Corps à corps: Frantz Fanon's Erotics of National Liberation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Frantz Fanon was one of the most important voices in decolonial and black liberation struggles of the mid-20th century. Writing about race and colonialism in Martinique, France, and Algeria, he articulated the importance of blackness to Western frameworks of the human. The black studies scholarship influenced by Fanon has continued in a similar vein, arguing that much of modern, Western thought either does not discuss race at all or considers race as an add-on to the larger discussion of Western subjectivity. Alternatively, Fanon and his interlocutors argue that race is the central function of the larger fields of Western philosophy and science, even if race is not mentioned at all. To make this claim, they largely point toward two tendencies in Western thought. First, Fanon and his interlocutors often examine the centrality of time and space in modern Western philosophy. Indeed, much of Western philosophy and science has implicitly and explicitly examined time as a linear trajectory that is largely monopolized by the Western European and North American white male subject; alternatively, space has been theorized as the static and nondynamic measure of the Western subject’s capacity to progress. Second, Fanon and his interlocutors also critically interrogate the related discussion of mutual recognition that is assumed in much of Western thought. As such, Western thinkers have often contended that, historically, the self recognizes itself in the other, and vice versa, and that self/other relationship is the basis for concepts of subjectivity. Yet, Fanon and his interlocutors have also pointed out that the lack of recognition of black people as human or as subjects has done little to foreclose whiteness as the position overrepresented as the human. Rather than recognition, white people have historically enacted racial violence against black bodies as a central mode through which to enter into humanity. As such, time and space and the lack of recognition as outlined by Fanon and his interlocutors suggest that nonwhite bodies have always provided a crisis for Western concepts of universality and subjecthood.
Frantz Fanon, Alienation, and the Psychology of the Oppressed
The details in the above excerpt sets the context of this treatise, as it will centralize its focus on Frantz Fanon and his interpretive psychoanalysis on the vitality of Alienation. Fanon transparently show how pervasively dangerous alienation can be among the colonized populace. Historically, the compartmentalization of the colonial world has been systemically divided into a dichotomous milieu, befittingly placing one group superior over another. As a socially constructed phenomenon within the colonial world, alienation creates an undying paradigmatic Apartheid-based realism. In a similar vein, "apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world…the world of the dominator, guarded by the army and the police." 2 Fanon embarked on a mission to de-pathologize the Third World peoples whom were trapped in this world of colonialism, while simultaneously, attempting to politicize those whom were oppressed. In this respect, Fanon's rationality of counter-memory enhanced his capacity to think critically and dialectically formulated a commitment, dedication, and responsibility to facilitate dialogue, discourse, and spaces to build capacities to revolutionize the psyche of the "wretched of the earth." According to Judith Butler's book Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon, "Fanon's work gives the European man a chance to know himself, and so to engage in that pursuit of self-knowledge, based upon an examination of his shared practices, that is proper to the philosophical foundations of human life." 3 In other words, Fanon wants the European colonizer, the European elite, to see his complicity in systemic violence inflicted upon the colonized.
Frantz Fanon & the Dialectic of Solidarity (2005)
If there is some original contribution in this work, it lies in the seriousness with which I have taken Fanon's claim to be asserting a radical humanism and his understanding of the extent to which struggle is a battle of ideas - not a battle between the grand claims of contending ideologies or elites, but a battle within and on the terms of the popular praxis of struggle. Fanon, I hope to have shown, although I have not stated this, is a philosopher in the classic mould in so far as he sees philosophy as 'a way of life'. Philosophical discourse is not the primary object of his analysis. The primary object of his analysis is the lived experience of resistance to the racialisation of humanity that has enabled colonial and neo-colonial modes of global domination
Rereading Frantz Fanon in the light of his unpublished texts
2020
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is principally known as a great theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular through the two main books he published during his lifetime Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). What is less known is that he was in parallel a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. A volume of about a thousand pages of texts either difficult to access or presumed lost was recently published, following more than a decade of research in archives located in different parts of the world. It reveals first the importance and originality of his thought as a scientist, and secondly the importance of this dimension of his work for the understanding of his political texts. This is shown on two points: 1) the role of violence in the decolonization process, when compared with Fanon's texts on psychiatric internment, the phenomenon of agitation and the alternative model of social therapy and 2) the use of «identity» as cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, which he strongly criticised, when compared with Fanon's systematic questioning of any personal «constitution» in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric work.
The Paradox in Frantz Fanon's Liberation Contestation in the Context of Humanism
EJMSS Volume 3 NO 3, 2023
Various dimensions have emerged in man's understanding of humanism, and ample space has been accorded thoughts about violence and pacifism. African philosophers like Frantz Fanon and Nelson Mandela have taken a position in this debate. The question that has remained unanswered is whether the endorsement of violence as a tool of liberation is not dialectically opposed to the trappings of humanism. The struggle for political evolution in various nations in African presently is one of the numerous motivations of this study. Across history and even in contemporary times, various violent activities have been justified by allusions to liberation and restoration of humanism. Frantz Fanon's contestation and advocacy of violence, in his quest for decolonization in Algeria, represent a liberation philosophy that raises questions about the pursuit of humanism with seemingly nonhumane means. Could such actions be contextualized in humanism? Is it not a camouflage? What is humanism? Is there in-humanism in humanism? This paper engages critical analysis examine what appears to be contradictions in Fanon's humanism. The paper traces how Fanon's theory of violence has affected humanity and to what extent this contributes to sharpening the struggle for national integrity and egalitarianism in Africa.
The Disalienating Praxis of Frantz Fanon
Cultural Critique 113, 2021
Decolonization is one of the most profound political changes of the past century, a transformation with effects touching nearly every part of the world. Alongside the anticolonial movement, it has drastically reshaped how those living in the twenty-first century experience global power and politics. Only recently have scholars begun tackling the conceptual challenge that decolonization and anticolonial struggle raise, perhaps fueled by an increasing awareness of the structural racial inequalities that remain. In his preface to Frantz Fanon's collected works (published in French), Achille Mbembe divides Fanon's reception into three, roughly chronological stages: those who read him for his anticolonial praxis in the 1960s; those who saw him as contributing to the development of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, with its emphasis on race, language, and representation; and those who read him in the 2000s for lessons in counterinsurrection, in a world a generation removed from the Cold War and two generations removed from decolonization (Mbembe 2011). The recent translation and publication of Fanon's psychiatric writings, along with his journalistic political writings and two early plays, offer the occasion for yet another reading, one framed around Fanon's anticolonial praxis and his understanding of psychopolitics. These new materials also raise the question of whether such a reconsideration will simply add another stage to Fanon's reception or whether these psychiatric writings will elucidate something new about the psychopolitics of anticolonial struggle altogether.
"A Logic of Camps": French Antiracism as Competitive Nationalism
As the Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen attacks starkly remind us, European multicultural policy continues to falter over the growth of public Islam. But long before these events, tension between competing visions of citizenship and nationhood had weakened the very civil society organizations that could shape such policy. In France, where non-governmental organizations had labored against discrimination for over a century, this conflict led to profound disaffection within the nation’s powerful antiracism movement. Drawing from more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among French antiracist NGOs, this article examines that disaffection among activists whose work in the name of cultural outsiders simultaneously served to rememorialize historic national traumas from the Dreyfus Affair to Algeria. Revealing a new despondency over sociolegal advocacy for Islam, some decried "infiltration" of communitarian voices into their erstwhile republican movement while others, under increasing pressure to adopt an emergent pluralist vision, equated this new model with foreignness itself. The resulting "crisis of antiracism" saw competitive reassertions of nationhood in the face of countervailing state discourses of European postnationalism. If writings on French multiculturalism to date have focused on Islamic piety and urban youth deviance, this article examines the significant impact these have had on France’s preeminent social justice movement.
"Kindred spirits: Fanon's postcolonialism"
Textual Practice 29.5 (2015); pp. 949-972.
This essay concerns the significance of phenomenology in Frantz Fanon’s thought and its influence on the autobiographic and ethnographic contours of his study, Black Skin, White Masks. Of note is Fanon’s movement between metaphor and phenomenology, especially as concerns figures of the hand and the body, and how his narratological treatment of these figures, both with respect to himself and the Antillean, reveals to us a new understanding of the place of language, time, and action in Fanon’s thought and contemporary literary and postcolonial race theory and criticism.