{"id":258219,"date":"2024-04-01T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258219"},"modified":"2024-07-01T08:19:58","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T07:19:58","slug":"whos-afraid-of-frantz-fanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/whos-afraid-of-frantz-fanon\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Frantz Fanon, with FLN soldiers (left) and a page from The Wretched of the Earth (right) in the background. Photos: Alamy<\/p><\/div>\n

The Rebel\u2019s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon<\/em><\/strong><\/a>; by Adam Shatz; Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/strong><\/p>\n

Long decried by liberals and conservatives alike, the Martinican psychiatrist remains one of the most piercing critics of colonialism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

27 Mar 2024<\/em> – In the months since October 7, a great deal of US commentary has brandished the words of Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon as evidence of the supposed moral degradation of the left. Conservative commentator Eli Lake, writing in Bari Weiss\u2019s The Free Press<\/em>, provides<\/a> a representative example. \u201cAll this Fanonism, so popular in academia today, is being used to justify exterminationist rhetoric against the only Jewish state and against Jews anywhere,\u201d Lake contends. Of the two examples he cites, one is a statement by CUNY\u2019s Jewish Law Students Association; both refer only to Fanon\u2019s claim that colonial oppression made it \u201cimpossible to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
More than almost any other twentieth-century intellectual, Fanon has been remembered through his aphorisms.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Likewise, psychologist Jonathan Haidt declares<\/a> that the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses can be explained by the popularity of \u201cstraight oppressor\/victim terminology, from post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon.\u201d Similar arguments\u2014whether they reference Fanon or allude more generally to applications of frameworks of colonialism, settler colonialism, or decolonization to Israel-Palestine\u2014increasingly pervade<\/a> mainstream<\/a> reactions<\/a> to the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity in the United States.<\/p>\n

These caricatures reflect a long tradition of Fanon fearmongering among American conservatives and liberals alike. For decades, Fanon has been invoked as a bogeyman in debates about Israel-Palestine, Black activism in the United States, and even the politics of higher education. In 2014, writing in the aftermath of an Israeli bombing campaign that killed over 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the late New Left sociologist and activist Todd Gitlin denounced<\/a> Fanon as an advocate of a \u201cbrand of brutal Manichaeism.\u201d In 1967, after a summer punctuated by Black uprisings in Newark and Detroit, Aristide and Vera Zolberg lamented<\/a> the \u201cAmericanization of Frantz Fanon\u201d by his interpreters and admirers in the Black Power movement. And in a 1990 address at Harvard, Allan Bloom\u2014railing against the \u201cradicalism\u201d taking over humanities departments\u2014dismissed<\/a> Fanon as \u201can ephemeral writer once promoted by Jean-Paul Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his espousal of terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s bogeyman status reveals little about his thought, but it discloses a real tendency in his reception. More than almost any other twentieth-century thinker, Fanon has been remembered and interpreted through his aphorisms, which are by turn lyrical, seductive, and arresting. \u201cA Black is not a man,\u201d but resides in a \u201czone of nonbeing.\u201d \u201cEurope is literally the creation of the Third World.\u201d Or, most famously: \u201cDecolonization is always a violent phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n

But single expressions are merely \u201cpieces of a man,\u201d as Adam Shatz, quoting Gil Scott-Heron, observes in The Rebel\u2019s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon<\/em>. In this timely and engaging new book\u2014the first full-length biography in English since David Macey\u2019s in 2000\u2014Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon\u2019s life and work. The unifying pursuit of Fanon\u2019s life, Shatz argues, was the \u201cdisalienation\u201d of those suffering from racial and colonial oppression\u2014a project at once individual and social, clinical as well as political. For Fanon, Shatz concludes, this was the end goal of psychiatry as a practice of freedom.<\/p>\n

\n
At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply distorted, Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon\u2019s life and work.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply misread and distorted, The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em> helps us return to all of Fanon\u2014the fullness of his thought and practice beyond the familiar aphorisms. On four questions, in particular, Fanon speaks most forcefully today, and not always in ways we might expect: the place of violence in struggles for liberation; the phenomenology of Blackness and the experience of racialization; the relation between cultural tradition and political struggle; and the nature of the Western-led global order.<\/p>\n

Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, one of France\u2019s vieilles colonies<\/em> in the Caribbean. He died young, like so many Black radicals of the twentieth century\u2014in 1961, at the age of only thirty-six, of leukemia. He first came to France as a soldier, enlisting with the Free French Forces during World War II. After the war, he studied medicine and psychiatry, immersing himself in the heterodox methods of \u201cinstitutional therapy\u201d associated with the radical psychiatrist Fran\u00e7ois Tosquelles at the Saint-Alban asylum. He first came to Algeria as a doctor, to pursue and extend these methods, in 1953\u2014where he would ultimately become better known as a rebel than a clinician.<\/p>\n

Shatz places special emphasis throughout on Fanon\u2019s work as a psychiatrist, including his clinical work at hospitals in France, Algeria, and Tunisia. The depth and sophistication of the book\u2019s treatment of this material marks the most significant difference from Macey\u2019s study, which instead reveals much more about Fanon\u2019s upbringing and early life in Martinique. Indeed, it is through this psychiatric lens that Shatz takes on the two questions that have most preoccupied interpreters of Fanon: his views on violent resistance to oppression, and his understanding of race.<\/p>\n

Long before he arrived in Algeria, Fanon knew violence firsthand\u2014both the everyday violence of a colonial order and the violence of modern war. The Algerian revolution broke out in 1954, a year after he was hired to direct the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. Fanon and his staff immediately put their clinic in the service of the revolution, to members of the National Liberation Front (FLN). This daring choice endeared Fanon to the group\u2019s regional leadership\u2014especially military strategist Abane Ramdane, who would guide Fanon\u2019s path into the FLN\u2019s inner circle. Fanon never designed FLN policy or strategy himself; initially he was a spokesman, writing articles for the FLN\u2019s newspaper El Moudjahid<\/em>, and later he would become a diplomat, representing the FLN through its diplomatic arm, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA), in the newly independent nations of Africa.<\/p>\n

\n
Fanon knew violence firsthand\u2014both the everyday violence of a colonial order and the violence of modern war.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was in this context that Fanon developed his ideas about violence, which come through most vividly in the stories he told about the revolution at it was unfolding rather than from his actions within it. These accounts\u2014captured in the books A Dying Colonialism <\/em>(1959), Toward the African Revolution <\/em>(1964), and, most of all, The Wretched of the Earth <\/em>(1961)\u2014would become among the most widely read texts on decolonization ever written. \u201cAt the individual level, violence is a cleansing force,\u201d Fanon famously writes in the first chapter of Wretched<\/em>, \u201cOn Violence\u201d\u2014or at least, that is how most translations have rendered it. The French is \u201cla violence d\u00e9sintoxique.\u201d Shatz argues that \u201cdisintoxicating\u201d is a more appropriate translation, suggesting that anticolonial violence is not necessarily righteous or redemptive but a psychiatric phenomenon of sorts\u2014one that relieves the supposed \u201cinferiority complex\u201d imposed by the colonizer upon the colonized.<\/p>\n

Beyond this alternative translation, though, Shatz offers a familiar reading of \u201cOn Violence\u201d as a straightforward defense of armed struggle against colonial rule. More compelling is his discussion of Fanon\u2019s nuanced understanding of the place of violence in liberation struggles that emerges from a reading of the rest of Wretched<\/em>.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, in his role as FLN spokesperson, Fanon did, on occasion, justify acts of violence against civilians, including Algerians. Shatz demonstrates that Fanon worked to conceal a grisly massacre of three hundred Algerian civilians who supported a rival group to the FLN, and, closer to home, helped cover up the murder of his friend Ramdane by rivals within the FLN\u2019s leadership. Shatz sees Fanon\u2019s role in these acts as a sort of ethical compromise\u2014an acceptance of the demands of revolutionary discipline, but one that came with heavy psychological costs. Ramdane\u2019s murder, Shatz argues, haunted Fanon for the rest of his life; shortly before Fanon\u2019s own death, he confessed to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir that he felt responsible for it.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Fanon argued that vengeance against the European settler population in Algeria could not form the basis of a viable political strategy. \u201cRacism, hatred, resentment, and \u2018the legitimate desire for revenge\u2019 alone cannot nurture a war of liberation,\u201d he concludes. Animus toward the settler population or the colonial power may well be an inevitable factor in \u00a0anticolonial revolt, but it was far from sufficient. \u201cPolitical education of the masses,\u201d Fanon insisted, is required to turn the \u201cspontaneity\u201d of the initial phase of revolt into a disalienating politics, one that creates a new universalism out of the wreckage of the old.<\/p>\n

This view of violence is most evident in the final chapter of Wretched<\/em>, \u201cColonial War and Mental Disorders,\u201d where Fanon offers case histories of both Algerian and French patients he treated at the Blida-Joinville clinic and at the Charles Nicolle Hospital in Tunis. Shatz takes these stories to represent the keystone of Fanon\u2019s pursuit of disalienation.<\/p>\n

In one case, Fanon recounts the story of a European policeman who had tortured Algerian fighters, and who, he claimed, could \u201chear [their] screams even at home.\u201d Though Fanon agreed to treat him privately, in order to keep him separate from the FLN fighters in his care at the hospital, one day this patient took a walk on the hospital grounds, where he spotted one of his former victims. Fanon \u201cfound him leaning against a tree, covered in sweat and having a panic attack\u201d and soon noticed that his other patient, the policeman\u2019s victim, had gone missing. \u201cWe eventually discovered him hiding in a bathroom where he was trying to commit suicide,\u201d Fanon wrote. The Algerian had recognized the policeman and thought he had come to the hospital to arrest him.<\/p>\n

In another case, an African freedom fighter from another independence struggle, who had placed a bomb in a caf\u00e9 that killed ten people, was haunted by insomnia and anxiety attacks, which intensified each year on the anniversary of the bombing. This militant \u201cnever for a moment had thought of recanting,\u201d Fanon writes. He understood his symptoms as \u201cthe price he had had to pay in his person for national independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
Fanon\u2019s thinking about anticolonial violence cannot be understood apart from his analysis of colonial violence, which Shatz largely overlooks.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These case histories form a sobering counterpoint to Wretched<\/em>\u2019s first chapter. Fanon clearly understood the psychic wounds of colonial warfare, including the moral injury that doing violence inflicted on both anticolonial militants and French soldiers. Shatz reads Fanon as arguing that \u201cthe disintoxicating effects of violence are ephemeral at best.\u201d If the work of decolonization could require violence, the work of disalienation required reckoning with\u2014working through\u2014the costs that violence incurred.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Fanon\u2019s thinking about anticolonial violence cannot be understood apart from his sophisticated analysis of the nature of colonial <\/em>violence, which Shatz largely overlooks in The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em>. He is far from alone in this elision, which often undergirds the portrait of Fanon as a prophet of violence.<\/p>\n

Colonial violence is depicted in Fanon\u2019s writings, especially Wretched<\/em>, in two ways. First and most obvious is the brutal French war of counterinsurgency, which inflicted widespread torture and mutilation and killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians. Fanon sees the war as both a logical outcome of the colonial regime and a pathological expression of racist, colonial fears of the inherently violent \u201cnative.\u201d \u201cColonized society is not simply described as a society without values,\u201d he writes in Wretched<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The \u201cnative\u201d is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus the brutal, ferocious violence unleashed upon the \u201cnatives\u201d who resist.<\/p>\n

But beyond the violence of war, there was also the less discrete, more quotidian violence of colonial rule itself, which Fanon had experienced in different forms in Martinique and Algeria\u2014the simultaneously psychic and somatic violence of racialized regimes of interpersonal harm and economic inequality that colonial society imposed. The colonial world is a \u201cManichaean world,\u201d Fanon explains\u2014a \u201cworld cut in two.\u201d It is \u201ca world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized\u2019s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.\u201d In it, \u201cyou are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything.\u201d The sinews of the colonial order, moreover, linked this everyday violence to the spectacular violence of colonial warfare, and the denial of humanity that accompanied it: \u201cSometimes this Manichaeanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject,\u201d Fanon explains. \u201cIn plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s dictum that \u201cdecolonization is always a violent phenomenon\u201d must be understood in this context. This most cherry-picked line of Fanon\u2019s writings represents not so much a strategic injunction, and still less a blanket justification for killing, as an acknowledgment of the scale of transformation\u2014from the personal to the structural\u2014that decolonization entailed. As philosopher Lewis R. Gordon observes in What Fanon Said <\/em>(2015), Fanon\u2019s work emerged from the recognition that \u201ccolonialism\u2019s victory would be continued violence; the colonized\u2019s victory would be, to the colonial forces, violence incarnate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\u201cThe colonized\u2019s sector is a famished sector,\u201d Fanon wrote. In it, \u201cyou are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A onetime playwright, Fanon was sensitive to the dramaturgy of struggle. In his landmark Conscripts of Modernity <\/em>(2004), anthropologist David Scott counterposes the \u201cromance\u201d of decolonization long associated with the work of Fanon and other anticolonial writers to the \u201ctragedy\u201d evident in the second edition of C.\u00a0L.\u00a0R. James\u2019s study of Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins <\/em>(1963). As Scott reads them, James\u2019s additions to the original 1938 text stressed the \u201cirreconcilable dissonance between Toussaint\u2019s expectations for freedom and the conditions in which he sought to realize them, between the utopia of his desire and the finitude of his concrete circumstances.\u201d The same could be said of Fanon. To sever ties with France, to reconstitute Algerian society, to forge out of the ruins of European humanism a \u201cnew man\u201d\u2014all represented wrenching, violent transformations that imposed significant costs on the relationships, identities, and forms of life of those involved in the struggle, not least Fanon himself.<\/p>\n

Reading Fanon\u2019s work in this way leaves open many of the questions of strategy that \u201cOn Violence\u201d is often presumed to answer. Fanon\u2019s work serves as a bracing corrective to the contemporary liberal imagination, which both privileges existing political orders and presents an extremely circumscribed model of nonviolent civil disobedience as the only morally acceptable or strategically viable form of political resistance. Rather than resolving the question of means and ends in antiracist and anticolonial struggles, a Fanonian recognition of the violence inherent in the overturning of a racial-colonial world order clears the ground for a more productive conversation about them.<\/p>\n

Beyond debates about anticolonial violence, Fanon is most invoked today in discussions about racialization and the \u201clived experience of Blackness.\u201d Here, too, Shatz stresses the psychiatric dimensions of Fanon\u2019s thought\u2014and presents a partial psychohistory of his subject.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s first book, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, was published in 1952. (The text was initially rejected as Fanon\u2019s doctoral thesis by his adviser on the faculty of medicine in Lyon.) The young Fanon, then twenty-six, plotted the psychic coordinates of a society defined by racism, especially its fears and fantasies of Black sexuality. With Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, Shatz argues, Fanon found his voice not only as a philosopher of the \u201clived experience of Blackness\u201d but as a diagnostician of what historians Barbara and Karen Fields call \u201cracecraft\u201d\u2014the ideologies, myths, and neuroses that \u201cform us as racialized individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shatz also sees the book as a critical moment in Fanon\u2019s own Oedipal drama, reckoning as it does with not one but two of Fanon\u2019s intellectual father figures: the Martinican poet and politician Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Though Fanon was deeply influenced by Sartre\u2019s analysis of racial formation in Anti-Semite and Jew <\/em>(1946), he fulminated against Sartre\u2019s characterization of N\u00e9gritude\u2014the literary movement pioneered by C\u00e9saire and other Afro-Caribbean writers\u2014as \u201cthe weak stage of a dialectical progression\u201d that had to be superseded in order to achieve \u201cthe realization of the human society without race.\u201d To Fanon, this verdict smacked of white paternalism and dismissiveness, and it came too close to the empty assertions of common humanity that pervaded French republicanism\u2014only made more unbearable by the everyday racist humiliations Fanon experienced on the streets of Lyon.<\/p>\n

\n
Fanon may have had a \u201cburning wish to achieve freedom from history,\u201d as Shatz writes, but he was no ethical voluntarist.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the same time, Fanon had his own criticisms of N\u00e9gritude. He deeply admired C\u00e9saire\u2019s idea of \u201cBlackness as invention,\u201d but he criticized the movement\u2019s orientation to history. \u201cIn no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color,\u201d he insisted. Instead, Shatz argues, Fanon understood disalienation as aiming at freedom from<\/em> the past\u2014grounded in an existentialist insistence on the necessity of self-invention.<\/p>\n

This reading of Black Skin, White Masks <\/em>sets Shatz against Afropessimist receptions of Fanon, which have claimed him as the philosophical spokesman of an ontological\u2014not merely phenomenological or historical\u2014anti-Blackness. As Jesse McCarthy explores<\/a> in a critical essay, the theoretical foundation of Afropessimism links \u201cracial exceptionalism, political immutability, \u2018antiblackness\u2019 as structural antagonism, and abjection in the form of \u2018social death.\u2019\u201d Whereas each of these concepts predate Afropessimism, their particular synthesis, in the work of figures such as Frank Wilderson III, is often premised on a selective reading of Fanon.<\/p>\n

Above all, this Fanon is a theorist of permanent abjection. For Wilderson, C\u00e9saire\u2019s vision of \u201cBlackness as invention\u201d is hopelessly na\u00efve; instead, he writes, \u201cBlackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim.\u201d Similarly, Wilderson takes Fanon\u2019s account of racial interpellation in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> to expose the \u201cruse of analogy.\u201d The ontological and exceptional character of Black abjection means that \u201cthere is no analogy between the suffering of Black people and those others who find themselves subjugated by unethical paradigms\u201d\u2014and, consequently, that the very idea of interracial solidarity is a logical impossibility.<\/p>\n

For Fanon, though, history was not essence, much less destiny; his diagnosis and etiology of the \u201cepidermalization\u201d of inferiority was not a prediction of its permanence. The Rebel\u2019s Clinic <\/em>shows that Fanon, true to his existentialist inheritance, was always oriented to a future in which the degradation of Blackness might be undone\u2014not least, through a struggle against the global colonial order, which required forging solidarities across racial, religious, and national lines.<\/p>\n

This is a helpful corrective to the Afropessimist Fanon, but it can slide easily into overstatement. Fanon may have had a \u201cburning wish to achieve freedom from history,\u201d as Shatz writes, but he was no ethical voluntarist. In what Shatz calls the \u201cconstant battle between the wound and the will,\u201d Fanon\u2019s exercise of will derived in part from \u201cthe discovery that race was a construction, not a biological reality,\u201d which, Shatz argues, \u201cfueled a sense of optimism about our ability to overcome racial conflict.\u201d This is as misleading as reading Fanon as a stark racial pessimist. As Ghanaian philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu argues in Fanon\u2019s Dialectic of Experience <\/em>(1996), Fanon\u2019s repudiation of \u201ca race-reductionist foundationalism of moral judgment and conduct\u201d did not render him optimistic so much as open to a range of racial futures\u2014all of which would invariably reflect the \u201cconstraining consequence of colonial history.\u201d For Fanon, Sekyi-Otu concludes, achieving a world free from racial hierarchy depends less on the \u201cunencumbered freedom and optional decision of the moral subject\u201d than on the ability to forge\u2014out of \u201csocial agents caught in a tangled web of undeniable antagonism and ironic kinship\u201d\u2014a collective subject capable of creating a new set of conditions.<\/p>\n

The complexities of Algerian revolutionary politics\u2014especially its divisions between the military forces of the interior (the so-called \u201cArmy of the Frontiers\u201d) and the political leadership in exile\u2014shaped Fanon\u2019s literal and ideological travels, which Shatz maps beautifully in the final third of Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em>. He places Fanon\u2019s work in conversation with Algerian thinkers and political leaders such as Ferhat Abbas, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Harbi, and Fanon\u2019s colleague and friend Alice Cherki. Shatz\u2019s framing of these figures as key interlocutors for Fanon marks another difference from Macey\u2019s 2000 biography, which was more concerned with Fanon\u2019s relation to the canon of postwar French theory. It also sheds further light on Fanon\u2019s thinking about the relation between cultural tradition and political struggle, which animated his early engagements with N\u00e9gritude.<\/p>\n

\n
Fanon consistently underestimated the power that Islam held among his adopted countrymen, including many of his fellow revolutionaries.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A central matter of debate within the FLN was the place of Islam in the revolution and in postcolonial Algeria. Shatz is wistful for the secular and pluralistic Algeria Fanon and his leftist comrades like Ramdane imagined, counterposing it to the tragedy of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s (which began after a military coup nullified an election victory by the Islamic Salvation Front, leading to eight years of violence between government forces and Islamist insurgent groups). But by confining himself to retrospective assessment, Shatz evades a full accounting of the implications of Fanon\u2019s secularism in his own time.<\/p>\n

Fanon was not entirely dismissive of Islam, and the clinical success he had in integrating aspects of Muslim practice in his experiments in social therapy at Blida caused him to reconsider the role of so-called \u201ctraditional culture.\u201d In some of his writings during the revolution, most famously his chapter \u201cAlgeria Unveiled\u201d in A Dying Colonialism<\/em>, Fanon demonstrated a growing understanding that Islamic religiosity could serve as an expression of cultural rebellion in the face of French colonialism. Yet, simply as a strategic matter, Fanon consistently underestimated the power that Islam held among his adopted countrymen, including many of his fellow revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

Political theorist Anw\u0101r Omeish further contends<\/a> that Fanon held onto the common distinction between traditional and modern in Western thought, portraying the Algerian revolution as an \u201cawakening\u201d to a political identity that would supersede Algerians\u2019 cultural and religious affiliations. (In this way, Fanon seems to have ironically recapitulated the perspective he had faulted Sartre for in his writing on N\u00e9gritude.) Fanon\u2019s portrayal of Algerians as traveling a road from Islam to secular anticolonial nationalism not only misrecognized the political sociology of Algerian society but also failed to reckon with a key feature of French colonialism itself. As historian Muriam Haleh Davis has shown<\/a>, Islamophobia was the modality through which French racism expressed itself in Algeria; the French state framed its colonial project as an attempt to convert Muslim peasants into the \u201ccivilized\u201d subjects of a market economy. The turn to Islam as a source of anticolonial resistance was not merely a refusal to face the future by returning to a communal tradition; it was a forthright rejection of the specific form of racialization that French colonial rule had imposed.<\/p>\n

The \u201cawesome task Fanon enjoins upon postcolonial humanity in their particular national communities,\u201d Sekyi-Otu writes, \u201cis nothing less than wresting from the West monopolistic stewardship of the \u2018human condition\u2019 in its concrete instance as the modern project.\u201d As a participant in a revolutionary struggle in which he was decidedly an outsider, Fanon may have overlooked the ways that cultural resources already present in Algeria could be mobilized in support of that task. His experience is a reminder of the persistent challenge of navigating local social conditions in pursuit of a universalist political horizon.<\/p>\n

Black anticolonial thinkers have long developed their political analyses and dreams of the future \u201con the scale of the world,\u201d as political theorist Musab Younis has put it<\/a>\u2014not as a way of replicating the global imperial gaze but of resisting the \u201cspatial and temporal fixities of imperial discourse.\u201d Through engaging narration of Fanon\u2019s global travels and international relationships, The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em> stresses that Fanon, too, rebelled against being fixed in place and time. \u201cThere should be no attempt to fixate man, since it is his destiny to be unleashed,\u201d Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This orientation is also evident in Fanon\u2019s own thinking about global order and the world-system, though Shatz largely neglects this theme. Indeed, the predicament of the postcolonial world was as much Fanon\u2019s subject as the drama of decolonization. As he grew more invested in the politics of Pan-Africanism in 1958 and 1959, Fanon gained a greater sense of the obstacles that newly independent nations faced. Internal divisions of ethnicity, religion, and class\u2014combined with external plays for economic and political influence by former colonial powers and the superpower of the United States\u2014made so-called \u201cflag independence\u201d insufficient.<\/p>\n

\n
The predicament of the postcolonial world was as much Fanon\u2019s subject as the drama of decolonization.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Proof of this insufficiency came in the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba\u2014orchestrated by Belgium, carried out by internal secessionists in the mineral-rich province of Katanga, and blessed by the United States. In one of the book\u2019s darkest moments, Shatz reveals that Fanon, who had formed a friendship with Lumumba, was informed in advance of the plot against his life by Holden Roberto, a CIA-backed Angolan leader whom Fanon had also befriended. When Lumumba was brutally murdered, with CIA approval<\/a>, in January 1961, Fanon blamed himself\u2014as he had after Ramdane\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Shatz is appropriately unsparing in his criticism of Fanon\u2019s \u201cgullibility\u201d about Roberto. At the same time, Lumumba\u2019s fate speaks to Fanon\u2019s prescience about postcolonial politics. For Fanon, the array of dangers postcolonial states faced came together in the figure of the \u201cnational bourgeoisie.\u201d Obsessed with Western values, this class sought not true freedom for the nation but merely a seizure of class power once held by the foreigner. \u201cFor the bourgeoisie,\u201d Fanon wrote, \u201cnationalization signifies very precisely the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period.\u201d In the absence of a positive program to combat the underdevelopment created by colonialism, the leader of the new nation\u2014backed by the national bourgeoisie\u2014basks in the glow of history, invoking both the struggle for independence and the mythic past of cultural nationalism to justify his reign.<\/p>\n

Shatz rightly sees in this analysis \u201ca startling anticipation of the Mobutus and the Mugabes of the future,\u201d lauding Fanon for his prescient critique of post-independence rulers who parlayed cultural nationalist appeals into popular legitimacy and personal riches. But this venality, for Fanon, was not only a character flaw; it was a function of their place in a hierarchical global economy. Colonialism created the conditions for the cravenness of the post-independence national bourgeoisie. As he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>:<\/p>\n

As soon as the capitalists know, and they are obviously the first to know, that their government is preparing to decolonize, they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony in question. The spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Absent a remaking of the global economic order created by colonialism, the new ruling classes had no choice but to pursue capital from whatever sources were available\u2014opening the way for multinational corporations and international finance to exercise extraordinary power across the postcolonial world.<\/p>\n

This sense of colonialism as a world-ordering project pervades Fanon\u2019s analysis of anticolonial nationalism. On the one hand, because the slave trade and European colonization had precluded the free development of Third World societies, the development of \u201cnational consciousness\u201d represented the only hope for the creation of a genuine \u201cinternational consciousness.\u201d \u201cThe building of a nation,\u201d Fanon argued, was the counterpart to the \u201cdiscovery and encouragement of universalizing values.\u201d On the other hand, Third World nationalism would falter if it simply replicated the model of the nation-state that had first emerged in post-Westphalian Europe. The conclusion of Wretched <\/em>offers a final series of admonitions, imploring leaders and intellectuals of the Third World not to \u201cimitate Europe\u201d or be \u201cobsessed with catching up with Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shatz understands these statements in a literary and philosophical register; to him they exemplify Fanon\u2019s attempt to forge a new, truly universal humanism out of the wreckage of the false humanism of the European philosophical tradition. This existentialist reading does capture a core concern of Fanon\u2019s thought. But it erases the fact that the conclusion of Wretched<\/em> was also intervening in a conversation about how national liberation movements should orient themselves toward the European and American-led global order.<\/p>\n

One participant in this conversation was Richard Wright, whose Native Son<\/em> was an early inspiration for Fanon. In the final section of Black Power <\/em>(1954), an account of his sojourn in soon-to-be-independent Ghana, Wright urged Kwame Nkrumah to be wary of Western capital, which would only lead Ghana \u201cfrom tribal to industrial slavery, for tied to Western money is Western control, Western ideas.\u201d While less focused on the specific politics of aid and investment, Fanon echoed this sentiment in Wretched<\/em>: \u201cLet us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it.\u201d For Fanon, liberation into Western capitalism and European nationalism wasn\u2019t liberation at all. Rather than an opportunity for more states to join the so-called \u201cliberal international order,\u201d decolonization was a way of revealing its pathologies\u2014and beginning to overcome them.<\/p>\n

As war rages in Gaza and Ukraine, the pathologies of this order are more visible than ever. Shatz writes, in his conclusion, that \u201cour world is not Fanon\u2019s, yet his critique of power and international relations retains much of its force.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, too, does his diagnosis of the ways the violence at work in the racial and colonial ordering of the world can wreak havoc on the human mind. One can hear echoes of Fanon\u2019s pursuit of disalienation in the words of Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. In a January interview<\/a> with journalist Alexia Underwood, Darwish bore witness to the colonial warfare unfolding in Gaza\u2014and its attendant mental disorders:<\/p>\n

One of the real struggles during these times is not to lose your mind, because one of the goals of any oppressive system, like colonialism, is to make the oppressed crazy. It\u2019s a system of control. If they succeed, then no one will listen to you when you start shouting. I\u2019ve seen this happen to people around me, so I became a little obsessed with it. When I endure atrocities or witness them, I question myself, and remember this, and it pulls me back to sanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Fanon once wrote: \u201cMadness is one of the ways that humans have of losing their freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Sam Klug is Assistant Teaching Professor at Loyola University Maryland and Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. He is author of the forthcoming book, <\/em>The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – bostonreview.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Mar 2024 – Long decried by liberals and conservatives alike, the Martinican psychiatrist remains one of the most piercing critics of colonialism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":258220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[237,2642,532,405,1268,1936,551,612],"class_list":["post-258219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-africa","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-colonialism","tag-colonization","tag-european-union","tag-frantz-fanon","tag-neocolonialism","tag-postcolonialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258219","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=258219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258221,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258219\/revisions\/258221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}