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
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First published 2019
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appropriate.
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For Laura, Adam and Sami
Contents
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
page viii
Introduction: a black rebel with a cause
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
A family romance
The North African syndrome: madness and colonization
The Wretched of the Earth: the anthem of decolonization?
Tradition, translation and colonization
Conclusion
1
33
58
95
123
159
197
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
2
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
4
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
6
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
8
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
10
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
12
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
14
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
16
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
18
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
20
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
22
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
24
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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.
26
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
28
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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.
30
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
31
McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact, p. 43.
Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 37.
Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 27.
Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 28.
Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 37. See also Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks, p. 16.
Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, p. 53.
Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, p. 52.
Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, pp. 44–45.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 175.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 177.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 178.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 175.
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.
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.
Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, (London: Earthscan
Publications Ltd, 1989), p. 32.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 62.
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.
Frantz Fanon, ‘Accra: Africa Affirms its Unity and Defines its Strategy’,
in Toward the African Revolution, p. 167.
Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria in Accra’, in Toward the African Revolution,
p. 161.
Fanon, ‘Accra: Africa Affirms its Unity and Defines its Strategy’,
p. 166.
Fanon, ‘Algeria in Accra’, p. 161.
Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 205.
Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 371.
32
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
90
91
92
93
Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 477.
Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 213.
Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, p. 202.
J.-P. Sartre, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, in A. Haddour, S. Brewer and
T. McWilliams (trans.), Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London:
Routledge, 2001), p. 47.
Sartre, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, p. 478.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 27–28.
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.
Fanon, ‘National Independence’, p. 554.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
Geismar, Fanon, p. 185.
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
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
34
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
35
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
36
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
37
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
38
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
39
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.
40
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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]
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
41
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
42
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
43
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
44
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
45
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
46
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
47
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
48
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
49
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’.
50
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
51
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
52
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
53
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.
54
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
55
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).
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 97.
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 103 and 117.
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 98.
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 111.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976),
p. 8.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 7.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 10 and p. 7.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 14–15.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 16.
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.)
Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 13, 19 and 21.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 19.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 17.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 22.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 22–23.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 25.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 26.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 25.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 27.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 39.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.
56
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 37.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 33 and p. 34.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 36.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 36.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 31.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 41.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 58.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 58.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 15 and p. 59.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 59.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, pp. 59–60.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 62.
Sartre, Black Orpheus, p. 63.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 133–134.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 135.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 123.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 123.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 126–127.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 127.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 129.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 17.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 36.
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.)
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 35.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 109–110.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 109–110.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 110–111.
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.
Weate, ‘Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology’,
p. 172.
The significance of Sartre in Fanon
57
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
59
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
60
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
61
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.
62
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
63
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
64
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
65
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
66
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
67
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
68
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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:
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
69
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
70
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
– 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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
71
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
72
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
73
(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
74
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
75
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
76
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
77
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
78
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
79
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
80
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
81
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
82
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
83
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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Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
85
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
86
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
87
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
88
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
89
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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Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
91
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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Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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.
A poststructuralist reading of Fanon
50
51
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53
54
55
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Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 127.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 186–187.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 212.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October, 34 (Fall, 1985), p. 76.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse’, October, 28 (Spring, 1984), p. 129.
Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man, p. 126 and p. 130.
Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Postcolonial Discourse’,
Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), p. 40.
Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, p. 129.
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.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 190.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 191.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 196.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, pp. 196–197.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 199.
Bhabha, ‘Day by Day … With Frantz Fanon’, p. 195.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 30–31.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 30–31.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 35, 40.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’ (citing J. Dollimore), p. 30.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 31.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 31.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, pp. 27–28.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 43.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 43.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 45.
Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories’, p. 45.
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.
Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 25.
K. Mercer, ‘Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia’, in A.C. Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge,
1999), p. 197.
Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 15.
Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 16.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, in Fanon, The Wretched
of the Earth, pp. ix–xi.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 27–28.
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85
86
87
88
89
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Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 29.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 48.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 31.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, pp. xxv–xxvi.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xix.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xx.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xx.
A. Haddour, Colonial Myths, History and Narrative (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000).
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xxii.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: The Penguin Press, 1970).
Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 147.
Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p. 148.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xxxvi.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xl.
Gates, ‘Critical Fanonism’, pp. 457–458.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xii.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xiv.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p.xiv.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 59.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 39.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 81.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 76.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 39.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 64–65.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 78.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 187–188.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 197.
Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of
Oppression (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1985), p. 254.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, p. xv.
Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, pp. xxvii–xxviii.
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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
96
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A family romance
97
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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Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
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
A family romance
99
– 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
A family romance
101
(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’,
A family romance
103
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,
A family romance
105
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
A family romance
119
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
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 17–18.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 36.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 18.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 111 and p. 11.
Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 124.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 25.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 35–36.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 31–33.
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.
Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, p. 61.
Jean Amrouche, ‘La Culture peut être une mystification’, Vie intellectuelle, VIII–IX, (1952).
Jean Amrouche, ‘Colonialism et langage’, a speech given at the ‘Congrès
Méditerranéen de la Culture’ (Florence, October 1960), p. 115.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 44.
Mayotte Capécia Je suis Martiniquaise (Paris: Corréa, 1948). René
Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres (Paris: Editions Arc-en-Ciel,
1947).
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 43.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 42.
Capécia, Je Suis Martiniquaise, p. 150. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin,
White Masks, p. 43.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 44.
120 Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 45.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 47.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 54.
Abdoulaye Sadji, ‘Nini’, Présence Africaine (1947), p. 489. Quoted in
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 57–58.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61.
Chidi Ikonné, ‘René Maran, 1887–1960: A Black Francophone Writer
between Two Worlds’, Research in African Literatures, 5:1 (Spring
1974) p. 6.
René Maran, ‘Hommage à René Maran’, Présence Africaine (1965),
p. 139. Cited in Ikonné, ‘René Maran, 1887–1960’, p. 12.
Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, pp. 45–46. Cited in Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks, p. 66.
Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, p. 11. Cited in Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks, p. 64.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 65.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 69.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 69–70.
Germaine Guex, La Névrose d’abandon (Paris: Presses Universitaire
de France, 1950), p. 13. Quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
pp. 73–74.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 74.
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.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 76.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 81.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 30.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 76.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 77.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 79.
Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, Sign 7:1 (1981),
pp. 45–46.
Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, p. 45.
Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, p. 44.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81.
Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 83.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 84.
A family romance
52
53
54
55
56
57
121
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 80
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 81.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, pp. 84–85.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 85.
Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman?’, p. 81.
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
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
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.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 47.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 51–52.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 12.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 52.
Fanon, ‘West Indians and Africans’, p. 36.
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.
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.
Duffus, ‘When One Drop Isn’t Enough’, p. 1091.
Duffus, ‘When One Drop Isn’t Enough’, p. 1094.
Manville, ‘Témoinage d’un ami et d’un compagnon de lutte’, p. 13.
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.
Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries, pp. 38–39.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 138.
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
Madness and colonization
125
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
Madness and colonization
127
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
Madness and colonization
129
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
Madness and colonization
131
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
Madness and colonization
133
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
Madness and colonization
135
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
Madness and colonization
137
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
Madness and colonization
139
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
Madness and colonization
141
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.
Madness and colonization
143
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
Madness and colonization
145
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
Madness and colonization
147
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
Madness and colonization
149
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
Madness and colonization
151
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.
Madness and colonization
153
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.
Madness and colonization
155
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
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133–134.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 121.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133.
The Arabic word caïd means (tribal) leader; while the French word
notable means a prominent, famous, distinguished person.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 132.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, p. 133.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, pp. 122–123.
Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, pp. 136–137.
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.
Fanon, Frantz Fanon: De la Martinique à l’Algérie et à l’Afrique, p.
113.
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.
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.
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, pp. 100–101.
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, p. 100.
Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, pp. 121–122.
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
Madness and colonization
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
157
at the hospital he assured his patients that ‘there would be no strait
jackets or chains in the future.’ Geismar, Fanon, p. 65.
Vergès, ‘Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism’, p. 48.
Geismar, Fanon, p. 64.
Geismar, Fanon, p. 66. Also see Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait, pp.
64–65.
Geismar, Fanon, p. 64.
François Tosquelles, Le Travail thérapeutique àl’hôpital psychiatrique
(Paris: Editions du Scarabée, 1967), p. 7. See Geismar, Fanon, p. 54.
Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life, pp. 150–151.
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, p. 80.
Geismar, Fanon, p. 85.
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.
Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’,
pp. 307–308.
Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’,
pp. 309–310.
Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, pp. 80–85.
Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’,
pp. 308.
Fanon, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’,
pp. 308–309.
Jean-Michel Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962): From
Colonial to Transcultural’, History of Psychiatry, 7 (1996), p. 541.
Jacques-Joseph Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient (Paris:
Imprimerie de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1843), p. 14.
Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, pp. 18–19.
Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, p. 18.
Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, pp. 20–21.
Dr Boigey, Psychologie morbide, Etude psychologique sur l’Islam,
in Annales médico-psychologiques (Paris: Masson, 1908), p. 8.
Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 534.
Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 534. See also
Moreau, Recherches sur les aliénés, en Orient, p. 13.
A type of property in precolonial Algeria: an inalienable charitable
endowment.
Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 535.
Bégué, ‘French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962)’, p. 535.
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
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 80.
Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 162.
Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 167.
Keller, Colonial Madness, p. 165.
Vergès, ‘Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism’, p. 53.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 242.
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).
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 243.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 243.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 244.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 241.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 241 and p. 247.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 249.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 249.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 249–250.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 248 and p. 249.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 236.
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.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 227.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 226.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 233.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 235.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 237.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 237.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 240.
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
The anthem of decolonization?
161
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
The anthem of decolonization?
163
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:
The anthem of decolonization?
165
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
The anthem of decolonization?
167
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
The anthem of decolonization?
169
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,
The anthem of decolonization?
171
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
The anthem of decolonization?
173
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
The anthem of decolonization?
175
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
The anthem of decolonization?
177
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.
The anthem of decolonization?
179
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
The anthem of decolonization?
181
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
The anthem of decolonization?
183
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
The anthem of decolonization?
185
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
The anthem of decolonization?
187
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.
The anthem of decolonization?
189
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.
The anthem of decolonization?
191
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.
The anthem of decolonization?
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
193
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 126.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 125.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 127.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 129.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 128.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 131.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 132.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 132.
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).
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 135.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 140.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 140–141.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 142.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 142.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 145.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 150.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 161.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 161.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 110.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 110–111.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 103.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 103.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1967), p. 92.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 65.
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Representations, 31 (Summer, 1990), p. 70.
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
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
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.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 84.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 85.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Work, vol. 10 (New York:
International Publishers, 1975), p. 51.
Roger Magraw, France 1815–1919: The Bourgeois Century (London:
Fontana, 1983), p. 49.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 88.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 88.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 70.
Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’, p. 89.
Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871)
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), pp. 270–279.
Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871), p. 271.
Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaire (1827–1871), pp. 316–321.
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.
René Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, Le Mouvement social, 71 (April–
June, 1970), p. 40.
Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, pp. 44–45.
Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, p. 44.
Gallissot, ‘Marx et l’Algérie’, p. 49.
The anthem of decolonization?
195
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.
Tradition, translation and colonization
199
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
201
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
203
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
205
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
207
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
209
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
211
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
213
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
215
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
217
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
219
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
221
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
223
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,
Tradition, translation and colonization
225
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
227
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
229
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.
Tradition, translation and colonization
231
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
233
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
235
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
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
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.
Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in
Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 307.
Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, pp.
309–310.
Bassnett and Trivedi (eds), Post-colonial Translation, p. 17.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Translation as Conquest’, in André Lefevere
(ed. and trans.), Translating Literature: the German Tradition from
Luther to Rosenzweig (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977).
Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 310.
Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 311.
Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, p. 312.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 2.
Said, Orientalism, p. 3.
Said, Orientalism, p. 5.
Louis Gardet, Les Hommes de l’Islam (Paris: Librairie Hachette,
1977), p. 384.
Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), p. 7.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 171–172.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 169.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 170.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 169.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 172.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 251.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 252.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 253.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 253.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 138.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 138.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 147.
Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, Traditionalism
or Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1976), p. 33.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 33.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 35.
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48
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79
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Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 36.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 37.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 37–38.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 38.
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).
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 39–40.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 41–42.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 40.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 42.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 43.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 61.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 42.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 153–154.
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.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 154.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 155.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 156.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 156–157.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 159.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 159.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 161.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 162.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 163.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 164–165.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, p. 165.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 165–166.
Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, pp. 169–170.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 97–98.
Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 97–98.
Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 12.
Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 14.
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
Tradition, translation and colonization
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
239
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.
Ahmad, In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures, p. 195.
Ahmad, In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures, pp. 190–191.
See below LeVine’s assertion that globalization and neo-liberalism
gave rise to this sort of Islam.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 189.
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).
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.
LeVine, ‘Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East’, p. 403.
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.
Tradition, translation and colonization
241
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
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
255
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 25.
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 28.
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 28.
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34.
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34.
Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, p. 34.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 226.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 203.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 16.
Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 96.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 51.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 63.
‘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.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 199.
Hollier, ‘Mosaic: Terminable and Interminable’, p. 159.
Frantz Fanon, ‘The Rising Anti-imperialist Movement and the Slow-wits
of Pacification’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom,
p. 625.
Fanon, ‘The Rising Anti-imperialist Movement’, p. 625.
Frantz Fanon, ‘African Countries and their Solidary Combat’, in Khalfa
and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, pp. 633–635.
Frantz Fanon, ‘At Conakry, He Declares: “Global Peace Goes Via
National Independence”’, in Khalfa and Young (eds), Alienation and
Freedom, pp. 641–642.
Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria’s Independence: An Everyday Reality’, in Khalfa
and Young (eds), Alienation and Freedom, p. 548.
Fanon, ‘Algeria’s Independence’, p. 548.
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
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,
259
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
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
261
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
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
263
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
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
265
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
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
267
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
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
269
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
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
271
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