt the Arabo-Islamic world fatal blows. He concurs with Shariati that Islam has radical ideological and intellectual resources that – if harnessed – could revolutionize the Third World in its anti-colonial struggles and pave the way for emancipation and the foundation of a new humanity and civilization. Fanon invokes the significant contribution of the ulemas in Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle but cautions against the pitfalls of religious sectarianism. He also invokes intellectuals and political leaders such as Léopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta and Kateb Yacine, warning against the dangers of essentialism. He rejects the rhetoric of negritude and the sectarian language of those who idealize the Arabo-Islamic culture. He fears that religious sectarianism will thwart the independence, and hinder the development, of Third World nations.

208 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference In Fanon’s view, decolonization must not shut the colonized in an inward-looking nationalism; it is not ‘the closing down of a door to communication’ with others. On the contrary, national consciousness is a precondition for opening up dialogue with other independent peoples. He is adamant that it is ‘at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows’.32 It is through the project of nation-building that he envisages an ethics of decolonization which empowers subaltern cultures to open up to other cultures. Such an ethics of decolonization is at odds with the ethnocentrism underpinning the humanities. A critique of this institution – which, as we have seen, failed to mediate the heterogeneity of the history of knowledge – is beyond the scope of my critical inquiry. But what I will attempt here is a critique of its ideology: humanism and its implication in the colonial project. Fanon cautions against Western humanism, which ‘stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience’.33 He unmasks the putative ‘spiritual adventure’ of the West as nothing but a stratagem deployed to consolidate its colonial hegemony: ‘It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity.’34 Fanon situates this crisis at the level of ‘European thought’.35 He argues that this thought does not promote dialogue; rather, it shuts humankind in a solipsistic narcissism. Caught in a state of stasis, this thought was – and continues to be – characterized by its ‘motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium’; a logic sustained by the hegemonic force of colonial Europe.36 To rehumanize humanity, Fanon calls for a new epistemology, for the reinvention of a new language which will not be an ‘obscene caricature’ of the thought that governed old Europe. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon cautions against the pitfalls of nationalism which, as it became vacuous, did not express the hopes of the masses. In the post-independence period, the idea of ‘nation’ was supplanted by ‘race’ and that of the state by ‘tribe’. The various theocratic governments in Arab countries and brutal dictatorships in Africa were a case in point of ‘clientalist’ states, whose mission was



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not to serve the masses but the interests of ‘capitalism, rampant, though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism’.37 In these theocratic states and dictatorships, the party became a tool for ‘private advancement’, and repressive regimes were instituted to keep the people ‘hemmed in and immobilized’.38 In the post-independence period, ‘the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime’ and ‘[t]he strength of the police force and the power of the army are proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk’.39 In Western capitalist countries, the ‘dictatorship’ of the bourgeoisie was predicated on its economic hegemony; in under-developed Arab and African countries, we witnessed not ‘the rise of a bourgeois dictatorship, but a tribal dictatorship’, serving the clientalist interests of ‘the same ethnological group as the leader’.40 Carrying on from Fanon, Laroui analyses the historical and political factors which led to the mummification – or more precisely the mythologization and racialization – of Arabo-Islamic culture. As we will see below, he further elaborates on the pitfall of nationalism, the ‘dictatorship’ of the petty bourgeoisie and the crisis of Arab intellectuals, attributing the retardation of this culture to an alienated technocracy. Laroui and the crisis of Arab intellectuals The retardation of modern Arab society, maintains Laroui, stems not only from its encounter with European colonialism but also from its view of history and of the past. He distinguishes between tradition as a ‘social fact’ and as a ‘system of value’, between tradition as structure and as ideology.41 Raymond Williams (writing about the same time as Laroui) provides a positive definition of the concept of ‘tradition’ as distinct from a reified past. In his view, tradition is not an inert residue from the past but, like ideology, it is a constitutive process which ensures the survival, continuity and development of culture. Unlike Williams, Laroui defines the concept negatively in relation to the notion of progress and development characterizing European modernity. This definition accords with Fanon’s description of the mummification of the colonized culture. Tradition incarnates, for Laroui, ‘agrarianism, ruralism, passivity, ahistoricity’.42 The urban elite were supposedly

210 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference the bearers of progress; the peasantry, the emissaries of archaism and conservatism. However, on closer inspection of history, argues Laroui, the reverse is true: the urban elite was to blame for failing to enact change and dynamize traditional society. Prior to the eighteenth century, a horizontal solidarity connected the great Islamic cities of Andalusia, Fez, Tunis and Damascus, indeed so much so that these urban centres were brought together in a closer relationship to the exclusion of their rural surroundings. In this open and yet tightly knit framework, scientific and literary interchange ensured the vitality of urban culture. However, the period of high and open culture was followed by economic and cultural decadence as this horizontal solidarity was supplanted by an enforced parochial relationship between the cities and their immediate rural environs.43 This decline announced the end of cosmopolitan Islam. Nevertheless, Laroui contends that tradition was defined by an elite that failed in its pedagogical project to assimilate the rural dwellers into urban culture. A set of historical and economic conditions determined the relationship between city and country, between ‘the juridicotheological, intellectual Islam of the towns [and] the mystico-naturalist Islam of the countryside’.44 Tradition means for Laroui the culture’s ‘traditionalization at the hands of an elite’.45 In the colonial period, tradition became an agency that mobilized the entire society against foreign intrusion by espousing a contradictory nationalism: a shut-in nationalism – reactionary, xenophobic and theocratic – as opposed to an open and assimilationist nationalism which ‘presented itself as the standard-bearer of modernity’.46 Laroui discerns the salient characteristics of these two nationalisms: one of denial, turned toward the past and the country’s interior; and another of openness or compromise, playing the game of colonial rationality. The former was strong in moments of crisis and was the real driving power behind independence, while the latter predominated during periods of dialogue and in the long run was the real beneficiary of independence.47 It is the latter that Fanon denounces for its complicity with neocolonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. In agreement with his



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assessment of these two contradictory nationalisms, Laroui argues that they were represented by the same leadership, namely an urban elite that rejected political compromise, sought to rehabilitate the past and worked for the traditionalization of the nationalist movement in the colonial period. The position of the elite with regards to tradition was ambivalent depending on its political interests. At times, this elite adopted a liberal stance, relinquishing tradition for political expediency by exposing its weaknesses; at other times, this very same elite also jealously reaffirmed tradition once it realized that its future prospects were at stake.48 It is erroneous to think that tradition maintained itself by itself: it was rather established and sustained by the work of an elite which coerced society to behave in a traditional fashion.49 As has been argued, tradition is always already constitutive in that it helps society renew itself, but in the Arab world tradition lost its creative impetus and its ossification represented nothing more than a manifestation of ‘traditionalization effected by an elite at different stages of its history’.50 In reality when we retrace this movement of reaffirmation, resurrection, or rehabilitation of tradition, after an interlude during which triumphant nationalism forgets its traditionalist vocation, and when we related it to different developments on the economic, social, and cultural levels, we cannot help notice that the same groups are playing the same roles today that they played in the past: a politico-military elite (Makhzen), an economic elite (the urban middle class), and a cultural elite (the urban petite bourgeoisie). In a new situation and with new means we again find, however, the same conditions of economic pressure from outside, the same failure on the part of these elites, and the same phenomenon of re-adaptation, of returning toward the self, toward the interior, toward the past. A new tradition answers to a new situation; everything is reformulated and reinterpreted.51 Indeed, culture was reinvented and reformulated in accordance with a dysfunctional tradition that was colonized, imperialized and hegemonized. Echoing Fanon, Laroui maintains that ‘tradition [was] a choice made in response to foreign intervention’.52 The threat of ‘hegemony

212 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference from without’ brought about the traditionalization of culture, which manifestly expressed the political/economic uncertainty of the elite with regards to its own future in a colonial society dominated by others.53 In Gustave E. von Grunebaum’s Orientalizing interpretation of Islamic tradition, Laroui identifies the 1950s concept of the end of history, an ethnocentric thesis which conceived of traditional Islam as ‘inwardlooking’, ‘shut-in’ and doomed to instability and stagnation. In von Grunebaum’s view, it was condemned to repeat itself; modernist Islam was in a state of confusion and ‘intellectual disorder’. Commenting on this state of confusion and disorder described by von Grunebaum in Classical Islam, Laroui writes: Islam today denies the West because it remains faithful to its fundamental aspiration but cannot undergo modernization unless it reinterprets itself from the Western point of view and accepts the Western idea of man and the Western definition of truth.54 It is this idea of ‘man’ which Fanon rejects in The Wretched of the Earth; and it is this notion of ‘truth’ which Said challenges and dismisses for its falsehood and ideological mystification in Culture and Imperialism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Clearly, von Grunebaum replicates the ethnocentrism of sociologists who tend to define tradition negatively from the perspective of Western modernity as ‘passivity, stasis, inertia and homogeneity’ and who also tend to oppose tradition as ‘a destiny’ to progress as ‘necessarily an intervention from the outside’.55 This threat of ‘intervention from the outside’ brought about not only the passivity, inertia and stasis of tradition, but also the elite’s (re)turn to the self and to the past. Two rationales played a key role in shaping the ideological world-view of Arab intellectuals: Salafiyya and eclecticism.56 Salafiyya or Salafism derives from the Arabic salaf which means ‘that which has passed’. As a school of thought, it emerged ‘in the late nineteenth century in Egypt and Damascus as a reaction to the prevailing spread of European ideas and sought to expose the roots of modernity within Muslim civilization’.57 Whereas Salafism is traditionalist in its posture, eclecticism



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tends to be modernizing and embraces change. It is a heterogenous group of intellectuals representing different political persuasions and philosophical schools of thought. However, according to Laroui, both rationales lacked a historical dimension and seemed to confirm dependence and exacerbate historical retardation. In their conception of history as ‘past’, Arab intellectuals could not effectively discern the objective conditions of their societies. ‘This bitter truth notwithstanding,’ Laroui writes, ‘the great majority of Arab intellectuals continue to lean toward salafiyya and eclecticism and, what is even stranger, believe they enjoy complete freedom to appropriate the best among the cultural products of others: the freedom of a Stoic slave!’58 He characterizes the salafī as absolutists believing in ‘Providence […] constantly lapsing into the psychology of heroes of the past’; the eclecticists, as relativists oblivious to history, ‘are at the mercy of every passing fashion’.59 Laroui identifies two types of alienation. The first type is Westernization and the attendant acculturation and psychological effects of self-division. This sort of alienation is akin to that which Fanon delineates in Black Skin, White Masks; it is, in Laroui’s words, ‘visible and openly criticized’. There is also another type of alienation which is more pernicious: it is insidious and suppressed. This second type of alienation, albeit veiled, is prevalent in Arab society: it consists in the medievalization of thought ‘through quasi-magical identification with the great period of classical Arabian culture’.60 As Fanon suggests, this identification might have provided a ‘psycho-affective equilibrium’ for the colonized, but it was nonetheless alienating. Cultural policy in post-colonial Arab states was formulated to thwart Westernization and to promote ‘the sanctification of Arabic in its archaic forms and the vulgarization of classic texts (the resurrection of the cultural legacy)’.61 The salafī are mistaken in believing that they are free to think within the framework of tradition; their alienation is in fact complete, manifesting itself in the ‘loss of self in the absolutes of language, culture, and the saga of the past’.62 It is not the traditionalization of thought – ‘the fossilization of language and the promotion of cultural tradition as a badge of nationality’ – which will liberate them, but rather a historical consciousness.63 Only historical materialism will enable Arab intellectuals to apprehend their real alienation by historicizing the materiality of their retardation.

214 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Elaborating on this insidious type of alienation, Laroui writes: the Arab intellectual, whether he is salafī or eclectic, reverses the terms of the problem. He insists upon a form of alienation that he rarely experiences in the course of his public life, and passes over in silence the forms of alienation into which he is continually plunged. He comments favorably on Marx’s analyses, yet turns back in adoration toward a distant past.64 The alienation of Arab people stems from the fact that their future is made to coincide with the ‘absolute truths’ of medieval times, and from the salafī’s rejection of Westernization which masks this alienation and insidiously deepens their cultural retardation.65 Laroui contends, with Fanon, that the ideology of the postcolonial state, led by a technocracy and civil bureaucracy and maintained by the army, was – and still is – mainly dominated by the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie is not a class per se: it is ‘a nondescript residue of decadent classes’.66 Heterogeneous in its character, the petty bourgeoisie is ‘chiefly composed of artisans, peasantry dependent on family work forces, shopkeepers, and poor intellectuals’.67 Concurring with Fanon, Laroui argues that it is neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie: it controls the means of production but does not have enough capital.68 He dismisses the petty bourgeoisie for its utopianism and adventurism, and criticizes it for apprehending capitalism only from the outside as a destiny. ‘Having no future in the dominant system,’ he writes, ‘[the great majority of the elite/the petty bourgeoisie] return to an embellished past when they see themselves as masters of their own destinies; even as socialists they are orientated toward the past.’69 For Laroui, the three clearly defined classes (i.e. the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) are relatively weak in relation to their Western counterparts. In Western capitalist societies, the petty bourgeoisie is not a homogenous class and it is even less so in under-developed societies. However, the petty bourgeoisie has ideological preponderance, representing the majority of the urban population and also an element of the peasantry (albeit small) which entered cash economy and underwent a radical mutation as a result of colonization and the imposition of colonial capitalism. The petty bourgeoisie embodies the



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contradictions of a society which experienced radical social, cultural and political changes as a consequence of the urbanization of traditional culture. As the repository of culture, the petty bourgeoisie is therefore both modern and traditional. Commenting further on the concentration of power in the hands of this nondescript class, Laroui writes: These characteristics and others (less visible) pointing in the same direction explain why the petite bourgeoisie must necessarily come to power and why through its exercise of power it perpetuates a general dualism: economic, social, cultural, and linguistic. It comes to power easily because the three classes – aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat – are either foreign or numerically weak and because the peasant majority is separated into two groups: one of these shares the petite bourgeoisie’s values and the other is little prepared to participate in political life.70 As Laroui remarks, the petty bourgeoisie is not a class per se but a ‘historical category’. All agents of modernization in all walks of life in Arab society come from this category which is formed by foreign schools of thought.71 Paradoxically, these agents work not to modernize but to traditionalize the postcolonial state. The contradictory character of the petty bourgeoisie (that is, say, its eclecticism and duality) is a feature of the educational policies pursued by the state: on the one hand, a bureaucratic elite or technocracy, taught at universities and scientific and technological institutes, is formed with a view to running the state; on the other hand, education programmes in the humanities remain faithful to traditional thought. This duality at the core of education works to medievalize culture and maintain the political dominance of the petty bourgeoisie.72 Laroui describes the salient characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie as ‘a minority, a fraction of which is able to govern by virtue of its monopoly of modern culture’. In his view, it perpetuates the status quo by the sole fact it keeps itself in power, giving this culture to a tiny minority that is quickly cut off from the rest of population. Modern culture is thus a means, a tool, an ideology subordinated to traditional culture, where the latter is propounded as an intangible value.73

216 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference The petty bourgeoisie – comprised of state technocracy, civil and military bureaucracy – is ipso facto reactionary: it cannot envisage the victory of modernity over traditional thought. Like Fanon, Laroui warns against the hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie. He diverges from Fanon, however, by arguing that only the proletariat – with the help of the emergent revolutionary intellectual – can bring about effective change, modernizing Arab culture and freeing it from the constraints of a medievalized tradition. Like Fanon in his critique of the ahistoricism and essentialism of negritude, Laroui warns against the medievalization of Arab culture and thought. Like Fanon, he warns against the pitfalls of nationalism which cocoons culture in a mummified past. Like Fanon, he cautions against a retrograde nationalism and argues for a brand of nationalism that fosters internationalism. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie is never complete and Laroui is optimistic that the Arab world is open to change because culture is never completely sealed as a system. Conscious of the outside world, the revolutionary intellectual must transcend traditional thought, and repudiate ‘the romanticism, the utopianism, and the exclusivism of the petty bourgeoisie; by taking a clear and distinct position vis-à-vis language, history, and tradition; by becoming aware of history’ and by outlining a ‘programme that is capable of guiding the Arabs towards the paths of the future’.74 While they have a great deal in common, Fanon and Laroui part company on the role of the proletariat in the period of decolonization. In his discussion of the ‘bourgeois phase’ as a useless phase, Fanon attributes the decadence of colonial society to its proletarianization and its economic and cultural dislocation. Laroui, on the other hand, contends that only historical materialism can help the proletariat and the organic intellectual overcome the alienation and retardation of Arab society. As we will see below, Khatibi takes a completely different view. In his critique of Fanon’s and Laroui’s historical materialism, he is adamant that Fanon’s programme of decolonization is simply a chimera, and that Laroui’s historicism is bankrupt. Khatibi: an intractable difference It is worth reiterating that a cosmopolitan and pluralistic Islam paved the way for Europe’s Renaissance, and that the Muslim world was a



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melting pot of diverse cultures. This Islam lost its salient characteristics as it shut itself in the cocoon of dogmatic thinking. What was once an open and dynamic culture became caught in the yoke of colonial oppression. Excluded from the diachronic process of history, this culture became ‘mummified’. It could no longer provide social change: its life was ‘frozen’ and ‘its structures [were] both corseted and hardened’.75 It lost its creative impetus to renew itself through interaction with other cultures. ‘History’ must not be confused with the residues of a dead past: it is an active agency determining the future. Likewise, ‘tradition’ must not be mistaken for the rigidity and dogmatism inherent in the notion of the ‘traditional’: tradition is inventive; it shapes culture. Not only did the disjunction between past and present shackle history, it also produced a historical hiatus. The Arabo-Islamic culture fell a prey to European colonialism: it lost its faculty to translate other cultures, as well as the cosmopolitan spirit it hypostatized and the pluralistic conception it represented. Denied a historical role, Muslims were compelled to fall back on archaic forms of traditional culture. Colonialism shut their society into a mythic time far removed from the present, while religion offered them a refuge. The religious formalism – which gave rise to fundamentalism in colonial times and subsequently – was the symptom of a moribund culture suffering from sclerosis: a diseased culture that ‘[could] no longer adopt its institutions to its grievous needs’.76 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon comments on the necessity to revitalize the colonized culture through an ethics of decolonization, enabling it to play a historical role on the international stage. Colonialism did not promote a genuine and equal interchange between cultures, but rather the imposition of the dominant over the subaltern. Fanon denounces Europe’s murderous humanism for its implication in the colonial project. In the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth, announcing the advent of a new kind of humanism, Fanon writes: ‘Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.’ Khatibi dismisses Fanon’s anti-colonial slogans as the expression of a wretched consciousness. He can neither understand what Fanon meant by the ‘European game’ nor

218 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference comprehend the semantics of Fanon’s usage of the personal pronoun ‘we’. In Khatibi’s view, Fanon’s revolutionary declaration of independence, his demands for the right of difference, cannot be achieved. He argues that Europe – as an idea – still inhabits the very edifice of the Arabo-Islamic culture, despite unsettling it in colonial times. Europe must not be perceived just as an ‘absolute and devastating exteriority’ which dominates it.77 Khatibi acknowledges the necessity of Fanon’s intervention against colonialism but criticizes his view of the West as a formulation of ‘simplistic hegelianism’ borrowed from Sartre.78 He questions Fanon’s definition of the West in its propinquity to the colonized ‘Maghreb’. A long history of conflict, argues Khatibi, has given rise to a mutual misunderstanding which cannot be overcome by revolutionary praxis à la Fanon, a praxis based on a reductionist reading of Marx or underwritten by a fundamentalist discourse on Arab nationalism. Khatibi questions the effectiveness of both types of nationalism. By conflating this praxis with this sort of nationalism, he clearly refutes Fanon’s brand of revolutionary politics as crypto-fundamentalist. According to Khatibi, the subject pronoun ‘we’ of Fanon’s address should not be situated within the Western or Islamic traditions, but at the margin of both. This pronoun is the subject of a long history of translation. Khatibi is keen to stress that the Arabo-Islamic civilization was an ‘intermediary civilization’ which mediated culturally between Hellenism and the Renaissance, between the Roman civilization and medieval Europe, and that it geographically connected Europe, Africa, India and China. Unlike Fanon, Khatibi proposes to open up a faceto-face dialogue between two interrelated metaphysical traditions: Islam and the West. He considers Islam as a theology of translation, and its spirit as essentially Greek. He deplores the fact that the Arabo-Islamic civilization neglected its Greek heritage and that Islam became theocratic as it lost its faculty to mediate between cultures. The decline of this civilization culminated with its colonization, and Khatibi outlines three trends which sought to decolonize and revive it: traditionalism and salafism on the one hand, and rationalism on the other. He contends that traditionalism confined metaphysics to the realm of theology, whereas salafism reduced metaphysics to doctrinal



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politics in its attempt to reform a corrupt and decadent Arabo-Islamic world under the yoke of European colonialism. These two trends lost their sense of tradition and forgot their indebtedness to Greek philosophy. This sort of reformism failed to question its theocratic foundation and could not overcome its limitations. Moreover, it remained oblivious to what it considered (and still considers) to be foreign domination: the West. It failed to open up a dialogue with Europe, which it situated outside its discourse: an outside which in fact affected – and still affects – it from within.79 He criticizes salafism for adopting technology which it voided of its Western values in order to codify its doctrinal project with religion, a project which would not bring about the necessary reforms for modernization.80 He also criticizes rationalism, a term which he uses interchangeably with historicism (or what he calls ‘crude Marxism’: the kind espoused by Sartre and Fanon). For Khatibi, the work of Laroui is a good example of this type of historicism which attributes the decline of the Arabs to colonialism. As we have seen, Laroui denounces the dispossession of the subject by Western colonialism, and rebukes traditionalism and salafism for reifying history in a nostalgic view of the past.81 Nonetheless, Khatibi criticizes him for not taking into account what came between these long continuous moments of history: these moments are characterized by their disjunction, by their disorder and by their dissymmetry. He also chides Laroui for constructing the subject of history as absolute and transparent, unaffected by the psychoanalytical notion of the unconscious and by biography in its translation (or rather interpretation) of the narrative of history. Khatibi argues that Laroui posits a totalizing notion of identity without interrogating its metaphysical and philosophical foundations and that such a notion bankrupts his historicism. What Khatibi calls the ‘Maghreb’ (which in Arabic means ‘the West’) should be a site of non-return to an originary notion of being, a rejection of a society founded on religious theocracy. In his view, the term ‘Arab’ refers to a civilization which is incapable of re-inventing itself without entering this planetary world and undertaking major transformations to accommodate itself with its technology. In the lexis of Khatibi, techné assumes the progressive role which translation used to have on the development of Islamic civilization. Nonetheless, in his

220 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference exploration of the complex relationship between metaphysics, technology and decolonization, he acknowledges that technology could have perverse consequences as will-to-power. Notwithstanding its colonial impetus, he argues, technology is universal and could provide us with a meaning to the question of being. It is at the core of this relation that he inscribes the pronoun ‘we’; a ‘we’ that appropriates this will-to-power to decolonize. He remarks that the Orient (the East) is not a metaphor, a vehicle moving towards the West propelled by a dialectical schema or governed by a culturalist or speculative agenda. Rather, these two opposed poles are caught up in the same metaphysics, despite the fact that in their interplay one eclipses the other. He argues for an intractable difference which could be achieved by a double critique; a critique of both. The Maghreb, according to him, is a topographical site which connects the East, the West and Africa, and is characterized by its linguistic, cultural and political plurality. It must rethink itself in relation to its Outside (Europe) so as to decentre and abandon the nostalgic and totalizing notion of identity, the poisonous identitarian discourse on the açala (originality), with a view to discovering this intractable difference which should speak on behalf of the oppressed. For Khatibi, it is no longer possible to cling on to the old conception of the Ouma82 as a nostalgic and totalizing notion of identity which holds the Arab world together on the basis of a shared language and religion. The Ouma is marked by difference: it is linguistically, ethnically and culturally diverse. To deconstruct this essentialist conception of identity, Khatibi proposes a pluralistic view which he characterizes as ex-centric and non-transcendental.83 Only a pluralistic view of civilization, of languages, of technical and scientific elaborations could help the colonized Arabs decolonize and enter the global scene, and not Fanon’s outcry which is, according to Khatibi, the expression of a tortured soul. Taking his cue from Derrida, Khatibi attempts to provide a double critique which would accommodate difference by incorporating it in the discourse of the West (Europe/Maghreb). His supposition that the West still affects the Islamic tradition from the inside is nonetheless problematic. As has been suggested, the Western episteme is formed as a Western phenomenon by cutting itself from its historical origins and from its place of emission. This process was instituted through a ‘logic



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of supplementarity’ which put these historical origins under erasure.84 This logic – which funded European epistemology and colonialism – is exclusive and at variance with Khatibi’s supposition that the West is within the colonized.85 There seems to be a gap between Khatibi’s decentring of the subject and the Fanonian project of decentralizing (in the sense of ‘decapitalizing’) the supplementary economy governing the relation between centre/periphery; there seems to be a dissonance between his deconstructive theory and current political reality which continues to be marked by neo-colonialist, hegemonic and counterhegemonic/religious tendencies. The decentring of the subject did not really coincide with the promotion of democracy in the Third World; in fact, the majority of African and Arab countries are firmly governed by tyrannical autocracies and despotic dictatorships. At the height of postcolonial and deconstructive criticism, we witnessed brutal dictatorships, famines and ethnic conflicts plague Africa and, recently, wars have raged in Arab countries – exacerbating religious fundamentalism – wars instigated by Western powers, supposedly in an effort to promote Western democracy. Khatibi is right to refute the poisonous identitarian discourse on the açala. However, he seems to be oblivious to the fact that colonialism is at the core of its baneful manifestation. His claim that the West inhabits the Islamic culture overlooks the cultural narcissism of the Western tradition, the colonization of Arabo-Islamic culture and the rape of its cultural resources; and such a claim clearly goes in the opposite direction to the one made by Max Meyerhof, who intimates that it is in fact Islam which is at the core of European thought.86 In sum, Khatibi overlooks not only the pitfalls of neo-colonial mystification but more crucially the role played by Western colonialism in the medievalization of thought and Arabo-Islamic culture. His assertion that the West has affected the Orient/Islam past and present from within obfuscates two historical instances: first, the fact that radical Orientalism (which enabled Islam to be a religion of translation and cultural mediation) was supplanted by Western colonialism; second, the fact that the latter as a corporate institution imperialized the Islamic world and still maintains its hegemony over it. Khatibi overlooks the moments of disjunction and dissymmetry between the West and Islam, the moments of expropriation, dispossession, displacement

222 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference and suppression of difference, moments which led to the political decline and fall of Arabo-Islamic civilization and which concomitantly established the dominance of the West and the putative universality of its epistemology. Let us now turn to Said, who provides useful analyses of these moments in his discussion of Orientalism as a discourse and as political structure. Said: humanism as a critique of trouble Said defines Orientalism as a scholarly activity giving rise to an epistemology in the eighteenth century which constructed the Orient as an inferior; he also defines it as a corporate institution which delivered Western colonialism/imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These definitions focus on three central issues, namely: ‘the question of fields of knowledge, the question of representation, and the question of empire’.87 Geographically, the scope of Said’s ‘Orientalism’ extends beyond the confines of North Africa and the Middle East to include the Far East, Africa and South America, setting the West over and against the ‘Third World’. Underpinned by epistemic, political, economic and military structures, Orientalism comes to hypostatize in Said’s theorizing the hegemony of the West – the colonial attitudes of Great Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also the dominance of the USA in the late twentieth century.88 For the sake of cogency, I have chosen to concentrate on two of the many points of criticism levelled against Said: first, he constructs a totalizing subject of history and thought by positing the West/East as two ontologically and epistemologically distinct, and yet fixed, entities; he conceives of Orientalism as a homogenizing concept, replicating the dichotomizing and essentializing structures of the very discourse he critiques;89 second, he provides a contradictory critique of humanism: he dismisses it for its implication in the colonial project but seems to propose in subsequent works the very humanism he debunks in Orientalism.90 In In Theory, Ahmad criticizes Said for rejecting Marxism ‘as a child of Orientalism and an accomplice of British colonialism’,91 and chides him for espousing a neo-liberalist and -humanist posture which panders to a Reaganite/Thatcherite political agenda. Ahmad is adamant that



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Orientalism is a by-product of its historical and political context, which he delineates thus: Orientalism appeared in 1978, a rather precise point in the history of the world, in the history of the demographic composition and reorganization of the political conjuncture in the United States, and in the history of intellectual productions in the metropolitan countries generally. Each of these aspects deserves some comment because all have some bearing on how books were being read, and how this book in particular intervened in intellectual history. By 1978, the two great revolutionary decades, inaugurated – roughly speaking – by the onset of the Algerian War in 1954 and culminating in the liberation of Saigon in 1975, were over. The decisive turning point had come in Chile in 1973, with the defeat of Unidad Popular, but we did not know it then, because the liberation movements of Indochina and the Portuguese colonies in Africa were still in progress. The two revolutions of 1978–79, in Iran and Afghanistan, then made the shift unmistakable. The Khomeiniite takeover in Iran was one of those rare conjunctures in which the revolution and the counter-revolution were condensed in the same moment. In Afghanistan, the last country to have a revolution under a communist leadership, history now repeats itself, in Marx’s famous phrase, both as tragedy and as farce. If the Iranian Revolution had signalled the decisive defeat of the Left in the Middle East and the rise to ideological hegemony of Islamic fundamentalism in that whole region, the history-as-tragedy-andas-farce in Afghanistan was to contribute considerably to the collapse of what socialism there had ever been in the Comecon countries, helping to pave the way for perestroika first in the Soviet Union, then on a global scale. The savage destruction of Baghdad in 1991, the worst since the Mongols sacked the city in the thirteenth century, was the gift of this global perestroika making one recall Marx once more. As he famously put it in his correspondence on the Gotha Programme: capitalism does not lead to socialism, it may lead just as inexorably towards barbarism.

224 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference All that was to come later. What the end of the revolutionary decades did, however, was, first of all, to shift the entire balance within the metropolitan countries further to the Right. The AngloSaxon countries witnessed the rise to governmental power of the most reactionary ideologues, Reagan and Thatcher.92 I quote at length to underscore two crucial points Ahmad raises. First, perestroika was not a local matter relating to the economic and political restructuring of the former USSR but a global manifestation, the significance of which must be sought at the levels of politics and cultural theory. Perestroika brought forth the disintegration of the Communist Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It helped not only to promote the project of neo-liberalism but also to consolidate the status of the US as the only superpower. Second, Perestroika announced the Gulf War and George Bush’s ‘New World Order’, two major events that saw the rise of radical political Islam as a surrogate for communism. I concur with Ahmad that this savage war was the gift of global perestroika and neo-liberalism; I will return later to elaborate further on this issue and the ramifications these events had on the development of this sort of Islam.93 It suffices to note at this stage that Ahmad sees a correlation between the development of cultural studies and Reaganite/Thatcherite politics, between the decline of the Left and the emergence of postcolonialism with Said at the helm of this new discipline. To return to the three definitions of Orientalism Said provides: it is true that he conflates Orientalism as a scholarly activity with an epistemology which delivered not only nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European colonialism but also late twentieth-century neo-colonialism. It is fair to suggest that his definition of the latter as a ‘corporate institution’ captures the hegemony of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it is rather misleading to confuse, as Ahmad does, Said’s politics with the neo-liberal corporate institution he critiques. Ahmad contends that the ‘Third World’ critique of neo-colonialism owes its politics to Marxism and accuses Said of hijacking this notion to pursue a neo-humanist and -liberal political agenda. What is of interest is not Said’s politics per se, but the ideological shift to the Right in the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence of neo-liberalism,



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which has had destabilizing effects on North Africa and the Middle East. ‘Neo-liberalism was born in the midst of the 1970s crisis of accumulation,’ writes David Harvey, ‘emerging from the womb of a played-out embedded liberalism with enough violence to support Karl Marx’s observation that violence is invariably the midwife of history. The authoritarian option of neo-conservatism is now emerging in the US. The violent assault upon Iraq abroad and incarceration policies at home signal a new-found determination on the part of the US ruling elite to redefine the global and domestic order to its own advantage.’94 Accumulation by dispossession (and the attendant violence it generated in North Africa and the Middle East) is arguably at the origin of the exclusion of these regions from the trend of globalization. As has been noted, despite the historical role their syncretic culture played in the globalization of the world from the eleventh century onwards, despite their strategic position at the crossroads of Africa and Euroasia and in the Mediterranean and despite bordering on highly globalized economies, the Middle East and the Maghreb are ‘marginalized from the flow and structures that define contemporary economic globalization’.95 This marginalization is at odds with Khatibi’s deconstructive pronouncements that the West is an integral component of the Maghreb and, as we will see, also with Said’s avowed desire to situate his critique at the centre of metropolitan cultural and political discourses. To put into context Said’s critique of imperialism and Orientalism as a corporate institution, let me briefly revisit what Ahmad calls ‘global perestroika’ and the political instability and violence ramifying throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Clearly, the current political situation shows that the wonderous ‘Dar El Islam’ which (in Fanon’s words) ‘shone so brightly from the twelfth to the fourteenth century’ has been supplanted by a habitus which now represents globalized terror and war. As Mark LeVine remarks, ‘since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the dominant neoliberal ideology and structures of globalization have generated increasing levels of political and socio-economic chaos in the Middle East’.96 There is a correlation, he argues, between the globalization of chaos, radical political religion and terrorism.97 He asserts that violence and chaos are sponsored in the Middle East and North Africa to thwart the development and functioning of democratic political institutions, but does not expand

226 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference on who is sponsoring chaos and how violence is instrumentalized by the agents of neo-liberalism to prevent the processes of globalization and democratization in these regions. In his view, neo-liberalism maintained its hegemony politically and culturally by imposing a materialist and consumerist culture and by eroding the cultural frontiers which were formally protected by the nation-state. Indeed, cultures are always already ‘plural’ and ‘open’, and LeVine points out that Muslims who were coerced to cross new cultural boundaries by dint of neo-liberal economy were made to experience the erasure of their culture and globalization as a sort of neo-colonialism.98 He identifies culture as a site of political resistance but overlooks the fact that it is also a site of coloniality and hegemonic politics. Neo-liberalism generated an untold violence in the Middle East and North Africa but did precious little to promote democracy and help integrate their regions into the globalized economy. What conclusions could one draw from the discussion of Ahmad’s ‘global perestroika’? How can one read Said in the light of this context? One has to go beyond Ahmad’s facile characterization of Said as the by-product of global perestroika. Said identifies Orientalizing textuality in the writings of Aeschylus and Edward Lane and in the politics of Kissinger, but this textuality is marked by the dimension of history and politics. In Culture and Imperialism, elaborating on the hegemony of the US as part of a corporate institution which developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he provides the following statistics to demonstrate the crowning moment of imperialism and the ‘rise of the West’: in 1800, Western powers occupied 35 per cent of the Earth’s surface; in 1878, 67 per cent; and in 1914, 85 per cent. As he explains the era of high or classical imperialism, which came to a climax in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has so interestingly described as ‘the age of Empire’ and more or less formally ended with the dismantling of the great colonial structures after World War Two, has in one way or another continued to exert considerable cultural influence in the present.99 In Said’s view, the US has now established its dominance; and with the development of globalization, the ‘realities of the Empire’ – albeit



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obfuscated – are now maintained by an ideology which purports to promote ‘doing good’ and ‘fighting for freedom’.100 Said challenges neo-liberalism, providing a pithy reading in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism that goes beyond a formalistic Marxist critique of colonialism/imperialism. Globalization driven by neo-liberal capitalism and its corporate institutions altered the specificities of colonialism: it is now supplanted by neo-imperialism which maintains its dominance not merely by dint of violence – as Fanon claims in The Wretched of the Earth – but also by the insidious work of ideology.101 This mutation is at the centre of Said’s critique of colonialism as a corporate institution. It is, however, instructive to add that while neoliberalism ‘ideologized’ the colonial issue, the violence it generated in parts of the Third Word and Middle East remains naked and is indeed unspeakable. In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said’s chief task is ‘to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories’.102 Said not only identifies ‘the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples’ but also shows how culture has become a battleground where colonial attitudes are articulated and contested.103 Nonetheless, in his attempt to delineate the overriding textual attitudes which enabled European countries to maintain their colonial rule overseas and the dominance of their culture, he overlooked in Orientalism the colonized’s response to such attitudes – ‘the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World’104 which Fanon eloquently describes in The Wretched of the Earth. Because of this oversight, Said is criticized for replicating the Manichaean language of colonialism. However, in Culture and Imperialism, Said engages contrapuntually with culture as a site of colonial and anti-colonial struggle. He maintains that ‘the power to narrate, or to block over narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’.105 He also affirms that the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and

228 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community.106 Culture is a matrix where xenophobic and colonial attitudes are conceived and re-generated, but it is also a site of anti-colonial resistance. Like Fanon and Laroui, Said warns against the tendency of religious and political fundamentalism to return to culture and tradition.107 As has been noted, Laroui considers the threat of hegemony from without as one of the chief factors in the traditionalization of culture and its glorification by the elite. Said warns against this threat but also against the threat of hegemony within the imperializing culture. He conceives of decolonization as a process contrapuntually involving both colonizing and colonized cultures. He envisages this process as taking place in the humanities and at the university as Western intellectuals endorse and promulgate the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, motivating both colonizer and colonized to liberate themselves from the yoke of colonialism. Indeed, as Said observes, one cannot keep apportioning blame to the West for all the problems befalling Third World countries in the post-independence period. The pages of history written by the indigenous elite were not always edifying and history will remember harshly some of their leaders for instituting corrupt dictatorships. Aligning himself with Fanon’s warnings regarding the pitfalls of nationalism, he contends that the fortunes and misfortunes of nationalism, of what can be called separatism and nativism, do not always make up a flattering story. It too must be told, if only to show that there have always been alternatives to Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither monolithic nor deterministic. Besides, culture is not monolithic either, and is not the exclusive property of East or West, nor of small groups of men or women.108 Said cautions against the nefarious effects of nationalism, be it colonial and xenophobic or defensive and reactive. He regrets the fact that such nationalism has become ‘woven into the very fabric of education where children as well older students are taught to venerate and celebrate



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the uniqueness of their tradition’. He conceives of the university as a cultural location where dogmatic unthinking and xenophobic attitudes can be interrogated and rejected. Like Fanon, he announces the emergence of a forward-looking humanism, led by new social movements challenging old patriarchal, hegemonic and totalizing discourses of Orientalism in the Middle East.109 In Culture and Imperialism, he jettisons the totalizing conception of identity he upheld in Orientalism, arguing that the binary language which has hitherto governed nationalism and colonialism is now obsolete. From now on, the old authority has been superseded by new alignments transcending the limits of gender, race, religion and nation/state, and challenging the essentializations of identity politics.110 Said is adamant that imperialism paved the way for globalization: modern empires reached their pinnacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and established a complex system of global trade and communication that interconnected the world.111 Direct and indirect colonial rule ended, but imperialism lingers on in the sphere of culture, politics and economy.112 He argues that culture and identity are always already plural and hybrid, and that imperialism cannot be static; it is marked by the processes of history and cultural hybridization. Nonetheless, he goes on to contradict himself by asserting that imperialism is homogenizing: The thing to be noticed about this kind of contemporary discourse, which assumes the primacy and even the complete centrality of the West, how totalizing is its forms, how all-enveloping is its attitudes and gestures, how much it shuts out even as it includes, compresses and consolidates. We suddenly find ourselves transported backward in time to the late nineteenth century.113 Said could not conceive of the paradoxical workings of imperialism as a homogenizing and differentiating process. It is neither the one nor the other, neither inclusion nor exclusive, neither universal nor specific. It is both at once. As a system, imperialism totalizes and discriminates. As a historical force, it is implacable and unescapable, for while it puts the colonized subject under erasure, it represents by proxy and ‘speak[s] for everything within its dominion’.114

230 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Western cultural forms must not be idealized as autonomous superstructures divorced from their materiality, namely the colonial dynamic which these forms helped maintain. Said considers imperialism ‘as a process occurring as part of the metropolitan culture, which at times acknowledges, at other times obscures the sustained business of the empire itself’.115 In Culture and Imperialism, he examines how the colonial past is imbricated in the present, and more crucially he takes Western intellectuals to task for their uncritical views and their unholy alliance with institutions of power, an alliance which bankrupted the humanist project of the Enlightenment and also impoverished the debate on the issue of decolonization.116 Even intellectuals at the cutting edge of critical theory were oblivious to the involvement of culture in maintaining colonialism and in building modern empires. Said acknowledges his indebtedness to Foucault and Williams, two intellectual giants who dominated the field of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s, but chides them for overlooking the significance of the colonial question and for replicating what was taking place in anthropology, psychiatry, comparative literature and the humanities: the exclusion of the colonized and imperialized subject. In Orientalism, Said attempts to remedy this ‘theoretical oversight’ prevalent in the fields of humanities and social sciences.117 ‘What partly animated my study of orientalism,’ he writes, ‘was my critique of the way in which the alleged universalism of fields such as the classics (not to mention historiography, anthropology, and sociology) was Eurocentric in the extreme, as if other literatures and societies had either an inferior or a transcended value.’118 However, Said replicates this Eurocentrism in Orientalism. By arguing that Orientalism established a seamless line connecting ancient Greece and Rome to colonial Europe, he unwittingly puts under erasure the significant contribution of Islamic tradition to the development of humanism and the Enlightenment. As we have seen, a number of critics find flaws in his critique which reproduces colonial Manichaeism. I have dealt in a cursory fashion with the critique of Said’s essentializing and dichotomizing language in Orientalism and his response to it in Culture and Imperialism. Let me now turn my attention to the second point of criticism levelled against him, namely his open and ambivalent views with regards to humanism.



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In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said provides a corrective to such an Orientalizing and Eurocentric view. I concur with Nadia Abu El-Haj that his critics view his stance vis-à-vis humanism ‘as inconsistent in light of his other theoretical and political commitments or simply as a throwback to an earlier epistemological, theoretical, and political tradition too embedded in a history of Eurocentrism and its attendant forms of violence to be resuscitated today in the name of radical politics.’119 In his attempt to rescue humanism from the charge of ethnocentrism, Abu El-Haj observes, Said sought to redefine it: to make it more ‘cosmopolitan,’ more accurately reflecting the contemporary world; to recognize other historical traditions – the practices of humanism, for example, that began ‘in the Muslim madaris, colleges, and universities of Sicily, Tunis, Baghdad and Seville in the 12th and 13th centuries’ – as the source of the development of Western humanist traditions and, thus, to integrate other cultural and intellectual traditions, both historical and contemporary, into what one thinks of as humanism and the humanities as taught in U.S. universities today. Within that nowrevised vision, for Said, humanism was an (essential) ‘antidote’ to the phenomenon of increasing specialization that marks the contemporary world: the transformation of knowledge into ‘expertise,’ often at the service of corporate or state interests.120 It must be said that Said’s brand of humanism establishes a correlation between twelfth-century Arabic/Islamic hermeutics and jurisprudence – viz. the fiqh and ijtihad121 which were crucial for the development of humanism – and nineteenth-century Nietzschean philology which sought to unearth truth and discern it from conceptual falsehood mediated through received ideas. For Said, humanism is a critique evincing truth and, as in isnad,122 constitutes an interpretative chain of interdependence, connecting contemporary readers to readers from the past. Said’s humanism is an interpretative technique which depends on ‘the presence of others’; it is ‘given as a community of witness’ upholding the truth, just as in the Islamic tradition of ijtihad (which etymologically stems from the infamous concept jihad, originally meaning

232 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference battle for truth). Ijithad, as a hermeneutic affirmation, has points of contact with Nietzschean philology which – by mobilizing a whole army of ‘mobile of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms’ – strives to discover the truth and find humanistic knowledge, the total aggregate of ‘human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration’.123 What Said refers to as ‘humanist reception’ is an interpretative exercise; like ijtihad, it necessitates ‘troping the general language further in one’s own critical language’ so as to enlighten readers and enable them to expand their hermeneutic horizons and inhabit multiple cultural spaces.124 What does it mean to ‘trope the general language in one’s critical idiom’? You might well ask. It means to transcend glib statements which obfuscate the truth. Said invokes George W. Bush’s phrase ‘the axis of evil’125 (claimed to comprise rogue states such as the Saddam regime, for instance, stockpiling weapons of mass destruction or sponsoring terrorism) as an exemplar of a glossy statement which obscures a number of facts about Iraq: ‘its history, its institutions, as well as [American] extensive dealings with it over the decades’.126 Such a statement tells us nothing about the extent to which the US propped up sordid regimes like Saddam’s before turning against them, nor about the ideological workings of neo-liberalism which undermine democracy and humanism. Referring to the mystifying rhetoric used to legitimize the brutal force deployed in the Gulf war, Said writes: For if, as I believe, there is now taking place in our society an assault on thought itself, to say nothing of democracy, equality, and the environment, by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well as imperialist ambition, the humanist must offer alternatives now silenced or unavailable through the channels of communication controlled by a tiny number of news organizations.127 While Fanon insists that historically Western humanism acted in complicity with capitalism and colonialism, Said in contrast endeavours to disentangle humanism from neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism. In effect, Said puts Western humanism on its head by deploying it (like



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ijtihad) as a technique of reading and critiquing the corporate institution it has hitherto legitimized: colonialism. Fanon conceives of the project of decolonization as a decentring of politics – that is, the overturning of the power relation between centre and periphery. It is from the periphery that Fanon intervenes to represent those who are marginalized. With Said, the project of decolonization ‘has moved from the periphery to the centre’.128 Echoing Khatibi, he contends that the exilic postcolonial humanist is better placed ‘to address the metropolis using techniques, the discourses, the very weapons of scholarship … at the very heart of the Western centre’.129 The postcolonial humanist strategically assumes an ambivalent position as both insider and outsider with regards to the dominant ideas and values that are circulating in society.130 Such a position, although it is ideologically fraught, empowers the postcolonial humanist to critique mystifying language and unearth the truth. Said envisages humanism as a ‘technique of trouble’ – ‘trouble’ in the sense of deconstructing received ideas and disturbing hegemonic thought. Like Fanon, Said cautions against the pitfalls of narrow-minded nationalism and against the politics of identity ‘at a time when the national and international horizon is undergoing massive transformations and reconfigurations’.131 The exilic postcolonial critic has the power to disturb the centrality of metropolitan global dominance. Said, however, circumvents the problem of the acculturation of the native elite and overlooks the marginality of those in the Third World – elite or otherwise – who cannot accede to the centre of power and privileges. It is important to decentre politics from the inside and the outside – as did Fanon – by way of empowering those who are marginalized. Conclusion In conclusion, two lines of argument can be gleaned from my long discussion of Islam and the translation movements, from Said’s Orientalism and Khatibi’s radical Orientalism, from Fanon’s conception of decolonization and humanism, and from Laroui’s pronouncements on the crisis of Arab intellectuals and their alienation. First, Islamic culture is imbricated in the very fabric of Western epistemology and it is therefore important to deconstruct the ethnocentrism

234 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference which presents Islam and Western thought as incompatible notions. In his critique of the historicism espoused by Fanon and Laroui, Khatibi establishes a dialogue between Islam and the West by arguing that Islam, as a religion of translation, mediated between different cultures and established the very foundations of Western epistemology. Arguably, such a dialogue is an important step towards the reconciliation of Islam with the West and the decolonization of the hegemonic relationship that the West has maintained over Islam. Nonetheless, Khatibi eschews the moments of conflict and diremption which marked this relationship and overlooks the politics of Orientalism as a corporate institution which was involved in delivering eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism and which has recently generated increasing levels of violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Ironically, Khatibi’s pronouncements were made at a time when neo-liberalism was consolidating the hegemony of the West. It is rather simplistic to think that the West could no longer be considered as an exteriority dominating the Orient/Islam, and that technology alone (like translation in the ῾Abbāsid period) could help decolonize and modernize it. The Middle East and North Africa, along with most Third-World regions, were kept outside the trends of development and globalization, and technology has been deployed as will-to-power to imperialize them. Second, colonialism and imperialism underwent radical mutations, as did the political and discursive agencies which supported and critiqued them. Neo-liberalism, with its corporate institutions and its hegemonic structures that maintain neo-imperialism, developed in parallel with Third-Worldism and postcolonialism.132 In his scathing critique of Said, Ahmad claims that postcolonialism supplanted Third-Worldism and hijacked its political agenda from Marxism. However, what is significant in Ahmad’s analysis is the ideological shift which occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s. Fanon might have foreseen the pitfalls of nationalism and predicted the emergence of neo-liberalism as a form of neocolonialism, but he did not envisage the extent of this shift, and more importantly the radical mutation of capitalism. Arguably, he was not in a position to grasp fully that ‘the internationalization of capital has been a “contradictory process involving both homogenization and differentiation”’.133 It is crucial to emphasize that this contradictory



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process sustains the dominance of ‘de-centred’ capitalism. Fanon did not anticipate the fact that globalization has drastically altered our relation to space and time, and that as a process it maintains one of the most insidious forms of neo-colonialism. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon could not fathom the deterritorialization of imperializing oppression and its ideologization: through a de-centred capitalism, neo-liberalism is in a position to exploit the labour of ex-colonized people without geographically occupying them. In Culture and Imperialism, Said provides us with a fruitful description and critique of this sort of neo-colonialism. For Said, decolonization must be sought at the level of thought and must take place in the humanities; humanism as a cultural formation and as a critique is the panacea to the degrading and de-humanizing politics of neo-liberalism and its imperializing ideology. Notes 1 Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 184. 2 Briffault, The Making of Humanity, p. 189. 3 Briffault, The Making of Humanity, p. 189. 4 Briffault, The Making of Humanity, p. 188. 5 Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 8. 6 Maurice Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004), p. 236. 7 Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam, p. 236. 8 Briffault, The Making of Humanity, p. 204. 9 Briffault, The Making of Humanity, p. 188. 10 Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam, pp. 237–238. 11 Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1983), p. 19. 12 Raymond Williams, Keywords (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976), pp. 268–269. Cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. tradere. 13 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 138–139. 14 Bassnett and Trivedi stress ‘the role played by translation in facilitating colonization’. They define ‘the metaphor of colony as a translation, a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map’. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. ‘Translation

236 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference as metaphor for post-colonial writing … invokes for [Maria Tymoczko] the sort of activity associated with the etymological meaning of the word: translation as the activity of carrying across.’ Maria Tymoczko, ‘Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, in Post-colonial Translation, pp. 19–20. 15 Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 307. 16 Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, pp. 309–310. 17 Bassnett and Trivedi (eds), Post-colonial Translation, p. 17. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Translation as Conquest’, in André Lefevere (ed. and trans.), Translating Literature: the German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977). 19 Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 310. 20 Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 311. 21 Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 312. 22 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 2. 23 Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 24 Said, Orientalism, p. 5. 25 Louis Gardet, Les Hommes de l’Islam (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1977), p. 384. 26 Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 7. 27 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 171–172. 28 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 169. 29 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 170. 30 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 169. 31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 172. 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199. 33 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 251. 34 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 252. 35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 253. 36 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 253. 37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122. 38 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 138. 39 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 138. 40 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 147. 41 Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, Traditionalism or Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1976), p. 33. 42 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 33. 43 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 35.



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44 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 36. 45 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 37. 46 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 37–38. 47 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 38. 48 Laroui considers ‘both tradition and innovation, or traditionalism and progressivism (…) as the achievement of an elite – nearly always urban – that act[ed] in one direction or the other according to the circumstances in which it [found] itself’ (Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 42). 49 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 39–40. 50 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 41–42. 51 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 40. 52 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 42. 53 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 43. 54 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 61. 55 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 42. 56 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 153–154. 57 Mohamed Bin Ali, The Roots of Religious Extremism (London: Imperial College Press, 2016), p. 42 and p. 47. See also Azziz AlAzmeh’s discussion of Salafism as a utopia. Azziz Al-Azmeh, Islam and Modernities (London: Verso, 1993), p. 135. 58 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 154. 59 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 155. 60 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156. 61 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156. 62 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156. 63 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 156–157. 64 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 159. 65 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 159. 66 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161. 67 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161. 68 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161. 69 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 162. 70 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 163. 71 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 164–165. 72 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 165. 73 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 165–166. 74 Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 169–170. 75 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 97–98. 76 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 97–98. 77 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 12. 78 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 14. 79 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 30.

238 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 80 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 31. 81 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 32. 82 In Arabic, the word ouma – or umma – means, generally, the Islamic world. 83 Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 14. 84 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 128–133. Derrida defines the ‘supplement’ as ‘simple exteriority, pure addition or pure absence’. The supplement represents the excessive character of otherness as evil that has come from the outside to affect and infect the inside. The supplementary economy consists in expelling the supplement by considering it as a dangerous excess. To restore the purity of the inside, the outside must be kept in its place, out; it ‘must return to what it should never have ceased to be’: a surplus excess. 85 Fanon provides an astute psychoanalytical reading of the Manichaeism which marks the psyche of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks. What Khatibi calls Fanon’s ‘tortured soul’ is simply the artifact of colonialism. 86 Max Meyerhof, ‘Science and Medicine’, in T. Arnold and A. Guillaume, The Legacy of Islam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), pp. 311–355. 87 Nadia Abu El-Haj, ‘Edward Said and the Political Present’, American Ethnologist, 32:4 (2005), p. 540. 88 Eclectic in its theoretical framework, Said’s Orientalism draws on Foucault, Williams and Gramsci to study the power relation between the West and the Rest. The crux of his argument is that ‘ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied’. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London and New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 5. 89 Robert Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 119–140. 90 As Ahmad points out: ‘What is significant is that after Said has assembled the whole narrative of European Literature, from Aeschylus to Edward Lane, as a history of literature’s complicity in inferiorization of the ‘Orient’, and after he has identified the Enlightenment as a unified trajectory and master sign, of both Orientalism and colonialism, he is of course faced with the problem of identifying some sort of agency that might undo this centuries-old tie between narratives of High Humanism and the colonial project. At this point we discover a peculiar blockage, for what Said now posits are the most ordinary, the most familiar values of humanist liberalism: namely tolerance, accommodation, cultural pluralism and relativism, and those insistently repeated words sympathy, constituency, affiliation, filiation. What is remarkable about this at times very resounding affirmation of humanist



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value is that humanism-as-ideality is invoked precisely at the time when humanism-as-history has been rejected so unequivocally.’ Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p. 164. 91 Ahmad, In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures, p. 195. 92 Ahmad, In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures, pp. 190–191. 93 See below LeVine’s assertion that globalization and neo-liberalism gave rise to this sort of Islam. 94 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 189. 95 Mark LeVine, ‘Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 33:3 (2005), p. 396. As LeVine observes: ‘the region’s function at the “vital margins” of the world capitalist system, as it constitutes a crucial node for the circulation of tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of oil, defence and war-related expenditure between the USA (and to a lesser extent, Europe) and the countries of the region. Yet, it participates relatively little in the “new” regimes of production, accumulation, consumption and communication that are still limited to the advanced countries of the West and to a selection of newly industrialized countries in the South. It is because of this dynamic that I argue that it is culture, and not economics and politics, that is at the centre of contemporary globalization as experienced directly by citizens of the Muslim world’ (p. 397). 96 LeVine, ‘Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East’, p. 394. In this global era, argues LeVine, millions of Muslims inhabit the West and ‘dar al-harb’ (abode of war) has professedly become ‘dar al-Islam’ (abode of peace and Islam). He deploys what he calls ‘globalized chaos’ to delineate at one and the same time a destabilizing neoliberalism and an emergent resistance that could democratize the public sphere and pave the way for development in the Middle East and North Africa. Paradoxically, LeVine writes: ‘the processes of globalization generated negative economic and cultural impacts while at the same time creating spaces for (re)new(ed) spheres of public activity that challenge hegemony and/or domination of existing authoritarian political systems’ (p. 404). He differentiates between radical political Islam and ‘public Islam’: the former is hegemonic and reactionary; the latter is innovative and can have a great potential to reconfigure public space. He identifies in new youth social movements the possibility to instrumentalize the chaos surrounding them with a view to opening up new alternatives. However, he does not really elaborate on how this democratization will be instantiated. 97 LeVine, ‘Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East’, p. 403. 98 LeVine, ‘Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East’, p. 399.

240 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 99 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 6. 100 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 7. 101 If the French Revolution culminated in the end of Absolutism and announced the emergence of the nation-state and of the individual in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one might ask what has globalization as a revolutionary process brought about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? It certainly proclaimed the end of the nation-state (which bourgeois capitalism instituted as a surrogate for the absolutist monarchy), but did it accomplish equality between different cultures? Did it increase the values of the Enlightenment and bring to the world greater individual freedoms? Did it engender multiculturalism? Did it render the specificities of culture and class obsolete in the same way that the end of Absolutism gave birth to liberalism and brought about the dissolution of serfdom and feudalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century? Paradoxically, globalization re-enforced rather than weakened cultural boundaries, in the same sense that class as a residual construct from the ancien régime persisted and gained greater significance in the bourgeois state. Globalization facilitated the free circulation of capital; but underpinned by neo-liberalism, its aim was at no time to promote relation of equalities between different cultures and nation-states. 102 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xi. 103 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xi and p. xiv. 104 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xii. 105 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. 106 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. 107 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. xiii–xiv. 108 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxvii. 109 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxvii. 110 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxviii. 111 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 4. 112 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 8. 113 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 24. 114 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 26. 115 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 59. 116 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 45. 117 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 47. 118 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 51. 119 Abu El-Haj, ‘Edward Said and the Political Present’, p. 549. 120 Abu El-Haj, ‘Edward Said and the Political Present’, p. 548. 121 The word fiqh means Islamic jurisprudence and epistemology – knowledge and interpretative understanding. The word ijtihad means independent reasoning and interpretation.



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122 In Arabic, the word isnad means a series – or chain – of authoritative sources which establish the authenticity and reliability of texts. 123 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 46. Also cited in Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 58. 124 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 76. 125 George W. Bush coined this phrase in his State of the Union speech made on 29 January 2002. 126 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, pp. 73–74. 127 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 71. 128 Edward W. Said, ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture’, Raritan, 9:3 (Winter, 1990), p. 30. 129 Said, ‘Third World Intellectuals’, p. 29. 130 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 76. 131 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 77. 132 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon conceives of the ‘Third World’ as a non-aligned entity to the two ideological blocs involved in the Cold War. As Tomlinson shows, this political formation conveniently describes the ex-colonized peoples and developed in the 1970s and 1980s in tandem with globalization. B.R. Tomlinson, ‘What Was the Third World?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38:2 (2003), pp. 307–321. 133 In his article ‘“Neo-colonialism” or “Globalization”?: Postcolonial Theory and the Demands of Political Economy’, Nagesh Rao critiques postcolonialism for its eclecticism and for its ahistoricism. He conceives of ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘globalization’ as two distinct discourses that are ‘yoked together’ in postcolonial theorizing (p. 165). Drawing on Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he dismisses ‘neo-colonialism’ as a political concept, arguing that ‘neo-colonial dependency is not permanent, inevitable, or even typical feature of “third world” development at all’ (p. 171). India is, contends Rao, a sovereign state and its national bourgeoisie is responsible, in equal measures, for its economic growth and decline. He also rejects the view that globalization has decentred capital and has brought about the demise of the nation-state and that ‘the economy has reached a new stage, which governments and workers alike are virtually powerless to withstand’ (p. 172). Capital has not become free-floating, the nation-state has not become an obsolete formation, and transnational capitalism has not culminated in the neocolonial dependency of the Third World. Rao invokes the economies of India and the ‘Asian Tigers’ as an exemplar of an ‘increasingly hegemonic sub-imperialist role not only in the subcontinent, but

242 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference elsewhere around the globe’ (p. 174). Rao is right to argue: ‘to do justice to the heterogeneity of economic conditions prevailing in “the postcolonial world”, we would have to divide them up in different regions and study each of them in their historical specificities: East Asian, South and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and so on’ (p. 172). While the economies of some Asian regions have enjoyed a measure of relative development and dominance, the fact remains that the economies in the other regions continue to exist under the hegemony of Western neo-colonial capitalism. It is rather simplistic to suggest that ‘globalization has left large parts of the world untouched’. Rao sets up ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘globalization’ as distinct bifid couplets, contending that ‘they are invoked by postcolonial theory loosely and without qualification’. Nagesh Rao, ‘“Neo-colonialism” or Globalization?: Postcolonial Theory and the Demands of Political Economy’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 1:2 (Spring, 2000), pp. 165–184.

Conclusion

In ‘Critical Fanonism’, Henry Louis Gates, Jr hails Fanon ‘as a global theorist: he is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern’. Fanon’s work appears to Gates as ‘rife with contradiction or richly dialectical, polyvocal, multivalent’, as ‘highly porous, that is, wide open to interpretation’ and ‘as a result, of unfailing symptomatic interest’.1 Gates bases his reading of postcolonial ‘Fanonism’ on Memmi’s article ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’ (written after the death of Fanon). At the centre of Memmi’s critique is Fanon’s rejection of both French culture and negritude, and his espousal of revolutionary praxis in colonial Algeria and Africa. ‘In his short life,’ Memmi writes, ‘Frantz Fanon experienced at least three serious failures.’2 The first consists in his disavowal of his West Indian identity and in his identification with the colonizer’s cultural models, which were French and white. The second was the outcome of his disillusionment with these models; his encounter with racism in mainland France ultimately led him to renounce his Frenchness. Subsequently, Fanon discovered Algeria and espoused its political causes. Indeed, he became the intellectual spokesperson of the Algerian Revolution, but Algeria was not the last stage. As Memmi intimates, although Fanon never abandoned Algeria, he relinquished the Algerian nationalistic point of view and moved to embrace Africa. The third failure Fanon experienced, Memmi argues, was brought about by the internal conflicts within the FLN which caused Fanon to abandon the narrowness of its political concerns in order to champion a new brand of humanism.

244 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference Memmi’s reading of Fanon’s biography reproduces the bifid structure which certain critics impose on the work of Fanon: earlier versus late Fanon; his psychoanalysis in Black Skin, White Masks versus his revolutionary praxis in The Wretched of the Earth. According to Memmi, his ambivalent relationship with Martinique and France continued until quite late in his life. Prior to his encounter with racism in mainland France, Fanon believed in the fiction of assimilation. Black Skin, White Masks captures this ambivalent relationship with the land of his birth (Martinique) and that of his adoptive culture (France). Memmi maintains that: The identification of the former Black slave with the White nation which enslaved and then apparently adopted him, inevitably contains a subtle poison: the success of the operation – if one can speak of success – demands that the Black man renounce himself as Black. It must be admitted that for a long time the Black himself consented to the White man’s monstrous demand. This is understandable: it is not up to the powerful to become more like the weak; assimilation takes place from the dominated to the dominant; from the dominated culture to the dominating culture, hardly ever in the inverse sense […] Now as one of the results of this unnatural effort, the war waged by the White against the Black also brings about a war of the Black against himself, a war that is perhaps even more destructive, for it is unremittingly carried on from within.3 Here, Memmi summarizes the problematic at the core of Black Skin, White Masks: the neurosis from which Fanon suffers as a Negro; the ‘war’ which the black wages against him/herself. Memmi draws a portrait of Fanon that reflects the psychological complex of Jean Veneuse, who felt abandoned both by his mother country and his adoptive country France. After his encounter with racism, Memmi argues, Fanon proclaimed ‘the end of the “White illusion”’. He had to ‘take off his White mask, which he believed he had to wear in order to get ahead in the world’.4 However, what is puzzling for Memmi is that Fanon’s disillusionment did not ‘mark a new era of self-affirmation’; it did not galvanize him to fight deliver his people, and ultimately

Conclusion 245 himself, from the fetters of colonialism and from its racial prejudice. Memmi asserts that: When a dominated man has understood the impossibility of assimilation to the dominator, he generally returns to himself, to his people, to his past, sometimes, as I have indicated, with excessive vigor, transfiguring this people and this past to the point of creating counter-myths. When Fanon finally discovered the fraud of assimilating West Indians into French citizens, he broke with France and the French with all the passion of which his fiery temperament was capable.5 Memmi describes Fanon’s identification with Algeria as a substitution for ‘an unattainable identification with Martinique’.6 Unlike Césaire, Fanon never returned to self. He never turned to negritude to resolve his dilemma, but rather turned against it. The Second World War was a landmark: just as the West Indians experienced what Fanon describes as their ‘first metaphysical experience’ (that is the realization that they were black and not white, their coming-into-consciousness which politically went hand in hand with their celebration of negritude), Martinique was made into a French Department in 1946. According to Memmi, Fanon felt betrayed by Martinique after its departmentalization. It could not provide him with ‘the psychological and material resources to succeed in his combat against the oppressor’.7 Because it could not free itself from the fetters of French colonialism, Martinique proved itself ‘incapable of furnishing him with the psychological and historical remedy to his tragic situation’.8 He had to channel his revolt against colonial France, and Algeria was therefore ‘uniquely suited to Fanon’s neurosis’.9 Like Algeria, Martinique was one of the departments of France. Like Fanon, the Algerian elite were steeped in French culture. Unlike the advocates of negritude, this elite revolted against France once it discovered the sham of assimilation.10 For the revolutionary Fanon, Algeria became ‘the embellished substitute of his lost home’.11 Three factors nevertheless conspired against integration into ‘his country of adoption’: the facticity of colour, language and religion.12 Memmi concludes that ‘one cannot shed his identity so easily. A Black man

246 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference does not get rid of his negritude by calling it a mirage: nor can anyone exchange his cultural, historical and social singularity for another, by a simple act of will not even in the service of a revolutionary ethic.’13 Memmi misreads Fanon’s rejection of negritude as a failure on the part of Fanon to ‘return to self’. He cannot understand the reasons why Fanon – a member of the black elite, nurtured on French cultural values – had to relinquish his Frenchness in order to embrace the revolutionary causes of Algeria and Africa. In the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth, argues Memmi, Fanon puts forward a universalist schema which drowns the singularities of ‘all those accursed differences’. Memmi misinterprets such a schema. He fails to comprehend that Fanon rejects the mythic rhetoric of negritude because it obfuscates the cultural, national and ethnic differences that traverse the notion of blackness. Memmi uses the concept of negritude in a confusing way, conflating Fanon’s blackness (his colour) with the literary movement of negritude which was set up by Césaire, Senghor and Damas. Through the work of this conflation, Memmi proceeds to disparage Fanon’s critique of negritude, which he understands as a rejection of self. He reads Black Skin, White Masks from the supposed perspective of a neurotic Fanon exasperated by the facticity of his blackness. Memmi describes Fanon’s work as an autobiographical account, composed of lyrical prose which ‘break[s] up into short poems of bitterness or rage’.14 He rejects ‘[Fanon’s] totally negative and very questionable conception of Negritude’.15 For Memmi, negritude is not just the recognition of belonging to an oppressed group, but is an ‘affirmation of self; it is protest, reconstruction of a culture, at least of its potential. Positive adherence to a group, and the decision to contribute to a collective future.’ Memmi rebukes Fanon for his ‘disdainful abandonment of Blackness […] in the name of universalism and the universal man [that] rest on a misconception’.16 Memmi holds an essentialist conception of identity, which reproduces the very abstraction he criticizes in Fanon. In fact, Fanon’s new humanism is at variance with this essentialist conception of identity; it is predicated upon an ethics which, in order to attain a universal plane, must acknowledge differences and must be anchored in history. As has been argued in Chapter 1, Fanon finds negritude initially empowering but criticizes Sartre for voiding the subjectivity of the

Conclusion 247 Negro. It is worth reiterating that Fanon comes round to Sartre’s way of thinking that negritude cannot be an end in itself. Like Sartre, he warns against the dangers of negritude’s homogenizing and essentializing discourse. Fanon is certainly careful not to represent blackness as a totalizing category in which the cultural, historical and national specificities of black peoples are obscured. Not all Negroes are the same: their different nationalities cannot be reduced to a totality. Fanon clearly realizes the dangers of negritude’s totalizing and racialized language and therefore refuses to adhere to its nationalism of colour. He refuses to idealize a mythic past at the expense of the present and the future and to partake in a project such as negritude which seeks to revive ‘an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization’.17 Fanon calls for an assimilation which empowers the Negro to be an agent actively involved in the making of the nation’s history. In Black Skin, White Masks, he seeks to be assimilated into French society and never envisages a return to a distant past. He refuses to be imprisoned in negritude’s ‘tower of past’ that is removed from the concerns of his present.18 In his initial critique of negritude, embracing a view of assimilation which entrusts him to the course of history, Fanon concludes: ‘What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the French people. We refuse to be considered “outsiders”’, and ‘I am personally interested in the future of France, in French values, in the French nation’. Rejecting negritude – or what he calls ‘Negro nationality’ – he asks: ‘What have I to do with a black empire?’.19 In no way does he jeopardize ‘[his] future in the name of a mythic past’.20 In Black Skin, White Masks, he still believes in a possible ‘family romance’ that could reconcile his black facticity with his French nationality; and he aspires to be a fully engaged participant in the future of the nation. It is, however, the failure to fulfil this aspiration which motivates him to relinquish Frenchness and take the path of revolutionary politics in The Wretched of the Earth. Memmi did not have to look very far to find the answer to his question why Fanon relinquished negritude and French culture to espouse the revolutionary causes of Algeria and Africa. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi (like Sartre) contends that one of the most severe calamities suffered by the colonized is that they were ostracized

248 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference and removed from history. They were no longer subjects of history, enjoying publicly the rights which political citizenship conferred upon them. ‘As a result of colonization,’ Memmi remarks, ‘the colonized almost never experiences nationality and citizenship, except privately.’21 The exclusion of the colonized from the public sphere forced them to re-enact their identity and experience their sense of cultural belonging privately within the cloistered domain of religion and within the refuge of home. This exclusion brought about the ossification of their culture. Like Memmi, Fanon remarks in Toward the African Revolution that the ‘sclerosed’ culture of the colonized reflects the specificities of a ‘dying society’, which could only be revitalized through a revolutionary praxis.22 In the concluding pages of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon formulates two protean models of cultural belonging: two incompatible views on cultural assimilation, underwritten by two nationalistic discourses that are mutually exclusive. In Black Skin, White Masks, he subscribes to the colonial doctrine of assimilation, attempting to reconcile his personal destiny with that of the French nation. However, his experience of French colonialism in Algeria radically changed his political views. As has been argued in Chapter 4, colonialism was a factor in the alienation of the colonized Algerians. ‘If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment,’ he writes, ‘I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.’23 In terms which recall Sartre’s ‘Colonialism Is a System’, Fanon contends the status of Algeria is defined by its ‘systematized de-humanization’.24 In his letter of resignation, he denounces assimilation as a sham: ‘the lawlessness, the inequality, the multi-daily murder of man [which] were raised to the status of legislative principles’.25 He concludes that decolonization is the only way out of the absolute dehumanization in which the colonized lived. The colonial doctrine of assimilation succeeded only in denying the colonized a historical agency. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon represents a nationalistic view which aims to empower the colonized to be the same as other peoples in history. He subscribes to a world-view which articulates, in the phraseology of Denis Hollier, ‘the pure openness of historical

Conclusion 249 synchronicity’, deconstructing a hegemonic definition of history: ‘That history […] is never strictly of one’s own. That history means risking one’s past in the other’s language […] a history that is no longer exclusively its own.’26 It is in this sense that we must interpret the oft-cited statement that ‘[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism is the only thing that will give us an international dimension’.27 Consciousness of self is a prerequisite for the enunciating subject and, crucially, for establishing discursive relations with others. Transposing an existential phenomenology onto the plane of international politics, Fanon holds that communication is impossible without the realization of the self and the existence of others. National consciousness must not be an inward-looking process which shuts the ex-colonized nations within some kind of political solipsism after their decolonization. On the contrary, national consciousness is a precondition for opening up dialogue with other independent peoples. Fanon warns against narrow reactionary nationalism. Nation building, he insists: [must be] accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalizing values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows.28 Central to the work of Fanon, especially The Wretched of Earth, is a conception of history and international politics enabling nations to share the same history without losing their differences; such a conception coincides with Hollier’s ‘post-Enlightenment history’ as ‘the register – or the concert – of what could, allegorically, be called the united nations’.29 Utopian as it may seem, this respect for difference, overriding the work of Fanon, could give rise to a globalization, a new world order free from the ambitions of imperialism. Some of Fanon’s critics are quick to dismiss the incendiary violence of The Wretched of Earth but overlook the ethical concerns of Fanon’s political project. Significantly, his project inaugurates a new humanism which is predicated upon Sartrean existential phenomenology. This humanism is premised on an ethics that respects difference, guaranteeing the freedom of self as it recognizes the Being-of-Others. The kind of

250 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference humanism which Fanon advocates is at variance with Senghor’s: it does not drown the difference of the black colonized in a totalizing conception of negritude. It is not maintained by a Western notion of humanism or universalism which was complicit with colonialism. Fanon announces the birth of a ‘new man’ with the decolonization of both colonizer and colonized. In ‘The Rising Anti-imperialist Movement and the Slow-wits of Pacification’, Fanon reiterates the point he makes in the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, maintaining that decolonization contributes to the regeneration of humanity and its continuing progress.30 The revolutionary movement in Algeria affirms itself as part of the tidal wave of anti-colonial resistance that was sweeping Africa; for Fanon it represents new beginnings and is a fundamental moment in shaping a new world, ‘overturning at vertiginous speed the old global balance fashioned by the imperialist states of Europe during over a century of hegemony and domination’.31 In ‘African Countries and their Solidary Combat’ (an excerpt taken from his intervention at the ‘Conférence pour la paix et la sécurité’ in Accra), Fanon insists that the struggle of the Algerian people is part of a larger project; it is inextricably linked to the decolonization of the African continent and the Third World.32 In the article ‘At Conakry, He Declares: “Global Peace Goes Via National Independence”’, he expounds further on the same idea that the independence of Algeria represents the independence of Africa as a whole, an idea which prefigures the key points raised in The Wretched of the Earth, namely that national independence is central to the project of decolonization, and that nationalism must be internationalist. French colonialism, he warns, will maintain its hegemony by instituting African republics that are independent only in name and without political sovereignty.33 ‘Sovereignty,’ writes Fanon, ‘is one and indivisible.’34 In ‘Algeria’s Independence: An Everyday Reality’, picking up themes from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: ‘the revolution’s blossoming sheds light on the combatant’s action by placing him in direct communication with the nation’.35 He deplores the fact that 82 per cent of the native population – namely the peasantry, the khamesat,36 the agricultural workers and traditional artisans – were kept at the margins of the political process. For Fanon, the Revolution expresses the people’s

Conclusion 251 will-to-power to obliterate the colonial system, as well as the patriarchal and feudal structures which thwarted their development.37 France could not adjust to the vicissitudes of history in the second half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, despite the processes of decolonization that were already underway, France pursued colonial wars in Madagascar, Indochina, Algeria and Black Africa, and in so doing undermined the democratic principles enshrined in its constitution. The Algeria Revolution, argues Fanon, made good where France had failed: it sought the restitution of these universal principles; the proclamation of the indivisibility of the rights of the individual which were denied by French colonialism.38 In ‘A Democratic Revolution’, Fanon further elaborates on the potential of the Algerian Revolution to establish a genuine democracy which French colonialism had denied in Algeria and Africa and compromised in France. The war constitutes the starting point of a new life, a new history – the history of an Algeria upset from top to bottom but rebuilt on entirely novel foundations.39 In The Wretched of the Earth, he uses the same phraseology to describe the phenomenon of decolonization, reaffirming this view that the Revolution meant the overturning of the old colonial structures and the foundation of a new society. In ‘A Democratic Revolution’, Fanon contends that the revolution turned a new page not only on the history of colonial oppression, but also on the obscurantism of a tradition which colonialism had mummified. The liberation of Algeria represents for Fanon the re-conquest of territorial sovereignty, but it is also a modernizing process. Decolonization is not a return to the pre-colonial past, but rather announces the advent of a modern nation assuming a significant role in today’s world politics.40 The foundation of such a nation cannot rest on the political, economic and social structures of colonial and traditional society. The colonization of Algeria in 1830 undeniably hampered its development and progress. For Fanon, independence brings in its train not only the liquidation of colonial structures, but also a rupture with the past. In Studies in a Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth, he expresses a similar view that the Revolution is political and cultural: it brings about radical mutations, liberating the colonized from the yoke of colonial domination, and replacing the feudal and medieval ideologies which had until then governed colonial society

252 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference with democratic principles befitting modern democratic states. The Revolution announces, in other words, the advent of democracy.41 Fanon envisages that such a momentous movement will emulate the French Revolution, guaranteeing the inalienable rights of the citizen, freedom of expression and of the press – rights and freedoms that are crucial to the development of the individual. This Revolution opposes tyranny and oppression; it draws its legitimacy from the power and sovereignty of the people.42 In ‘A Democratic Revolution’, he clearly subscribes to the universal values of humanism enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a fundamental document of the French Revolution. In The Wretched of the Earth, however, Fanon does not jettison humanism – which owes a great deal to the French Revolution and the history of human and civil rights – but loudly denounces its implication with colonialism and capitalism. He does not reject universal and humanist principles per se but their history, which developed in tandem with an emergent capitalism and with colonial expansion that consolidated the Second Empire. As it established its republican and democratic institutions at home, France was busy imposing its despotic and colonial rule overseas. I have expanded on this paradoxical development of the French Revolution in Chapter 5; what motivated colonialism was not the promotion of human rights but the economic interests of industrial capitalism which, as Sartre explains, became imperialist. In Algeria, French colonialism brought about the dispossession of the Algerians, as well as the disintegration of their society and their alienation. Threatened by depersonalization, atomization and alienation, the colonized sought refuge in their past by jealously protecting their sense of self and tradition. As we saw in Chapter 6, Fanon, like Laroui and Said, cautions against such a refuge into the past. In his view, anticolonial struggle is marked by two defining features. First, the colonized have to reaffirm their historical subjectivity; second, and more important, they have to adopt modern and revolutionary principles.43 The necessity of the struggle is engendered by the desire to espouse modern values without being colonized, assimilated and hegemonized. Fanon’s struggle is obviously determined by the exigencies of a brand of nationalism

Conclusion 253 that is open to embrace the values of other progressive cultures. In his words: The necessity of being reborn generates in the Algerian the desire to be himself and to understand the Other, to assimilate modern experience without allowing himself to be assimilated by the other. This twofold exigency means that the Algerian people is at once the most nationalist and the most open, the most faithful to Islam and also the most welcoming of extra-Islamic values. Of Muslim peoples, it is perhaps one of the most attached to the Muslim faith and one of the most steeped in the spirit of the modern west.44 In ‘A Democratic Revolution’, he clearly lays out the main lines of his critique of the pitfalls of narrow nationalism, a critique in which he rejects the backward-looking ideology of negritude in The Wretched of the Earth. He identifies in the Algerian Revolution a ‘creative’ and ‘dynamic’ synthesis reconciling the nationalistic aspirations of the people with the spirit of universality.45 He warns against nominal independence which might free the colonized from economic oppression only to keep them under neo-colonial domination. He is adamant that national independence is of necessity democratic and must ensure the social, economic and political liberation of the masses. It must overturn the feudal and colonial structures which have perpetuated their exploitation. Such a necessity is at the core of Fanon’s project of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth. I agree with Peter Hudis’s remark that national consciousness is a dialectical moment which leads to a higher stage of consciousness culminating in ‘a thoroughgoing social and political transformation that illuminates the content of a new society’.46 The ‘national phase’, crucially, provides an ideology which, Fanon claims, was lacking in the post-independence state; an ideology which binds society together and overcomes ethnic, tribal and religious conflicts. Nation building is not an end in itself but a means to an end for the accomplishment of humanism; it is, as Hudis writes, ‘the dialectical movement from lived experience of the specific individual to the universal goal of

254 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference mutual recognition’47 which is essential to global citizenship. However, I do not concur with Hudis’s assertion that The Wretched of the Earth is more dialectical than Black Black Skin, white Masks.48 Like Memmi, Robinson and Hall (and up to a point Bhabha and Khanna), Hudis presents a bifid reading of Fanon. What I have sought to show in this book is that Fanon is consistent in his views and political commitment. The political and revolutionary content of The Wretched of the Earth develops from his struggle in Black Skin, White Masks to disalienate the individual and restore intersubjective relationships and human function, thwarted by racism and colonial prejudice. In the Second World War he joined the dissidence to defend France against fascism and it is no contradiction that he took up arms to fight colonial France in the Algerian War. Critics who praise his courage in the Second World War and condemn his violence in the Algerian War are oblivious not only to their own contradiction but to the humanist dimension of Fanon’s politics. I want to contest Memmi’s assertion that Fanon completely relinquishes his cultural affiliation with France. Viewed within the framework of Freud’s ‘family romance’ (as we saw in Chapter 3), Fanon’s disillusionment with France can be thought to represent his idealization of its tradition, culture and political institutions. Notes 1 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Critical Fanonism’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (Spring, 1991), pp. 457–458. 2 Albert Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, Massachusetts Review, (Winter, 1973), p. 10. 3 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 15. 4 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 16. 5 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 16. 6 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 17. 7 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 21. 8 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 20. 9 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 25. 10 As Bulhan astutely points out, negritude was not an agency of revolutionary change – it ‘presented neither a total departure from the white world it denounced nor a program of transformative action, objectively transforming oppressive conditions’. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, p. 31.

Conclusion 255 11 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 25. 12 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 28. 13 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 28. 14 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34. 15 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34. 16 Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34. 17 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226. 18 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226. 19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 203. 20 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 16. 21 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 96. 22 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 51. 23 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63. 24 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63. 25 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63. 26 ‘Not being the same in history, but being in the same history. Assimilation, here, simply means the pure openness of historical synchronicity. That there is one and only one time and one history. That history (as opposed to memory) is never strictly of one’s own. That history means risking one’s past in the other’s language, in the other’s time. Assimilation, as it appears in Sartre’s conclusion, might thus be just another name for this fact: modern (post-Enlightenment) Judaism is entering a history that, like Bataille’s Hegelianism, is without reserve, a history that is no longer exclusively its own; it is entering the register – or the concert – of what could, allegorically, be called the united nations.’ Denis Hollier, ‘Mosaic: Terminable and Interminable’, October, 87 (Winter, 1999), p. 159. 27 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199. 28 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199. 29 Hollier, ‘Mosaic: Terminable and Interminable’, p. 159. 30 Frantz Fanon, ‘The Rising Anti-imperialist Movement and the Slow-wits of Pacification’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 625. 31 Fanon, ‘The Rising Anti-imperialist Movement’, p. 625. 32 Frantz Fanon, ‘African Countries and their Solidary Combat’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, pp. 633–635. 33 Frantz Fanon, ‘At Conakry, He Declares: “Global Peace Goes Via National Independence”’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, pp. 641–642. 34 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria’s Independence: An Everyday Reality’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 548. 35 Fanon, ‘Algeria’s Independence’, p. 548. 36 The propertyless peasants that rented land.

256 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference 37 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algerian Revolutionary Consciousness’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 582. 38 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria and the French Crisis’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 561. 39 Frantz Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 569. 40 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, p. 570. 41 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, p. 570. 42 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, p. 571. 43 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, p. 570–571. 44 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, pp. 571–572. 45 Fanon, ‘A Democratic Revolution’, p. 572. 46 Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades (London: Pluto Press, 2015), p. 136. 47 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades, p. 137. 48 Clearly, ‘The Negro and Hegel’ announces the incendiary language of The Wretched of the Earth. It is rather simplistic to oppose Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth on the basis that the latter is more political and incendiary in its ideological outlook while the former is apolitical, engaging only with psychoanalysis. In fact, the discourse in the section ‘The Negro and Hegel’ is arguably as violent as the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon describes the violence to which the colonized Negro is subjected as a returning violence in The Wretched of the Earth: it is a defining feature of colonialism and the process of decolonization. Violence pervades every aspect of colonial society, and as I showed in Chapters 3, 4 and 6, it permeates language, sexuality, class structure and even infiltrates the medical establishment.

Index

11 September 2001 225 18th Brumaire coup 128 ‘Abbāsids 197, 204 and ‘Abbāsid period 234 aarch 176–177, 188, 195 abandonment 8, 52, 103–105, 112, 116, 118–119, 246 Abane, Ramdane 19 Abbas, Ferhat 19, 31, 177, 188 Abbé Grégoire 129 Abdelkader, Émir 175 Abdoulaye, Sadji 101 Nini 101–102, 106, 109, 111, 120 Abu El-Haj, Nadia 231, 238, 240 açala 220–221 Accra Conference 20–21, 31, 250 acculturation 7, 18, 103, 110, 117, 123, 213, 233 accumulation by dispossession 225 Achour, Christiane 58 African Legion 174–175 africanité 11 Ahmad, Aijaz 78, 222–226, 234, 238–239 In Theory 222, 238–239 Al-Azmeh, Azziz 237 Algerian Revolution 21, 31, 191–192, 223, 243, 250–256

Algerian War 2, 7, 12, 17, 20, 28, 31, 66, 124–125, 127, 133, 136–137, 144, 147, 150–151, 178, 181–182, 190–192, 223, 254 Algiers 146, 174, 182–183 alienation 25–26, 35, 37, 39, 43, 46, 48–49, 52–53, 62–64, 69, 73, 110–111, 123, 142–143, 147, 150, 153, 159–160, 187–188, 190, 213–214, 216, 233, 248, 252 Alleg, Henri 156 Allied forces 8 Althusser, Louis 61, 66–68, 70, 92, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ 67–68 interpellation 66–70, 73, 107, 111, 116 Amrouche, Jean 48, 98, 119 ‘Colonialism et langage’ 98 ‘La Culture peut être une mystification’ 98 ancien régime 3, 117, 129, 240 animal 68–69, 126–127, 158 anthropological definition of the subject 27, 141 anthropology 125, 128, 135, 142, 144, 230

258 Index anti-colonial resistance 178, 188, 228, 250 anti-Semitism 35–36, 54 apatrides 160, 191 Apollinaire, Guillaume 11 appearance 50–51, 62, 65, 97, 103–104 Arabic 199, 204, 206, 213 Arabo-Islamism 11, 206–207 Arendt, Hannah 82, 94 On Violence 94 aristocracy 3, 154, 170–171, 173, 179, 183, 214–215 assimilation 7, 14, 26, 53, 66, 81–82, 96, 123, 125, 128, 130–134, 142–143, 147, 149, 154–155, 159, 203, 210, 244–245, 247–248, 255 association 128, 154–155 asylum 138–139, 141, 146–147, 150, 160, 174, 185–191, 195–196 asylum seekers 186–187 Azoulay, Jacques 141–144, 153 Balvet, Paul 138 Barthes, Roland 66–67, 70, 92, 163–164, 171 ‘Myth Today’ 66–67, 70, 163–164, 171, 202 mythology 92, 164, 171, 202 interpellation 66 Bassnett, Susan 202–203, 235 Post-colonial Translation 202, 235–236 Battle of Algiers 181–182 Battle of Alsace 7 Baudens, Dr Lucien Jean-Baptiste 125, 135, 152 Bégué, Jean-Michel 145–146, 157 Being-for-Others 34–35, 46, 48, 53 being-in-the-world 34, 41, 51 being-of-decolonization 23 béké 2, 3, 28, 97, 114, 117–118

Bergner, Gwen 27, 63, 105–107, 110–111, 120–121 Berlin Wall 85 Berthelier, Robert 152–153, 158 Bertherand, Alphone 134 Gazette Médicale de l’Algérie 134 Bertherand, Émile 134–135, 155 Médecine et hygiène des Arabes 134 Bethesda Hospital 1 Betts, Raymond F. 128–129, 154–155 Bhabha, Homi K. 25, 27, 37, 53, 59–60, 62–65, 70–85, 88–94, 106, 111, 167, 254 ‘Day by Day’ 74, 93 ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’ 25, 79, 89, 93–94 ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon’ 59, 91–92 ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ 93 ‘Sly Civility’ 93 biculturalism 202 Bilé, Serge 91 Noirs dans les Camps Nazis 95 bilingualism 202 Bin Ali, Mohamed 237 blackness 7–9, 11–12, 16, 38, 41, 43–44, 46, 48–50, 52, 65, 70, 93, 96, 100–102, 104, 109–110, 112–113, 115–116, 156, 246–247 Blida-Joinville Hospital 124, 137–138, 140–142, 147–148, 150, 153, 156, 186 blockade 2–3, 14–15, 99, 115 Blum–Viollette Bill 143 Bodichon, Eugène 124–127, 131, 133–135, 144–145, 148–149, 152–155, 158 Considérations sur l’Algérie 125, 158 De l’humanité 131, 153–154 Hygiène à suivre en Algérie 153

Index 259 Boigey, Dr Maurice 125, 145, 148, 152 Psychologie morbide, Etude psychologique sur l’Islam 157 Bonaparte 128, 168–169, 171–173, 181, 185, 193–195 Bonapartism 169, 171–173, 178, 182–185 Bône, Algeria 174 Boudin, Jean-Charles La Colonisation et de la population en Algérie 155 Boumendjel, Ahmed 20 Bourdieu, Pierre 144, 188 bourgeoisie 55, 118, 160–162, 164–167, 169–171, 188, 194, 209, 214–215, 241 national bourgeoisie 161–162, 165–167, 241 petty bourgeoisie 209, 214–216 bourgeois phase 159, 161, 165, 216 Bresson, Yvon 19 Breton, André 11 Briffault, Robert 197–199, 235 Bugeaud, General Thomas Robert 134, 173–176, 184 Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi 88, 94, 254 Bush, George ‘New World Order’ 224 Bush, George W. ‘the axis of evil’ 232, 241 Capécia, Mayotte 8, 15, 91, 98–99, 100–102, 105–106, 110–115, 119, 122 Je suis Martiniquaise 99, 101, 114–115, 119 La Négresse blanche 114–115 capital 42, 161–162, 165–166, 170–171, 179–180, 192, 199, 214, 234, 240–241 capitalism 27, 38, 86, 129–130, 159, 162, 164, 166, 173,

177–181, 183, 187, 192, 209, 214, 223, 227, 232, 234–235, 240–242, 252 castration 107–110, 120 Caute, David 12 centralization (linguistic and administrative) 129 centre and periphery 85, 166, 221, 233 Centre Neuropsychiatrique de Jour de Tunis 138 Césaire, Aimé 3–5, 9, 10, 15–16, 30, 41, 48, 69, 92, 115, 117, 184, 245–246 A Tempest 48 Discourse on Colonialism 94, 184 Chamberlain, Lori 203, 236 chaos 27, 225–226, 239 Charles X, King of France 172, 183 Chasseurs d’Afrique 174 chauvinism 162, 205 Cherki, Alice 58 Frantz Fanon, Portrait 28, 29, 31, 32, 157 city and country 166–167, 210 civilizing mission 131, 134 Cixous, Hélène 108–109, 120 class 5, 14–16, 38–39, 41–42, 44, 52, 55–56, 88, 97–98, 110, 115, 129–130, 144, 160–162, 164–175, 180, 183–184, 188, 190, 211–215, 240, 256 class consciousness 15, 38, 39, 168 classes dangereuses 168, 173–174, 179–180 classical 197–198, 200–201, 205, 206, 208–210, 213, 221 classicism 198, 201–202 classics 198, 230 climate 125, 127, 134–135 cogito (in Cartesian theory) 10 Cold War 85–89, 224, 241 colonial expansion 179, 181, 252

260 Index colonial settlements 127, 136, 176–177 communal therapy 137–138, 141–143 Commune 175, 184 Communism 224 Comte, August 10, 15 Congress of Mental Specialists and Neurologists (1935) 149 conscious 24, 44, 68, 116 consciousness 34–35, 38, 43–44, 47–51, 54, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 95–96, 152, 249, 253 coming-into-consciousness 15–16, 38–39, 114–115, 245 consciousness of the body 47–50, 61, 65, 69 consciousness of race 4, 8, 12, 15, 39, 43, 48–49, 65, 114 double-consciousness 102, 114 third-person consciousness 47, 69, 111 corporate institution 124, 135, 148, 203–204, 221–222, 224–227, 233–234 corporeal schema 9, 24, 43, 47–50, 64–65, 69–70, 90, 96, 101, 107, 151 cosmopolitan Islam 210, 216–217 coup d’état of February (1852) 181 Créole 28, 46, 56, 97–98 criminality 139, 144, 148–149, 152, 188 cubism 11 cultural schizophrenia 98 culture ‘men of culture’ 17–18, 45, 46, 206 tribalization of culture 11, 161 culture of conditionality 84 Damas, Léon 9, 97, 119 Pigments 97

Dar El Islam 206, 225, 239 ‘dark continent of female sexuality’ 108 Darwinism 126–127, 130, 142, 145, 148 day hospitalization 138–139 de Gaulle, General Charles 2, 5, 15, 21–22, 172, 181–184 de Saussure, Ferdinand 131–132 langue/parole 132 de Saussure, Léopold 124–125, 128, 130–133, 144, 148, 154–155 psychological race 131–132, 149 Psychologie de la colonisation française 154–155 de Tocqueville, Alexis 129 decentralization 166 of capital 166, 192, 241 decentring of the subject 49, 89, 220–221 of politics 233 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 117, 128, 154, 171, 252 decolonization 17–27, 76, 79–80, 82–83, 85–89, 124, 148, 151–152, 165, 172–173, 183, 186, 191–192, 198, 205, 207–208, 216, 220, 227–228, 230, 233–235, 248–251, 253, 256 deconstruction 25, 41, 70–73, 76–77, 233 deconstructive criticism 24, 40, 46 59, 71–75, 85, 90, 185, 189–191, 200, 221, 225, 233, 249 democracy 127, 164, 189–190, 205, 221, 226, 232, 251–252 democratic government/institutions 19, 27, 112, 126–127, 160, 164, 192, 225, 251–253

Index 261 Derrida Jacques 59, 71–74, 189, 220, 238 Dissemination 92 Of Grammatology 92–93, 238 Descartes 10–11 dialectic 22, 34, 36, 41–42, 44, 49, 54, 61, 64–65, 69–71, 73–76, 83, 85, 90, 97, 99, 112, 166, 169, 184–185, 207–208, 220, 243, 253–254 diaspora 40 dictatorship 88, 164, 183, 209, 221, 228 discrimination 4–5, 8, 14, 63–64, 66, 91, 112, 140 dissembling of self 24, 37, 59–60, 70, 75 dissidence 3, 5, 27, 95, 115, 254 Dominica 5, 95 Dorigny, Marcel 154 douar 136, 177 Du Bois, W.E.B. 102 dual economy 84, 159, 167, 180 Duffus, Cheryl 115–116, 122 eclecticism 212–213, 215, 241 education 28, 56, 98, 103, 124–125, 128, 131–134, 142, 166, 215, 228 El Mokrani 181 El Moudjahid 19, 21 elite 17–18, 88, 161, 167, 209–212, 214–215, 225, 228, 233, 237, 245–246 Engels, Frederick 170, 174–175, 194 Enlightenment 128–131, 197–198, 227–228, 230, 238, 240, 249, 255 Ensfelder, Pauline 1 entre (Derrida) 72, 74–75 Erlebnis 48, 65 Esprit 139 ethnicity 25, 36, 43, 70, 76, 109, 112–113, 116, 122, 140, 143

ethnocentrism 25, 132, 144–145, 152, 187, 198, 201, 205, 208, 212, 231, 233 ethnology 124–125, 128, 134–135 ethnopsychiatry 125, 142, 144, 148–149 évolué 59, 73–74, 88 exilic postcolonial 233 existential phenomenology 5, 24, 33, 35, 37, 43, 48, 53, 90, 112, 207, 249 exoticism 17–18, 67 expressionism 11 expropriation of Algerian land 26, 81–82, 136, 143, 146, 150, 176–180, 188, 222 extended family 143–144, 176–177, 188 facticity 15, 16, 35, 38, 41–44, 46, 48–49, 52, 96, 100, 104, 112, 115, 140, 245–247 false-consciousness 36, 50, 164 family romance 25, 91, 95, 102, 105, 112–113, 116, 118–119, 121–122, 247, 254 Fanon, Casimir 1 Fanon, Fernand 1 Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 11–14, 18, 24, 27, 29–31, 33–34, 37, 43–44, 52–53, 56–57, 59–60, 65–71, 75–76, 78, 89–93, 95–96, 98–99, 102–103, 105–106, 109–113, 116–120, 122–123, 132–133, 213, 238, 244, 246–248, 254–256 ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ 123–124 ‘Concerning Violence’ 20, 90, 190 ‘Medicine and Colonialism’ 123–125, 133, 136, 153,

262 Index ‘National Independence: The Only Possible Outcome’ 23, 32 ‘The North African Syndrome’ 123–125, 139, 144, 147, 153, 187–188, 191 ‘On National Culture’ 12 ‘Racism and Culture’ 17, 31 Studies in a Dying Colonialism 19, 23, 31, 59, 144, 147, 153, 155, 156, 189–191, 196, 251 Toward the African Revolution 12, 248 ‘West Indians and Africans’ 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 28–31, 116, 122 The Wretched of the Earth 6, 12–14, 17–27, 30–32, 34, 53, 55, 59, 71, 74–75, 78–80, 82–86, 88–90, 93–94, 99, 123–124, 140, 147–148, 153, 158–161, 172, 174, 178, 180, 182–183, 185–186, 188, 190–193, 205, 208, 210, 212, 217, 227, 235–236, 241, 244, 246–256 Fanon, Ibrahim 1 Fanon, Joby 8, 28 Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique 28 femininity 111 finance aristocracy 169–171, 173, 179, 183 fiqh 231, 240 French Republic First Republic 181 Second Republic 20, 170, 173, 179, 181, 183 Third Republic 181 Fourth Republic 173, 181–184 Fifth Republic 181–182 Foreign Legion 174 Foucault, Michel 186, 204, 230, 238

Fouillée, Alfred 124–125, 128, 130–131, 144, 154 Free France 2, 5–8 French Communist Party 9 French Revolution 117–118, 121–122, 129, 154, 171, 240, 252 Freud, Sigmund 25, 52, 91, 95, 105–109, 112, 121, 254 ‘autogeny’ and ‘sociogeny’ 52 ‘family romance’ 25, 91, 95, 105, 112, 121, 254 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) 7, 19, 20, 27, 58, 151, 156, 181, 182, 243 fundamentalism 81, 198, 205, 217, 221, 223, 228 Gallissot, René 176, 194 Gardet, Louis 204, 236 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 63, 83, 92, 94, 243, 254 gaze 9, 34–39, 43, 47–49, 51, 53–54, 59–60, 66–67, 69–70, 74, 90, 98, 103, 107, 111, 116–117 Gazette Médicale de l’Algérie 134 Geismar, Peter 6, 142 Fanon 28–29, 32, 156–157 Gendzier, Irene 12, 142, 143 Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study 28, 29, 156, 157 genitality 107, 109, 117 genocide 117–118, 133 Geronimi, Charles 19, 138 gerontocracy 176 Ghardimaou 187 globalization 25, 74, 79, 84–86, 88–90, 205, 225–227, 229, 232, 234, 239–242, 249 ‘globalization of chaos’ 225–226, 239 Goodman, Lenn E. 236 Gramsci, Antonio 186, 238

Index 263 Greece, ancient 197–199, 204, 218–219 Gros-Morne, Martinique 1 Guex, Germaine 104 abandonment-neurotic 104 La Névrose d’abandon 120 Guillet, Nicole 138 Gulf War 224, 232 Gutas, Dimitri 198, 235 Guyot, Yves 124, 128, 154 Hall, Stuart 77–78, 80, 89–90, 93, 254 Harvey, David 225, 239 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 14, 20, 34, 42, 44, 46, 64–65, 71, 76, 90, 106, 112, 118, 218, 255, 256 hegemony 67, 86, 151, 162, 171–173, 181, 204, 207–209, 211, 216, 221–224, 226, 228, 234, 239, 242, 250 Hellenism 218 heterogeneity 72, 76, 169, 171–173, 183–185, 208, 242 hierarchical cosmopolitanism 5–6, 140, 150 high and low 171, 179 historical consciousness 198, 213 historical materialism 213, 216 historicism 26, 216, 219, 233, 241 history 10, 14, 20, 21, 23, 25–26, 42, 44, 66, 72, 77, 80, 85–87, 89, 111, 116–118, 124, 126, 128, 130–133, 139, 142–143, 150, 160, 164–166, 170, 172–173, 180–185, 187, 189–192, 197–198, 201, 204, 206–213, 216–219, 222–223, 225–226, 228–229, 231–232, 238–239, 246–249, 251–252, 255 Hobsbawm, Eric 226 ‘the age of Empire’ 226 ‘high or classical imperialism’ 226

Holden, Robert 21 Hollier, Denis 248–249, 255 Hôpital Caratine 134 Hôpital du Dey 134 Hospital of Manouba 138, 150 Houphouët, Félix 21 Hudis, Peter 253–254 Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades 256 human 10, 23, 28, 42, 45–46, 50, 53, 57, 68–69, 82, 126–127, 129, 131, 228, 232, 252, 254 humanism 10, 12, 19–20, 22–25, 27, 33–34, 53, 55, 59, 79–80, 86, 88, 103, 126, 131, 148, 187, 190–192, 205, 208, 212, 217, 222, 229–233, 235, 238, 243, 246, 249–250, 252–253 as a ‘technique of trouble’ 233 humanitarianism 135 humanities 126, 197–198, 201, 208, 215, 228, 230–231, 235 humanity 13–14, 23–24, 36, 38, 41, 80, 126–127, 130–131, 137, 158, 167, 207–208, 250 Hunt, Lynn 112–113 family romance 121–122 Hurley, E. Anthony 115, 122 hybridity 74, 229 hybridization 229 hymen 72, 75 identification 53, 60–64, 71, 73, 76, 90–91, 113, 116, 213, 243–245 ideology 12, 16, 18, 30, 35–36, 46, 50, 61, 67–70, 79, 81, 95–96, 99–100, 110, 116, 129, 133, 152, 161, 163–166, 176–177, 184, 203, 208–209, 214–215, 225, 227, 235, 253 ijtihad 231–233, 240

264 Index Ikonné, Chidi 102, 120 IMF 84 incest 110 individual property 176–177 individualism 176, 188 individuation 37, 67–68, 70, 91, 109, 117 Indo-Chinese subjects 13 inferiority complex 51, 96, 99–102, 104, 152 ‘economic inferiority’ and ‘epidermalization’ of inferiority complex 52, 98 L’information psychiatrie 141 Innenwelt 61 intellectual (the) 18, 26, 151, 161, 207, 209–210, 212–214, 216, 228, 230, 233, 243 intellectual recognition 106 intellectuality 110–111 intermediary civilization 200, 218 internationalism 23, 25, 75 216 intersubjective (relation) 24–25, 33–34, 37, 43, 46, 48, 53, 254 intractable difference 220 introspection 34, 39, 41, 69–70, 149 Iraq 225, 232 Islam and madness 145–146 Islamic civilization 197, 200, 202, 205, 212, 218–219, 222 isnad 231, 240 Jean Veneuse 8, 52, 99, 102–106, 110–102, 116, 119, 244 jihad (battle for truth) 231–232 Joséphine, Empress 118 Julien, Charles-André 175, 194 July Revolution 172, 174, 178, 181–182 Keller, Richard 147–148, 157 Kenyatta, Jomo 207

Kesteloot, Lilyan 29 Les Ecrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une litérature 29 Khalfa, Jean 32, 56, 157, 255–256 Khanna, Ranjana 26, 160, 169, 185–191, 195–196, 254 Khatibi Abdelkabir 26–27, 89, 198, 200, 205, 216–221, 225, 233–235, 237–238 Açala 220–221 Maghreb 218–220 Maghreb pluriel 235, 237–238 Ouma 220, 238 Radical Orientalism 200–201, 233 Salafism 218–219 techné 219 West 219–221, 233–234 Koulouglis 174 Kovalevski M.M. 173, 176 La propriété collective du sol 173 labour 42, 55, 161, 168, 235 Lacan, Jacques 25, 59–66, 68–70, 77, 90–92, 105–109, 116–117 infans stage 61, 68–69 ‘in-the-Name-of-the father’ 25, 105, 117 mirror stage 60–61, 64–65, 68–70, 90, 116–117 Symbolic 61, 68–70, 90, 107– 110, 116–118, 141 Lacoste, Robert 137, 182 lactification 52, 100 Laroui, Abdallah 11, 26–27, 198, 205, 209–216, 219, 228, 233, 252 The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual 236–237 Latin 130, 198, 204

Index 265 Le Bon, Gustave 124–125, 128, 130–133, 144, 148–9, 154–155 and ‘historical race’ 131–132, 149 L’Homme et les sociétés, leurs origins et leur histoire 131 Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples 131, 154–155 Légitime défense 9 Leiris, Michel 56, 98 Léonard, Jacques 135, 155 Léro, Étienne 9 Léro, Thélus 9 Les Joyeux 174 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 110 LeVine, Mark 225–226, 239 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 133, 149 Lhermitte, Jean 47, 64 Lilliestierna, Christian 189, 196 literature 11, 115, 125–126, 142, 203, 230, 238 literature of combat 77 Loi-Jonnart 143 Lombard, Maurice 199, 235 Lorcin, Patricia 125, 153 Louis-Philippe, King of France 170–171, 183, 195 lumpenproletariat 26, 81, 123, 144, 160–161, 167–175, 178–180, 183–190, 193, 195–196 Lumumba, Patrice 21, 167 Lwoff and Sérieux plan 147 Lyon 8, 12, 103, 124, 139, 147 Lyon hospital 139 McCulloch, Jock 12, 30–31 Macey, David 21, 98, 119, 138 Frantz Fanon, A Life 28–29, 31–32, 156–157 ‘Race, Phenomenology’ 56 madness 26, 123, 137–138, 144–145, 147–148, 151, 159, 186–191

madness and civilization 145, 186 madness and colonization 26, 147, 151, 159, 187, 190–191 Maghreb 218–220, 225 Magraw, Roger 194 Manichaeism 26, 71–72, 74–76, 81, 83–87, 90, 110, 113, 140, 148, 152, 167, 204, 227, 230, 238 Manville, Marcel 4–8 Antilles sans fard 8, 29 ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’ 29, 122 Maran, René 9, 91, 98–99, 102– 103, 105, 111–112, 119–120 Batouala 102 Un homme pareil aux autres 99, 112, 102–103, 105, 119–120 Martin, Tony 161, 192 Marx, Karl 26, 129, 159–161, 167–178, 180, 185–186, 188, 192–195, 214, 218, 223, 225 The Communist Manifesto 161, 168, 193 Critique of the Gotha Program 160 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 168–169, 175, 185, 193–194 ‘Le Système foncier ancestral en Algérie au moment de la conquête française’ 176, 178, 194–195 Marxism 26–27, 39, 76, 159, 161, 166, 169, 171–172, 219, 222, 224, 234 masculinity 106–108 Médélice, Eléonore Félicia 1 Medical School of Algiers 134 medicine 26, 123–125, 128, 133–137, 144, 146–148, 152–153, 198 medicine of propaganda 135

266 Index medievalization of thought 213, 216, 221 Mehlman, Jeffrey 169, 193 melancholia 104, 149 Memmi, Albert 4, 12, 43, 45, 69, 88, 118–119, 148, 243–248 ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’ 243, 254–255 The Colonizer and the Colonized 92, 96, 119, 237, 247, 255 Ménil, René 9 Mercer, Kobena 77, 89–90, 93 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 24, 46–49, 56–57, 64 metaphor 37, 60, 63, 96, 202–203, 220, 232, 235 metaphysical traditions: Islam and the West 218 metropolitan 18, 137, 223–225, 227, 230, 233 Meyerhof, Max 221 Middle East 187, 222–223, 225– 227, 229, 234, 239, 242 Miles, William F.S. 122 mimesis 71–73 mimicry 72–74, 77 misandry 105, 112, 115 miscegenation 1, 110, 126–128, 131, 133 misogyny 103, 105, 112, 115 Mobile Guard 170–171, 176 Mollet, Guy 181 Monnerot, Jules 9 Montagnac, General François Joseph Lucien 175 Moreau, Jacques-Joseph 125, 145–146, 149, 152, 157 and Islam 145–149 Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient 145, 157 Morel, Benedict Augustin 149 La Moricière, General 175 moristan 146 Mosole, Pierre 7

Mostefaï, Chauki 20 ‘mother’ France 4, 8, 95, 102, 105, 113, 117–119 Moumié, Félix 21 Mouvement National Congolais 21 Muslims 19, 31, 81–82, 142, 145–146, 149, 152, 191, 197, 199–200, 204–205, 212, 216–217, 226, 231, 239, 253 mythology 11, 67, 164, 171, 202 nation 17, 19, 21, 80–81, 85, 89, 114, 162–163, 165–166, 168, 179, 186, 191–192, 208–209, 226, 229, 240, 247–251, 253, 255 national bourgeoisie 161–162, 165–167, 241 national consciousness 75, 77, 88, 151, 166, 172, 208, 249, 253 national culture 18, 27, 165–166, 172, 206–207 nationalism 8–9, 20, 22–23, 25–27, 34, 58, 74–75, 79, 88, 159, 162–164, 181, 205, 208–211, 216, 218, 228–229, 233–234, 247, 249–250, 252–253 nationality 16, 19, 26, 163, 213, 247–248 naturalization 66–67, 130 Nazism 2, 8, 22, 28, 86, 91, 95 negritude 5, 8–18, 26–27, 29–30, 33, 35, 37–42, 44–46, 53, 65, 88, 114–116, 118, 156, 205–207, 216, 243, 245–247, 250, 253–254 Negrophobia 8, 25, 65, 91, 100– 101, 105, 107, 109–111, 113–114, 133 neo-colonialism 21–22, 25, 86, 88–90, 162, 166, 209–210, 221, 224, 226, 232, 234–235, 241–242, 253

Index 267 neo-imperialism 227 and the insidious work of ideology 227 neo-liberalism 26–27, 205, 222, 224–227, 232, 234–235, 239–240 neurosis 2, 52, 103–105, 112, 116, 121, 244–245 New Negro 9 Nicolas, Armand 28 Histoire de la Martinique 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 203, 231–232, 236, 241 philology 231–232 ‘Translation as Conquest’ 203 Nkrumah, Kwame 20–21, 31 Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism 241 Notre Journal 141 ontology 5, 10, 44–47, 64 ontopological split 25, 75 ontopology 74 Oran, Algeria 6, 174 Orientalism 11, 108, 125, 133–134, 145–146, 148, 160, 169–170, 172, 175–176, 185, 197–200, 203–204, 221–225, 227, 229–230, 233–234, 236, 238 Ouma 220, 238 overdetermination 35–37, 49 Pan-Africanism 9, 22 parcelization of collective property 176–177 Paris 8, 9, 12, 170, 174, 182, 184 Parry, Benita 76–77, 93 past 13, 17, 44, 74, 78, 81, 86, 104, 129, 191, 201, 205–207, 209–214, 216–217, 219, 221, 230–231, 245, 247, 249, 251–252, 255 patois 129 patriotism 117

peasantry 26, 81, 160–161, 167, 178, 180, 186–188, 192, 210, 214, 250 Pélissier 130, 175–176, 184, 194 penis 107 penis envy 107 perestroika 78, 223–226 Pétain 2, 3, 114–115 National Revolution 2–3 petit-nègre 97 phallocentrism 107, 109–110 phallus 107–108 phenomenology 5, 24, 27, 33, 35, 37, 43, 48, 53, 56, 57, 65, 80, 90, 112, 207, 249 phenomenology of perception 24, 48 Philcox, Richard 25 philology 124–125, 128, 142, 144, 231–232 pieds noirs 5, 29 Pilotin, Michel 9 pitfalls of nationalism 22, 26–27, 58, 75, 88, 159, 161, 172, 205, 208, 216, 221, 228, 233–234, 253 Pluto Press 78 poetry 16–18, 33, 38–39, 41, 43, 45–46, 126 Pontorson Hospital 156 popularism 171 Porot, Antoine 125, 144–145, 147–150, 152–153 positivism 10–11, 39, 126–127 postcolony 186–187, 189–190 postmodernism 74, 90, 243 praxis 17, 19, 23–24, 27, 33, 77, 83, 172, 191, 218, 243–244, 248 pre-capitalist society 159 Présence Africaine 101 privatization 176 progress 73, 126–128, 145, 147, 153, 158, 205, 209–210, 212, 219, 250–253

268 Index proletarianization 3, 15–16, 114, 153, 188, 216 proletariat 15, 26, 38–39, 42, 153, 160–161, 165, 167–170, 180, 185, 214–216 Prussian War 175, 194 psyche 34, 69, 75, 100, 238 ‘psychiatrization’ 145 psychiatry 8, 24, 27, 123–125, 137–138, 140–142, 144–145, 147–153, 156–157, 159, 185–187, 190, 230, 248 psycho-affective 80, 82–83, 205, 207, 213 psychoanalysis 12, 14, 24, 27, 33–34, 52, 62, 64, 77–78, 90, 99, 105–106, 108, 111, 116, 160, 169, 185–187, 244, 256 psychological race 131–132, 149 putsch (13 May 1958) 182, 184 Quitman, Maurice-Sabat 9 ‘rabble’ (as a class of people) 179–180, 184 race 4–5, 10, 12–15, 25, 35–36, 38–39, 41–43, 48, 50, 52, 55, 70, 75–76, 78, 91, 95, 102–106, 109–111, 113–116, 125–127, 131–133, 140, 149, 153–155, 158, 162, 164, 170, 175, 208, 229 racial crossovers and intermixing (métissage) 127, 133 racism 2, 4–8, 10, 13–15, 17–18, 22–25, 28, 31, 33, 38, 41–44, 47–51, 53, 63–64, 67, 69, 91, 95–96, 102, 104, 112, 115, 117, 119, 124, 133, 139, 144–145, 148–149, 162, 167, 243–254 radical Orientalism 197, 200–221, 233

Rao, Nagesh 241–242 rationalism 39, 44,198, 218, 219 razzia 175 Reaganism 222–224 realism 11 regionalism 129, 163 Régis-Reboul report 146 Renaissance 10–11, 198, 200–201, 204, 216, 218 Renan, Ernest 131 De l’origine du langage 131 republicanism 3, 4, 8, 20, 25–27, 80–81, 95, 98, 112, 116–118, 122, 127, 154, 160, 164, 171, 173, 181–184, 192, 252 Resistance (in occupied France) 5, 138, 156 Revolution (1848) 170, 175, 179, 184 revolution 20–21, 26, 31, 86, 117–118, 121–122, 129, 138, 154, 160–162, 165, 168–178, 181–182, 191–192, 223, 240, 243, 250–253 Robert, Admiral Georges 3–6, 113, 115 blockade 3, 14, 99, 115 tan robè 6, 29, 91 Robert–Greenslate agreement 2 Robinson, Cedric 185, 254 Roman civilization 218 Royal Ordinance (10 March 1831) 174 ‘Royaume arabe’ 130, 195 Saddam Hussein 228, 232 Said, Edward W. 11, 27, 89, 148, 197–198, 200, 203–205, 212, 222–236, 238–241, 252 Culture and Imperialism 226–227, 229–230, 235, 239–240 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 212, 231, 241

Index 269 Orientalism 197, 203–204, 222–223, 227, 229–230, 236, 238 ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture’ 241 Saint-Alban Hospital 138, 141, 146 Sakhiet crisis 182 salafiyya 212–214, 218–219, 237 Salan, Raoul 7 and the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) 7, 184 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 8, 12–13, 17, 22–24, 26, 32–49, 51–57, 69–70, 76, 82, 90, 106–107, 112, 130, 159–160, 172, 178–184, 207, 218–219, 246–249, 252, 255 Anti-Semite and Jew 33–37, 43, 47, 49, 54–55, 65, 92 Being and Nothingness 33–37, 52, 54, 65 Black Orpheus 17, 33–43, 45, 55–56, 65, 103 Colonialism and Neocolonialism 94, 195 ‘Colonialism Is a System’ 22, 32, 159–160, 174, 178–180, 248 Critique de la raison dialectique 23 Existentialism Is a Humanism 33, 53 ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea in Husserl’s Phenomenology’ 53 Sayad, Abdelmalek 188 Le Déracinement 188 Schoelcher Lycée 4, 8 School of Algiers of psychiatry 123–124, 140, 144, 148–153, 191 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome 12 Second Empire 169, 172–173, 175, 178, 181, 183, 252

Second World War 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 27, 28, 30, 86, 91, 101, 102, 105, 114, 116, 117, 119, 138, 140 150, 226, 203, 245, 251, 254 segregation 80–81, 83, 86–87, 140, 150 Sékou Touré, Ahmed 21 sénatus-consulte 81–82, 130, 143, 176–179 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 9–12, 18, 21, 39, 45, 156, 207, 246, 250 Ce que je crois 29–30, ‘Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century’ 10–11 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française 119 Sétif uprising (1945) 20 Shariati, Ali 207 slave 1, 5, 13, 16, 28, 34–35, 40, 43, 50, 54, 73, 87–88, 97, 114, 118, 122, 140, 244 slavery 1, 25, 40, 54, 87–88, 97, 105, 111, 117–118, 128, 171, 208 abolition of 118, 128, 171 Soviet Union 224 Spahis 174 Special Powers Act (1956) 182 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 186 Stallybrass, Peter 26–27, 160, 169–173, 175, 180, 182–183, 185, 193–194 Stiglitz, Joseph 84 subaltern 186, 208, 217 supplement 37, 71–72, 185–186, 188–190, 238 supplementarity 37, 71–73, 100, 173, 185–186, 188–191, 221, 238 surplus capital 179 surplus populace 173–174, 179, 189

270 Index surrealism 11, 41 symbolic 25, 61, 68–70, 90, 105, 107–110, 116–118, 141 symbolism 11 Taïeb, Roger 28 techné 219 technology 39, 136–137, 175, 219–220, 234 Thatcherism 222–224 therapeutic environment 141–144 ‘thingification’ 69 Third World 22–23, 28, 58, 78, 84–88, 207, 221–222, 224, 227–228, 233–234, 241, 250 Tomlinson, B.R. 241 torture 136–137, 151, 156, 189 Tosquelles, François 124, 138–141, 156–157 Le Travail thérapeutique à l’hôpital psychiatrique thérapeutique institutionnelle 138 trade and globalization 229 trade and translation 199–200 tradition 17, 200–201, 205, 209–213, 216–221, 228–229, 231, 237, 252, 254 traditionalism 218–219, 237 traditionalization of culture 26, 210–213, 215–216, 228 translation 197–205, 218–219, 221, 232–236 translation movement 198–200, 204, 233 transnationalism 25, 74–75 tribalism 21, 163–164 tribalization – of thought, culture and politics 11, 161–166 Trivedi, Harish 202–203, 235 Post-colonial Translation 202, 235–236

Tunis Congress 147 Turin, Yvonne 133, 155 Affrontments culturels en Algérie au XIXe siècle 133, 155 Tymoczko, Maria 235–236 Tzara, Tristan 11 ultra-nationalism 162 ultras 19, 181–182, 184 Umwelt 61, 69 unconscious 24, 44, 50, 60–64, 108, 113, 149, 219 União dos Povos de Angola 21 Union du Peuple Camerounais 21 universal 33, 36–37, 42, 55, 60–62, 80, 103, 106, 111–112, 119, 125–131, 161, 164–165, 180–184, 192, 205, 220, 229–230, 246, 249–253 universalism 55, 130, 164, 182, 205, 230, 246, 250 universality 25, 37, 42, 50, 53, 111, 112, 127–131, 133, 164–165, 171, 173, 180–184, 205, 222, 253 urbanization 215 utilitarianism 127 Venuti, Lawrence 236 Vergès, Françoise 122, 140, 144, 156, 158 Vichy 2–5, 113, 114–116, 156 Victory Day 7 Vindic Françoise 1 violence 12, 14, 19–21, 23–26, 48, 74, 77, 79–84, 88, 90–91, 94, 96, 123, 139, 144, 147–152, 167, 175, 188–191, 225–227, 231, 234, 249, 254, 256 Viollette, Maurice 147 La Voix de la France libre (BBC) 5 von Grunebaum, Gustave E. 212

Index 271 Warnier, Dr Auguste Hubert 125, 127, 135–137, 143, 148, 150, 155, 176–178 Loi Warnier 136, 143, 176–178 Weate, Jeremy 48, 56–57 Weltanschauung 47, 95, 98 West, the 86, 88, 126, 134, 145, 162, 197, 199, 203–205, 207–208, 212, 218–222, 225–229, 233–234, 238–239, 253 Western epistemology 198, 200, 204, 220–222, 233–234 Westernization 213–214

Williams, Raymond 201, 209, 230, 235, 238 World Bank 84 Yacine, Kateb 207 Young, Robert 32, 157, 238, 255–256 Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 201–202, 235 Yoyotte, Simone 9 Yûsuf, General (né Joseph Vantini) 175 Zahar, Renata 12 Zouaves 174