{"id":17922,"date":"2014-12-08T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=17922"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:13","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:13","slug":"thinking-fanon-50-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/thinking-fanon-50-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Frantz Fanon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fanonian Translations In and Beyond \u2018Fanon Studies\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

In the Cheikh Djemal\u2019s film \u2018Frantz Fanon: His Life, His Struggle, His Work,\u2019 Rehda Malek, one of the co-editors of El Moudjahid at the time, recalls how he was \u2018impressed by Fanon\u2019s intellectual vivacity and the speed in which he could write papers,\u2019 adding that \u2018he could write an article almost without crossing out a word in a direct and spontaneous way.\u2019<\/p>\n

In a sense the same can be said of his writing of L\u2019an 5 de la r\u00e9volution alg\u00e9rienne and Les damn\u00e9s de la terre which were \u2018written\u2019 orally, so to speak, with Fanon speaking and his assistants writing down or typing his ideas. Though we know that Fanon gave much thought to each work, they were of the time and written very much for the time, and in the latter case very much against the time. Fifty years later, we consider these works as part of the oeuvre of a brilliant man, to be pored over and taken apart, every phrase scrutinised. And yet, when it was published, Les damn\u00e9s was roundly criticised by the French liberal and left intelligentsia. Communists and liberals agreed: Fanon\u2019s analysis was flawed; his insights were simply insights not theory; he made wild generalisations; he didn\u2019t understand Algeria, or Islam, or the peasantry, and so on.<\/p>\n

It was in the United States of America, that land of lynchers as Fanon puts it, where his books became famous. The Americas were Fanon\u2019s first resting place. Born in the Caribbean, he died in a Bethesda Hospital and was reborn in the 1960s revolts. And yet in his soon to be republished \u2018Fanon: A Life\u2019, David Macey\u2019s richly detailed and valuable biography of Fanon, Macey is dismissive of Fanon\u2019s knowledge of America which he says is not particularly empirical since it is \u2018derived primarily from literary sources \u2026 based on novels\u2019 (193). Is Fanon\u2019s understanding of the US problematic? Certainly Richard Wright\u2019s \u2018Native Son\u2019 tells more about the \u2018Negro\u2019 in the United States of 1940 then any empirical work.<\/p>\n

But Macey insists that it is not only the fact that Fanon understands America through novels but also that his understanding of the novels themselves is suspect. Of Fanon\u2019s reading of Chester Himes\u2019 \u2018If He Hollers Let Him Go\u2019 Macey argues that his own \u2018analytic schema, and perhaps at some level his own desires, almost forces him to misread the [book]\u2019 (194).<\/p>\n

Macey\u2019s criticism is not, however, confined to Fanon\u2019s understanding of the US. Macey contends that in \u2018Black Skin\u2019 Fanon \u2018confuses\u2019 Jean Veneuses\u2019 story with Germaine Geux\u2019s notion of abandonment, and more damningly he insists that Fanon really didn\u2019t understand Freud and \u2018misrecognizes\u2019 psychoanalysis (192, 194). [2]<\/p>\n

These are not new criticisms. The British Communist Party critic Jack Woodis said the same thing in the early 1970s arguing that Fanon was given to \u2018exaggeration\u2019, \u2018unscientific judgments\u2019, \u2018over-simplification\u2019 and often \u2018carried away by his own eloquence\u2019 (1972: 25, 27, 28, 34). [3]<\/p>\n

What is at stake in Macey\u2019s criticisms? A sense of \u2018objectivity\u2019? A criticism of sloppy research directed at Fanon and also postcolonial Fanon studies?<\/p>\n

But then also in the conclusion, one is taken aback when Macey proclaims that Fanon had \u2018certainly had a talent for hate\u2019 (505). Certainly? On what basis? That almost certainly is without empirical knowledge.<\/p>\n

And yet these kinds of schoolmaster\u2019s comments also appear in a footnote to the new translation of \u2018Black Skin White Masks\u2019. One wonders why Richard Philcox chooses to correct Fanon in a note on page 131 that Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories, was from Georgia not Louisiana. Certainly Fanon could have been misinformed even if Harris did work in New Orleans.<\/p>\n

But what is more important is the internal audience. Philcox adds: \u2018It is interesting for Fanon scholars to know that Fanon was not very rigorous in his scholarship.\u2019 The concern with scholarship has little to do with Fanon but represents tensions and pretensions within postcolonial studies as an academic field. This is not to say that Fanon was not concerned with correct data. Indeed, his articles on sociotherapy at Blida hospital and on day-hospitalisation in Tunis reflect his concern with empirical veracity.<\/p>\n

The tension is best understood instead as a stress between text and context, that is to say between Homi Bhabha and David Macey, but it is one where everyone agrees first in principle that Fanon\u2019s political writings have little contemporary relevance. [4] This governing attitude to Fanon is evident in Bhabha\u2019s 2004 foreword to Philcox\u2019s translation of \u2018The Wretched\u2019 titled \u2018Framing Fanon\u2019 which quite literally frames Fanon by throwing Fanon\u2019s decolonial revolutionary humanism into the garbage, reducing his contribution to violence, and thus ends up with nothing to put in its place but a kind of wishful ethics against the IMF and World Bank.<\/p>\n

Translations are not neutral; they are both products of history and are also highly charged politically. Translations therefore take on lives of their own. Tellingly, Macey and Philcox also tell us when they first read Fanon. Macey bought copies of his work in 1970 in France, quickly adding that after reading \u2018Althusser, Lacan and Foucault[,] Fanon began to look naive.\u2019 Like other Marxists of the British new left, Macey was drawn to French structuralism, and Fanon\u2019s work seemed decidedly dated and pass\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Macey\u2019s description of Fanon as na\u00efve is reminiscent of Bhabha calling Fanon\u2019s humanism \u2018banal and beatific\u2019 in his now seminal piece \u2018Remembering Fanon.\u2019 Attracted to Lacan through structuralism, both Bhabha and Macey are, in a sense, products of the same intellectual trajectory. So Macey\u2019s \u2018return\u2019 to Fanon could only be refracted through a postcolonial academic discourse that is in fact indebted to and read through French theory \u2013 Althusser, Lacan and Foucault. In other words, Macey\u2019s biography is intimate with Bhabha\u2019s \u2018Remembering Fanon\u2019 even if he is at pains to disagree with its consequences; the unquestioned assumption, as I mentioned earlier, is that the historical Fanon has almost no resonance with British postimperial realities.<\/p>\n

In \u2018On Retranslating Fanon, retrieving a lost voice\u2019, the afterword to \u2018The Wretched\u2019, Philcox more self-consciously writes about his reading Fanon and tellingly quotes Macey, \u2018\u201cit was his anger that was so attractive.\u2019 After all,\u201d continues Philcox, \u201cwe Brits have a long history of angry men.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t necessarily include myself among \u2018we Brits\u2019, but I was introduced to Fanon through a pamphlet by John Alan and Lou Turner, \u2018Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought\u2019. Fanon was immediately connected to a \u2018Black world\u2019 and most concretely to Biko and Black consciousness in South Africa. Sure, I was angry in 1981; you could say that about many Black and White youth in Britain\u2019s Thatcherite \u2018inner cities\u2019 facing the racist violence of the British nationalists and criminalisation by the British police.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t anger that drew me to Fanon. What interested me in how Steve Biko used Fanon\u2019s theory was the way in which theory could become concrete in different situations. I was interested in how and why revolutions had gone wrong and in the context of the Irish question (the hunger strike was just about to begin) I was drawn to thinking about the relationship between national liberation and internationalism. Early in 1981, before the Brixton \u2018riot\u2019 and the 1981 inner city rebellions in England, I got hold of a copy of \u2018The Wretched of the Earth\u2019 in New York for a dollar from the Barnes and Noble annex on 16th street. [5]<\/p>\n

It was the 1968 mass market Black Cat edition, the one with a black image of people in motion set against an orange background. Black Cat: I thought it had something to do with the Black Panthers (which I later found out from Charles Denby was named after the Black Panther of the Lowndes County Freedom Democratic Party in Alabama). For me it was always the Black Panther edition. 1968. The year of revolutions. In France, Czechoslovakia, Mexico and in the United States [6]\u2026 It was Fanon who had been right there.<\/p>\n

\u2018And then there is the way he has been treated,\u2019 writes Philcox, \u2018pulled in all directions by postcolonial scholars, made to fit their ideas and interpretations \u2014 and a great sense of injustice comes to mind every time Fanon is mentioned\u2019 (2004, 244). For Philcox, his translation of \u2018The Wretched\u2019 is an attempt to give back Fanon\u2019s voice, his \u2018tone, intensities, rhythms, and pauses\u2019 (2004 245). And though this is not the place to delve into the translations (and I have spoken about the translations by the African-American poet, Constance Farrington and by Richard Philcox elsewhere [7]) I do want to make one point about \u2018Black Skin White Masks\u2019.<\/p>\n

Published first by Grove in 1967, it is forgotten that it was an American translation for a popular market. One example: while \u2018Y a Bon Banania\u2019 refers to a popular breakfast cereal in France (with \u2018the obvious connection between blacks and apes through the mediating symbol of banana flour [See Gordon 2005 17], it meant nothing to most people in the US. Markmann\u2019s translation \u2018Sho good eatin\u2019 certainly made sense and conveyed a similar meaning to what Fanon was saying (see Turner 2011).<\/p>\n

The thing about translations is not only that they take on a life of their own but they also reflect different contexts. Homi Bhabha\u2019s \u2018Remembering Fanon\u2019, which became the introduction to the 1986 Pluto Press British edition (Markmann translation) of \u2018Black Skin\u2019 has become a canonical re-reading of Fanon for postcolonial studies. It doesn\u2019t refer to the French text at all, but is explicitly connected to a dig at English leftism: \u2018In the popular memory of English socialism\u2019, Bhabha begins, \u2018the memory of Frantz Fanon stirs a dim deceiving echo \u2026 a polite English refusal.\u2019<\/p>\n

If in France in the 1970s Fanon was found only in obscure second-hand bookshops, in the United States his works were being newly minted in mass market editions and becoming essential to discussions and intellectual debates foundational to the evolving Black and antiwar movements (and embryonic Black studies programs). And yet along with the US translations, we should also remember the groundedness of \u2018Black Skin\u2019 in the American drama. If, for example, the \u2018lived experience\u2019 or \u2018fact of blackness\u2019 [8] expressed by America\u2019s \u2018native son\u2019 at the end of chapter five drives Fanon to weep, the reference to \u2018twelve million black voices\u2019 (a title of Wright\u2019s later book) reflects the American drama \u2018cast in a different play\u2019, he says: a play in utter contrast to the French tragedy; a play of struggle and war, the defeats, truces, and victories (1967a 221) with which Fanon identifies. [9]<\/p>\n

Still involved in the French drama, a whole different play would begin with the Algerian revolution. If the real context for sociotherapy at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric hospital was a dynamic and living society, he logically could not carry on the work in a society that had become the asylum, with the medical profession intimately connected to the production of pathologies which rationally pursue the torture \u2018inherent in the whole colonialist configuration\u2019 (1967b 64). Thus, in one of his first articles for \u2018El Moudjahid\u2019 (October 1957), Fanon questioned the humanist commitment of the European left and liberals to a society which, using medical terminology, is a \u2018gangrene germ and the source of an epidemic\u2019 and whose essence is torture, violation and the inauguration of an \u2018unconditional reign of justice\u2019 (1967b 64-66). In other words, there was no middle ground, no space for an intellectual\u2019s autonomy. Such a society had to be opposed.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s own break with the \u2018French drama\u2019 is a product of the objective situation. 1 November 1954 dates the beginning of the Algerian liberation struggle. He often refers to the date as a historical dividing line \u2014 a before to which there is no going back. The struggle requires an absolute commitment, as he puts it in his 1956 speech to the first congress of Black writers. And just as he demands, in \u2018The Wretched\u2019, that intellectuals practically aid the revolution through commandeering resources snatched from colonial education, he works concretely, counseling those scarred by torture, harbouring guerillas on the run and training fighters in how to take care of the wounded (see 1967c), and directly aiding the armed struggle by teaching the bombers how to remain calm. As De Beauvouir recounts: \u2018he taught them to control their reactions when they were setting a bomb \u2026 and also what psychological and physical attitudes would enable them to resist torture best\u2019 (315).<\/p>\n

Fanon had been recruited into the FLN by Ramdane Abane, the Kabylian leader who became Fanon\u2019s mentor. Abane was a key figure behind the battle of Algiers and the conference at Soummam in 1956 held to create a coherent political program for the FLN, which was essentially a united front of different tendencies. Soummam declared that the military wing be brought under collective political control and put forward a vision of a future Algeria that remained Fanon\u2019s. [10] They both believed in the \u2018revolutionary dismantling of the colonial state\u2019 (Cherki 105). Explicitly critical of theodicy, the principle adopted as the Soummam platform was for a future democratic Algeria with the \u2018primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab, Amazigh, Muslim, [Jewish] Christian, European, etc.)\u2019 (Abane 39). Soummam, in other words, represented a political position and vision, which Fanon acknowledged in \u2018Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution\u2019, arguing that \u2018in the new society that is being built there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian \u2026 We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius can grow\u2019 (1967c 152, 32). By 1958 Abane was dead, liquidated by the FLN.<\/p>\n

Fanon refused to be publicly critical of the FLN even after the murder of Abane. This he later regretted, recounts De Beauvoir, but at the same time he needed to work out his thoughts through writing (Cherki 106). Despising some FLN leaders and militarists who reduced the struggle for independence to a simple equation of power, \u2018Year 5\u2019 was interesting in that it says almost nothing about the FLN or about political organisation but concentrates instead on the radical changes that had taken place in Algerian society since November 1954. He first titled the book \u2018the reality of the nation,\u2019 [11] but even so felt that that did not reflect the specificity and fluidity of the revolutionary moment.<\/p>\n

But Fanon balked when Maspero later changed the name to the \u2018sociology of revolution\u2019 saying, as publishers do (when they get overly concerned about marketing), that it was no longer the fifth year of the Algerian revolution. Fanon recoiled because \u2018sociology\u2019 was too intimately connected to an imperial project (1967c 37). The problem with sociology, including an ethno-sociology, is not that it doesn\u2019t contain an element of truth but that it has a false premise taking a situation arising out of colonialism as a dehistoricised cultural fact. Fanon insists that colonialism throws all elements of society into confusion, distorting and subverting all cultural relations. The first thing the colonised learn is to remain in place, argues Fanon.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the anticolonial revolt can throw everything into confusion in a new way, fundamentally upsetting colonised society and \u2018upsetting its limits\u2019 (2004 15). Under the most severe conditions \u2014 bombardments and raids on civilians \u2014 new attitudes and new relations emerge in what Fanon calls the \u2018drama of the people\u2019 (1967c 142), and the militant intellectual\u2019s role is to aid this unfolding and avoid \u2018erecting a framework \u2026 which follows an a priori schedule\u2019 (2004\/1968 113). In other words, though organisation is absolutely essential to help bring together scattered and local rebellions against colonial society, the organisation can itself become a pathology which suffocates thinking. Fanon warns against the brutality of revolutions, not only the brutal violence and counter-violence that worries him in \u2018Year 5\u2019 (see his introduction) but also the \u2018sclerosis\u2019 that knee-jerk anti-imperialism brings.<\/p>\n

In \u2018The Wretched\u2019 he is explicitly critical of what he calls the fetish of organisation often along military lines whose goal is to silence political discussion, calling the militant who wants to take shortcuts in the name of getting things done not only an anti-intellectual but atrocious, inhuman and sterile. Instead, gesturing to organisation as organic, he insists that the search for truth is the \u2018responsibility of the community\u2019 (2004 139) with the local, fully inclusive and democratic meetings the practical and ethical foundation of the liberated society. These \u2018liturgical acts\u2019, he writes, \u2018are privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak \u2026 and put forward new ideas \u2026\u2019 (2004 195) to become self-determining and decolonise the mind. Connected to everyday life and decision making, these daily acts are seemingly banal, but in the local engagements time becomes \u2018space for human development,\u2019 as Marx puts it, is \u2018no longer \u2026 of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world\u2019 (2004 135).<\/p>\n

Critics have dismissed Fanon\u2019s claims as romantic, but they are based on experience not flights of fancy. Fanon gives the example of lentil production during the liberation struggle, writing of the creation of production\/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN, which he says encouraged theoretical questions about the accumulation of capital: \u2018In the regions where we were able to conduct these enlightening experiments,\u2019 he argues, \u2018we witnessed the edification of man through revolutionary beginnings\u2019 because people began to realise that \u2018one works more with one\u2019s brain and ones heart than with one\u2019s muscles\u2019 (2004 133; 292).<\/p>\n

Talking of the political economy of food he adds, \u2018We did not have any technicians or planners coming from big Western universities; but in these liberated regions the daily ration went up to the hitherto unheard-of figure of 3,200 calories. [But t]he people were not content with [this] \u2026. They started asking themselves theoretical questions: for example, why did certain districts never see an orange before the war of liberation, while thousands of tons are exported every year abroad? Why were grapes unknown to a great many Algerians whereas the European peoples enjoyed them by the million? Today, the people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them.\u2019 It would not be surprising to hear questions about the objectivity of these enlightening experiments.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Black Skin White Masks\u2019 Fanon decries social science research methods, saying that they should be left to the botanists. Why? Because scientific objectivity was barred to him (1967a 14, 225), he was part of the research. Here, in \u2018The Wretched\u2019, he talks about \u2018objectivity\u2019 always being directed against the colonised. And then there is the revolutionary \u2018objectivity\u2019 of the enlightening experiments, and in \u2018Year 5\u2019 he posits himself as part of the \u2018we.\u2019<\/p>\n

At the time of its publication, \u2018Year 5\u2019 did not cause much of a stir in France; even Pierre Bourdieu recognised in his work that radical changes were taking place in Kabylia. [12] The government, however, found the book particularly incendiary and banned it as it was continually reprinted by Maspero. And yet in the wake of Algerian independence and the 1965 English translation by Haakon Chevalier (a Berkeley professor of literature, friend of Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s and Communist Party member who left the United States in 1950 after being accused of \u2018anti-American activities\u2019), the divide between Fanon\u2019s descriptions and post-independence Algerian reality became the source of new criticisms from Marxists (and later from feminists [13]) that Fanon was a romantic conservative.<\/p>\n

Discounting Fanon\u2019s \u2018enlightening experiments\u2019, a British Marxist, Ian Clegg, argued in his book \u2018Workers\u2019 Self-management in Algeria\u2019 that Fanon simply \u2018lacks a critical and dialectical analysis of the process of the formation of consciousness.\u2019 It is an argument repeated by Neil Lazarus, who while generally sensitive to Fanon\u2019s work finds, in his recent \u2018Postcolonial Unconscious\u2019, that Fanon \u2018often phras[es] subaltern thought in the elitist-idealist vocabulary of negation, abstract totalisation and self-actualisation\u2019 (2011 177). Lazarus references James Scott to emphasise the disconnection between the intellectual\u2019s romanticism and the local movement\u2019s concern with the concrete immediate. Beyond the tired vanguardist notions of saving theory for theoreticians, Fanon was concerned in \u2018The Wretched\u2019 that the work of intellectuals and militants was to patiently explain to the people that the future depended on their self-conscious and collective work. At the same time, Fanon rejected as populist and opportunist the idea that put an end to theoretical. In other words, isn\u2019t dialectical movement \u2014 engaging practice and theory \u2014 exactly what is at stake, not simply in what is living and what is dead in Fanon but what is living and dead in our period?<\/p>\n

It is the latter question that calls for us to approach Fanon\u2019s thinking not as an a priori application of theoretical categories but as always dedicated to the practical matter of changing the world. In other words, the fact is not only that Fanon would, as Edouard Glissant put it, act on his ideas by joining a revolution [14] but that for Fanon ideas were at one and the same time influenced by practice and themselves transformative. What Lazarus elsewhere calls Fanon\u2019s \u2018remarkable\u2019 essay, \u2018The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,\u2019 is precisely the product of a critical and dialectical analysis, a summing up of the experience of decolonisation. And yet, interestingly, in one of those \u2018snares of history\u2019 that Fanon speaks of, the American rebirth of Fanon \u2014 in the context of King and Malcolm, and debates about non-violence and self-defense \u2014 was made famous by the book\u2019s first chapter \u2018On Violence.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018The Wretched of the Earth\u2019 became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking\u2019, remarks Kathleen Cleaver (214), adding, \u2018Fanon\u2019s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.\u2019 The colonial world that Fanon wrote about \u2018bore a striking resemblance,\u2019 she continues (215), \u2018to the world that American blacks lived.\u2019 [15] For Cleaver (216), the special relevance to the Black Panthers \u2018was Fanon\u2019s analysis of colonialism and the necessity of violence.\u2019 This is not to suggest that there were not other discussions of Fanon in the US in the 1960s, [16] but Cleaver\u2019s summation suggests that was powerfully attractive to young American revolutionaries was the clarity of Fanon\u2019s descriptions of colonial manicheanism, the problem remains how to get beyond a Manichean reaction toward a new politics.<\/p>\n

Associating Algeria with Fanon, some Panthers fled to Algeria in the late 1960s and thus it was through the Panthers that Fanon returned momentarily to Algeria. But noticeably shorn of his internal critique of the liberation movements and postindependence, Fanon became reduced to the status of just another anticolonial figure. Yet, just as Eldridge Cleaver was opening the First Pan African Cultural Festival in 1969, Fanon had made his way across the Limpopo into the heart of settler colonial Africa \u2014 apartheid South Africa with US Black theology intellectuals like James Cone providing an important link between Fanon and the emergent Black Consciousness movement.<\/p>\n

The situation in South Africa was Manichean, but recognising that \u2018The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,\u2019 Biko took from Fanon a critique of alienation and interiorised fear as the basis for a new politics of solidarity, and a notion of Blackness not reducible to claims to indigeneity or a politics of identity but an \u201cattitude of mind.\u2019 Linking Black consciousness to national consciousness and grounding his analysis in Fanon\u2019s \u2018Pitfalls of National Consciousness,\u2019 Biko argued in an interview with Gail Gerhart in 1972 that it was possible to create a \u2018capitalist black society, [a] black middle class,\u2019 in South Africa, and \u2018succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs\u2019 (Biko 42).<\/p>\n

Biko\u2019s prediction became painfully true. And a Fanonian critique of post-apartheid South Africa now seems quite obvious. And yet it is in the responses to the crises of contemporary South Africa and the liberation party\u2019s social treason that the high point of the struggle recognised by Fanon can be recast. The maturity of our age means that a non-state directed politics based in what Fanon calls \u2018the rationality of revolt,\u2019 which begins in the refusal to remain quiet and stay in place, can as a movement in motion, \u2018uncover unknown facets,\u2019 \u2018bring to light new meanings \u2026 underline contradictions \u2026 [and] decipher social reality.\u2019<\/p>\n

This is not simply voluntaristic; the struggle, he says, is the work of the muscles and brains of African collective working out politics from the ground up. This is the school of the struggle, and the challenge for each generation is to think with it and inside it. It is in this context that we can also call on Fanon\u2019s work to help illuminate and aid new political subjectivities and spaces to develop autonomous politics. Rather than reducing Fanon to the past or to a politics of the experiential, perhaps we can take Fanon\u2019s writings as interlocutions in which different historical moments and movements bring out new resonances and explicate new insights.<\/p>\n

The damnation of the world\u2019s majority inscribed in the Manichean geographies so well described by Fanon in \u2018The Wretched of the Earth\u2019 obviously did not end with the negotiated settlement and the withdrawal of formal colonial rule. The violence that orders colonialism, the violence that follows the colonised home and enters every pore of their body, is reconfigured in the contemporary world of razor wire transit camps, detention zones, and prisons, in rural pauperisation and in the shanty towns and shack settlements. It is the silent scream of much of the world\u2019s population, who appear most of the time without solidarity, without agency, without speech. Beyond the gated citadels, beyond the zones of tourism, in the zone of often bare existence, there seems no way out. And yet, at a moment like ours in 2012, all of a sudden the rationality of rebellion is made absolutely clear. So too the relevance of a Fanonian political will.<\/p>\n

Yet more than a simple us and them, the \u2018we\u2019 for Fanon was not simply a commitment but a creative \u2018we,\u2019 a we of political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning. Indeed this was not only his critique of colonialism but also of the neocolonial afterlife. \u2018Colonialism is not a thinking machine,\u2019 Fanon argues, but all too often its aftermath, the new nation, is mired in the same mindlessness, indeed stupidity created by the nationalist party\u2019s will to power often mediated by crude force and in crude colonial ideologies against the very people who made liberation possible. In contrast, Fanon\u2019s \u2018we\u2019 is wonderfully articulated in Derek Walcott\u2019s poem, \u2018the Schooner Flight\u2019: \u2018Either I\u2019m nobody or I\u2019m a nation.\u2019 It is the nobodies, the damned, the impoverished and the landless who for Fanon become the source, the basis, the truth of the \u2018reality of the nation.\u2019 As S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa first said, \u2018we are poor in life but not in mind.\u2019 The movement stresses that collectively \u2018we think our own struggles.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the context of the continuing legacy of apartheid\u2019s spatial politics, so clearly articulated in \u2018The Wretched of the Earth\u2019, it is not surprising that one of the largest and most sustained social movements in post-apartheid South Africa is a movement of shack dwellers called Abahlali baseMjondolo, people who live in shacks.<\/p>\n

I speak of Abahlali because it is a movement I have worked with, bringing it into conversation with Fanon, as Zikode puts it in the preface to \u2018Fanonian Practices in South Africa\u2019.<\/p>\n

Like other grassroots movements, their struggle was not the result, as Fanon puts it in \u2018Black Skin\u2019, \u2018of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but quite simply because [they] cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger\u2019 (1967a 223). In the same vein, James Scott\u2019s argument that resistance begins \u2018close to the ground, rooted firmly in \u2026 the realities of daily experience,\u2019 expressed the birth of Abahlali. Their initial goals were, as Scott continues, \u2018modest.\u2019<\/p>\n

The revolt began in one shack settlement in Durban in 2005 in response to seeing the land promised to the settlement cleared for commercial use. They wanted the promised-land, they wanted the politicians and city officials to speak with them not about them, and they wanted the promises of housing in the city that had been made by Nelson Mandela to be realised. And as Scott notes, they were not \u2018aiming at large historical abstractions such as socialism\u2019 or criticisms of the World Bank and globalisation. They deplored these \u2018isms\u2019 as detrimental to building solidarity and as they grew politically they became skeptical of leftists and researchers who said they supported them but only wanted to use them for their own organisations, ideologies, research programs or careers.<\/p>\n

Unlike NGOs like the Shack Dwellers International, which claim to represent settlements to the housing department, Abahlali is a grassroots movement that grew from one settlement to settlements across the city based on local democratic inclusivity. Their meetings began to include discussions of socialism or what they call \u2018living communism\u2019 alongside inclusive and careful readings of the provincial slums act, which Abahlali later defeated at the constitutional court in 2009 with the help of lawyers who, in a Fanonian sense, took their orders from below. The victory came at a cost. Nothing is ever given for free, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass. Two weeks before the formal decision, armed men attacked Abahlali\u2019s office in Kennedy Road destroying the library that included all of Fanon’s titles and violently evicting many Abahlali members from the settlement. Over 1000 people fled as the local ANC branch took over the settlement.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Scott\u2019s intimation, Abahlali was never anti-intellectual, and they made the very subtle distinctions between the demand for things needed to live \u2014 such as electricity to prevent shack fires and struggles against removal to peri-urban areas far away from the city \u2014 and life. Life as creative, social, and fully human; life, in other words, as the struggle against what Fanon called a daily \u2018living death\u2019 (1967b 11) which meant subverting space and place. \u2018When Abahlali began to resist evictions it created a crisis,\u2019 argues S\u2019bu Zikode, Abahlali\u2019s former president, and \u2018when we began to take our place in the discussions and political life in our cities it created a[nother] crisis because,\u2019 he adds in a Fanonian vein, \u2018we as shack dwellers should have known our place.<\/p>\n

We should not live or think or speak or act outside that place\u2019 (Zikode 2011). In other words, by refusing their place in life (as things) they become political subjects as they break out of the confines of place, becoming \u2018human during the same process by which it frees itself\u201d (Fanon 2004), and in doing so \u2018they make that oppression visible and force a rethinking of conceptual categories\u2019 (Neocosmos 2012).<\/p>\n

In \u2018Black Skin\u2019, Fanon argues that a Black intellectual is not only a contradiction in terms [17] but a threat. The same can be said for the \u2018shack intellectual.\u2019 The shack dweller is seen as smelly, dirty, uneducated, lazy, feral and criminal and so the idea of a shack dweller who is also an intellectual is seen as a priori absurd, as outrageous, even as fraudulent. [18]<\/p>\n

And yet Fanon has becomes part of Abahlali\u2019s library, which begs Abahlali\u2019s implicit challenge to militant middle class and university trained intellectuals who are committed to social change. This is a question addressed in my book \u2018Fanonian Practices in South Africa\u2019 (which I don\u2019t have the space to rehash here); it touches critically on the massive academic corporation and its reproduction (citation industries, think-tanks, funding, grants, all of which reproduce themselves hegemonically, i.e. allowing for criticism promoting calculation and ulterior methods) and the effort of trying to find spaces, sensitive to thinking beyond place, to do something different.<\/p>\n

It is not good enough to herald the movement; aiding it begins by being sensitive to thinking outside of place and thus being wary, as I put it in \u2018Fanonian Practices\u2019, that \u2018the idea that radical intellectuals should abandon critical intellectual work to become \u2018one with the masses\u2019 is just as unrealistic and detrimental to a grassroots movement as to think that to really be critical the intellectual must become \u2018autonomous\u2019 from all grassroot movements\u2019 (Gibson 2011 219, conclusion). Thinking Fanon fifty years later offers new beginnings for thought and praxis.<\/p>\n

BIBLIOGRAPHY<\/p>\n

1. Abane, Bel\u00e4id. \u201cFrantz Fanon and Abane Ramdane: Brief Encounters in the Algerian Revolution,\u201d in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Living Fanon. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
\n2. Bhabha, Homi. 1986. \u201cRemembering Fanon,\u201d reprinted in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Rethinking Fanon Amherst: Humanity Books
\n3. Biko, Steve. \u201cInterview with Steve Biko\u201d in Andile Mngxtama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson editors, Biko Lives. New York: Palgrave, 2008.
\n4. Cherki, Alice. Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
\n5. Clegg, Ian Workers\u2019 Self-management in Algeria
\n6. Cleaver, Kathleen, Neal. \u201cBack to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party\u201d in Charles E. Jones eds. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore MD: Black Classic Press, 1998.
\n7. DeBeauvoir, Simone. 1992. The Force of Circumstance. New York: Paragon.
\n8. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Charles Lars Markman. New York: Grove, 1967.
\n9 __________. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove, 2008.
\n10 __________. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1967.
\n11. __________. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1967.
\n12. __________. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1968.
\n13. __________. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2004.
\n14. Gibson, Nigel C. 2011. Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo New York: Palgrave.
\n15. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
\n16. Gordon, Lewis R. 2005. \u201cThrough the Zone of Nonbeing: A reading of Black Skin White Masks in celebration of Fanon\u2019s Eightieth Birthday,\u201d The C.L.R. James Journal 11, no.1.
\n17. Helie-Lucas, Marie-Aime\u00e9. 1999. \u201cWomen, Nationalism, and Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle\u201d in Nigel C Gibson eds. Rethinking Fanon Amherst: Humanity Books.
\n18. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
\n19 Macey, David. 2000. Fanon: A Life. London: Picador
\nNeocosmos, Michael. 2012. \u201cThinking Emancipatory Politics: displacement, subaltern consciousness and the limits of a history of the (neo-)colonial world,\u201d Forthcoming Journal of Asian and African Studies.
\n20. Sayles, James Yaki. 2010. Meditations on Frantz Fanon\u2019s Wretched of the Earth Montreal: Kersplebedeb
\n21. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale U
\n22. Turner, Lou. 2011. \u201cRage and Reason: Specters of Fanon in African American Radicalism,\u201d paper given at the National Council for Black Studies 35th Annual National Conference Cincinnati, Ohio March 18.
\n23. Woddis, Jack. 1972. New Theories of Revolution: A commentary on the views of Frantz Fanon, R\u00e9gis Debray and Herbert Marcuse. New York: International Publishers.
\nZikode, S\u2019bu. 2012. \u201cUpgrades v Evictions\u201d www.abahlali.org\/node\/8734<\/a> accessed Feb 20, 2012.
\n24. Zouligha. 1999. \u201cChallenging the Social Order: Women\u2019s Liberation and Contemporary Algeria,\u201d in Nigel C Gibson eds. Rethinking Fanon Amherst: Humanity Books.<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

Nigel C. Gibson is an activist and scholar.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 pambazuka.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fanonian Translations In and Beyond \u2018Fanon Studies\u2019- Translations are not neutral; they are products of history and are highly charged politically. Yet despite this, Fanon\u2019s thought in his translated works has remained clear, inspiring people from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}