First, I would like to thank Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Valérie Lowit, and the other organizers for their hard work in putting this meeting together. A local meeting is difficult enough. To have taken on such a task on an international scale is Promethean. I would also like to thank Mireille Fanon-Mendes for her international work on human rights. Her father, in whose honor this meeting was organized, would be very proud to know how well she embodies his spirit. And finally, I would like to thank the audience. In the United States, there are scholars who are fond of saying that Fanon has no influence in France, that he is relatively unknown in French intellectual circles. The several hundred people who attended various sessions over the two days of this conference prove otherwise.
The time afforded leaves little room for but an outline of the ideas
I propose here. It is my hope that my fellow participants, the
audience included, will find these thoughts, offered in summary form,
useful. I will discuss Fanon in the present tense since, unlike many
of his critics, I do not share the view that he is trapped
irremediably in his time. It is the mark of a great intellectual, in
fact, that he or she only stands partially in such time while reaching
far into the future. Some critics erroneously use universality as
the criterion of a thinker transcending his or her time. Fanon's work
has shown, however, that human studies should be understood in other
terms. It is fallacious to think that the absence of universality
equals that of irrelevance. What is important, his work has shown, is
that ideas are sufficiently general (versus over general) and relevant
to reach others. I recently wrote a book on African diasporic
philosophical thought over the past thousand years. There is
literally no chapter in which Fanon's thought was not relevant, and he
stood, across three regions, as one of the undisputed canonical
figures.
Fanon has offered a set of important concepts that continue to be
relevant and useful. Here are several:
In Peau noire, masques blancs he offers a critique of method. He
shows that colonization occurs also at the level of how a people
produce knowledge. Let us call this epistemological colonialism. To
respond to this kind of colonialism, the intellectual must offer a
critique that shows how concepts can make us dependent on systems that
colonize us. In effect, this means there is important work for
intellectuals in emancipating projects. To understand the importance
of such work, it should be borne in mind that colonization and racism
challenge the humanity of colonized and racially-dominated peoples.
An at first logical response is to demonstrate that such people are as
human as the people who have colonized them. Such a response is,
however, a trap. For it would in effect affirm the colonizing group
as the standard of being human. The task, then, is to unsettle the
meaning of being human and to take responsibility for the standard or
standards by which being human should be lived. This is part of the
intellectual work, as articulated by Fanon, and it involves being
sufficiently self-critical as to question even the methods by which we
produce such work.
In the same book, Fanon argues for the importance of understanding
how the social world produces meaning and, as a consequence, kinds of
beings. He calls this sociogenesis. Most debates on colonialism and
racism focus on either dominating structures on the one hand or
individual responsibility on the other. Fanon argues that the social
world mediates both, but he reminds us that it is human beings who
produce the social world. We make the social world, but it also makes
us by becoming that by which our choices are contextualized and made
meaningful. Oppression, for example, exists through limitations
forced upon us by a stratified social world. It forces us to
exercise agency only over our inner life; being ineffective at
affecting the social world, we attempt to fix ourselves. W.E.B. Du
Bois referred to this as making ourselves into problems, of becoming
"problem people."
Fanon identified the production of problem people in his critique of
normativity. Modern colonialism and racism have, for example,
eradicated any coherent notion of a black person. The black
professional who attempts assimilation in the society encounters an
impasse. He or she is not considered a "normal" black person.
Through an endless stream of insults, her or she is treated, by whites
and other people of color, as not "really black". But at the same
time, should he or she assert not being black, the many limitations of
racist society are imposed in the form of illicit membership. The
discourse against affirmative action today is a case in point. The
black is always presumed to be "unqualified" in comparison to any
white under consideration. Then there is the other extreme: The black
criminal, drug addict, mentally challenged, licentious example (in
popular culture, the "gansta") is authentic. That such behavior is
considered pathological means that, in effect, black authenticity is a
form of abnormality. In effect, abnormality is in either direction.
Du Bois's observation was that some people are studied as problems
instead of people with or facing problems. A racist social world
produces people as the same. Fanon's point is that however black
people live or understand themselves, the social world thrusts upon
them a distorted version of themselves as problems. Du Bois called
this a doubled-reality. To be such people is to know of their
identity as seen through a world that makes them into problems while
at the same time knowing themselves as otherwise. The second stage,
of knowing the contradictions of the distorted image, is a dialectical
movement of double consciousness. It is part of the intellectual
dimension of decolonization.
The discussion of double consciousness raises the question of several
important distinctions in Fanon's thought. t is not only how we are
perceived and our critical understanding of that perception, but also
what we are able to do that has a similar contrast. Fanon's thought,
for example, offers a distinction between liberty and freedom. The
first is about an absence of constraint and is what we share with
other animals. The latter is about the responsibility we have for the
first. Freedom is about how we are able to appear to ourselves and
to others. It is about how we exercise our liberty or its absence.
To be free involves being out in the open. The addition of
responsibility brings back the discussion of pathology and
normativity. Fanon, unlike many other political thinkers, understands
the developmental aspect of human life. We are not, in other words,
born as adults. Freedom, as he sees it, is a maturation process. It
is about learning to live as an adult. Colonialism and racism
relegate a group of people to the status of children. In racist
societies, black men and women are always "boy" and "girl". In
French, such individuals, even when older and are not familiar, are
addressed as "tu" instead of "vous."
That modern racism and colonialism treat many people of color as
children leads Fanon to offer a critique of the Self-Other dialectic
and the problem of recognition. The genealogy is from the thought of
G.W.F. Hegel, where self-consciousness and freedom are understood
through struggles for recognition. A master achieves recognition as a
master through forcing another to do so and, in so doing, makes him or
her a slave. Where a master is eventually forced to recognize his or
her dependence on the recognition of the slave eventually empowers the
slave to overcome the relationship, which results in a higher stage of
freedom. This higher stage of freedom, in which each could become
self and other, is an ethical relationship. In the contemporary
academy, much discussion of race and racism is replete with criticism
of otherness. Fanon, however, argues that racism proper eliminates
such a relationship. Instead of self and other, there are self,
others, and non-self, non-others. In other words, there is the
category of people who are neither self nor others. They are no-one.
The dialectics of recognition is disrupted, and the struggle of such
people becomes one of achieving such a dialectics. Put differently,
they are not fighting against being others. They are fighting to
become others and, in so doing, entering ethical relationships. This
argument results in a peculiar critique of liberal political theory.
Such theory presupposes ethical foundations of political life. What
Fanon has shown is that political work needs to be done to make
ethical life possible. That is because racism and colonialism derail
ethical life.
It could be objected that ethics is still the goal of anti-racist
struggles. Given the argument about epistemological colonialism, a
similar argument applies to ethics. Which standard of ethics should
rule the process of social change? Since ethics must also be
interrogated, then it is, in effect, suspended at the moment of
critique? Ethics could, in other words, function in a counter-social
transformation way by demanding conditions that would preserve
colonial relationships.
Fanon brings all these considerations together in his political thought.
The distinction between liberty and freedom could also be understood
through what Jean-Jacques Rousseau has described as the will in
general versus the general will. The first is about initial's
interests. The latter is about the interest of one's society. Put
differently, one involves thinking about oneself and the latter
includes thinking about others. In Les damnés de la terre, Fanon
makes this distinction through his discussion of nationalism versus
national consciousness. The first involves thinking only about
one's ethnic group, the latter involves thinking about the nation, the
good of one's society. Nationalism is a manifestation of a will in
general, and national consciousness is an expression of the general
will.
The question of self-interest versus national consciousness comes to
the fore in Fanon's discussion of leadership in the process of
decolonization. His argument is similar to the one posed by Moses in
the Hebrew Bible: The charismatic leader could lead the people to
Promised Land that he may not enter. In similar kind, Fanon argues
that those who are best suited for the struggle for independence are
not necessarily suited for the task of building the nation that
follows. Those leaders should learn how to move out of the way for a
new set of leaders to emerge, a set whose understanding and
problematics are indigenous to the postcolonial situation. The
consequence that often emerges, however, is a dialectical movement
from colonialism to decolonization and then neocolonization to
postcolonization. The stage from neocolonialism to postcolonialism is
one in which the conflict is with the new mediating class, understood
as the national bourgeoisie but not properly such since their power is
divorced from capital. Theirs is a moral argument instead of a
material infrastructural one. Unlike the European bourgeoisie, whose
ascent was symbiotically linked to the development of resources and
ideas, this new bourgeoisie, which could properly be considered a
lumpen-bourgeoisie, are able to acquire wealth without national
development. Their way of life in fact requires the exportation of
wealth and its preservation elsewhere.
It is striking that although Fanon's analysis of the national
bourgeoisie in post-independence Africa is the largest chapter in Les
damnés de la terre, and his discussions of alienation, terrorism, and
torture in Pour la révolution africaine could be easily mapped onto
the present conflicts in Middle East and North Africa, his first
chapter on violence seems to have eclipsed most of his thought. I
will not outline the many discussions and criticisms here. Let us
instead considered an aspect of his discussion that is often
overlooked. If colonialism leads to a suspension of values, as we
have seen in the derailment of the dialectics of recognition, what is
the consequence in a world where there is no basis of limiting actions
without force? In other words, if ethics has been derailed (because
of an absence of egalitarian relations between selves and others), how
is it possible to outlaw violence? The situation becomes acute when
one considers the stage set by the colonial situation: On the one
hand, there is a group whose land was taken from them by force or
trickery. On the other, there are the settlers, most of whom, over
time, have acquired land through a legal process that their most
generation did not in fact create. Both groups make a claim for the
same land and its resources in terms of right. The tragedy of the
situation is that no one could really get what is right without the
other being wronged. This is the violent situation.
Although much attention is paid to Fanon's discussion of physical
violence, the point he is making is not redemptive. What Fanon
argues is that the criteria of nonviolence demanded by colonizing
forces require the absence of de facto transformation of power. In
other words, there is an analytical presumption that justice for the
colonized must mean injustice for colonizers. Thus, colonizers demand
for a just transformation into a postcolonial situation amounts to a
maintenance of the status quo. That is because their right to
colonization is not questioned in the ethical limitations posed on the
process of decolonization. In effect, decolonization is what is on
trial, and the logic of illegitimacy follows. A comparison with the
U.S. Civil Rights struggle illustrates his point. Martin Luther King,
Jr. is today recognized as an apostle of nonviolence. But when he was
waging his nonviolent protest, it was perceived by most white
Americans and the U.S. government as violent. That is because Dr.
King was, in Fanon's formulation, actional. To have been sufficiently
nonviolent for his critics, King would have had to cease fighting
against U.S. apartheid.
Contemporary Africa faces
many continued crises on which critical reflection brings many thinkers
to Fanon's thought. The context is
the so-called postcolonial state. The "post" in postcolonial does
not, however, signify a past condition. Today it is more an
illustration of an absence of moral legitimacy. In other words, the
head of a nation cannot call for the colonization of another nation
for the sake of national wealth. He or she must, instead, offer a
project of prosperity that establishes a de facto colonial
relationship while disavowing it de jure. Added to this situation is
the reality of neoliberal and neoconservative hegemony. The fall of
the Soviet Union has led to a form of historical triumphantism in
which socialism has become a form of outlawed discourse, as pretty
much affirmative action has become in Western democracies. Debates
and theorizing of this situation of postcolonial illegitimacy,
neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and their global significance in
African politics have emerged, in the shadow of Fanon, through the
thought of several creative contemporary thinkers. They include Kwame
Gyekye (Ghana), Mahmood Mamndani (Uganda and South Africa), Pal
Ahlulawia (Kenya and South Africa), Achille Mbembe (Cameroon and South
Africa), Elias Bongmba (Cameroon), and Rabson Wuriga (South Africa).
The logic of colonization in Africa offered by Lord Lugard finds its
legacy in these debates. Lugard argued that the error in Asia was the
hybridization of Europeans and the indigenous peoples and the
cultivation of capital development locally. For Africa, he argued for
the demotion of the indigenous people into children who should be more
properly ruled than negotiated with in equal relations as citizens
between one nation and another. The result, at least as argued by
Mamdani, is the cultivation of false histories of custom and kingship
with a consequence of rule over indigenous peoples on the one hand and
relations of citizenship for settlers or, in a word, whites on the
other. The legacy of such relations has been a crisis of the
political in Africa. In Gyekye's reading, politics requires sites of
discursive opposition or liberalized social spaces. The situation of
Africa has been a constant struggle for such spaces, especially where
leadership, armed, as Wuriga has shown, with the moral argument
against dissent from their participation in the decolonial process,
hold power through corrupting strategies tantamount to, in the thought
of Mbembe and Bongmba, the privitization of power. Ahlulawia is more
optimistic than most on the possibility of the exercise of citizenship
even under the weight of traditional leadership, but it cannot be
denied that there is much disenchantment with the postcolonial
situation in Africa. It is difficult to see how the logic of Lugard
has not continued, and how the warnings of Fanon against the
postcolonial national bourgeoisie could not be anything but prescient.
In his third autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected that he had
realized, during his years of teaching at Atlanta University in the
early twentieth century, that he had learned to stand still in several
languages. He realized that the Atlanta riots and the network of
laws that were developed to for U.S. apartheid were also experiments
on thwarting the course of freedom in the modern world. The
contemporary political situation of Africa is, in similar kind, a
laboratory of global significance. For example, it used to be a
truism that the radicalization of social inequalities would compel
disenfranchised populations to take action and issue in progressive
changes. Neoliberalism has, however, led to the erosion of state
apparatuses while cultivating capitalist expansion. The more recent
rise of neoconservatism to power has meant an abrogation of
protections in civil society and the encouraging of their absorbption
by religious institutions, instead of secular social ones. That many
contemporary religious institutions have leaned more to the right has
meant the development of right-wing ideology as inequalities continue
to increase. The ironic result has been a rise in black populations
moving toward the right instead of to the left. What this means as
states continue to fail, if the history of the European context is an
indication, is an increased possibility of new forms of fascism and
their concomitant forms of violence. If this assessment is correct,
then situation of Africa, although structured as peripheral in global
discussions, is, in fact, at its center. The future is no doubt a
struggle between different visions of global reality. Current
circumstances are pushing matters to a terribly ugly right-wing
version, but Fanon would remind us of the importance of imagining and
fighting for alternatives in which hope and possibility are embodied
in an organic relationship with what it means to be women and men who
question, with responsibility, what we are to become.
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