Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothersHowever, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.
Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil,
Fanon became
known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when
revolutionary violence
was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary
fighters such as Fidel
Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as
Stockley Carmichael,
Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto,
Kwame N'Krumah.
However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places,
his thinking did not
become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part
of Brazilian universities
and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other
revolutionary thinkers.
In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his
lukewarm reception was
due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial
conflicts, highly instilled
within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race,
yet racially colourless.
That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited
dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black
professors and researchers
at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity
or the affirmation of
racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.
Fanon's thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas - in
European books - and
at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight
of the Brazilian
cultural and political scene.
The 1960s and the Sartre epidemic
A careful reading of the main Brazilian cultural journals of
the 1950s did not cast
any light on Fanon's reception in Brazil. It is as if the publication
of Peau noir, masques
blancs (Fanon 1952) had passed unnoticed. Anhembi, from São Paulo,
published between
1953 and 1955 all the studies of race relations between whites and
blacks in São Paulo, the
outcome of a project co-ordinated by Roger Bastide and Florestan
Fernandes. It also
published some reactions to these studies. Bastide himself, after
having returned from Paris
in 1954, regularly wrote critiques and commentaries on books which
were released in
Europe, mainly in France; but he does not mention Fanon in his
reviewing activities. We
also found nothing in Revista Brasiliense. Clovis Moura, Florestan
Fernandes and Octávio
Ianni wrote for this journal on black issues (the Malê revolt, racial
relations, poetry), but
without mentioning the Martinican author. In 1958, Sergio Milliet
wrote a far-reaching
review of black poetry, and of course, cites the négritude poets and
Sartre. That is all.
Brazil became more familiar with Fanon's ideas shortly before
his death, more
precisely during Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir's stay in the
country, between
August and September 1960. Sartre and Beauvoir (1963) arrived in Rio
de Janeiro from
Havana, in order to promote international solidarity in support of the
Cuban revolution and
the war of liberation in Algeria. Certainly the Brazilian
intelligentsia, in close contact with
what was happening in Paris, accompanied, through Les Temps Modernes, the anti-
colonialist positions held by Sartre. His crusade to China, Cuba and
Brazil clearly had a
militant character. "Colonialism is a system that infects us with its
racism", wrote Sartre in
1956, and while he was in Brazil, he faced criminal charges in Paris,
together with another
121 intellectuals who openly proclaimed co-operation with the Algerian National
Liberation Front.
In the previous decade, the black newspaper Quilombo also
published passages of
his Black Orpheus, to show that the "anti-racist racism" of black
francophones contained a
new dialectic of liberation. But now, in 1960, Sartre was in Brazil,
defending the very same
anti-imperialist positions held by communists and the catholic left in
relation to Cuba and
Latin America, Asia and Africa; and thus the anti-racist and
anti-colonial struggle of
Africans and Afro-Americans came into closer proximity to Brazil.
I do not have any information as to whether Sartre mentioned
Fanon in his
conferences, but the ideas of his young Martinican disciple and how
they impressed Sartre
at the time are apparent in de Beauvoir's diaries. When reminiscing
about a visit to Ilheus,
for example, she notes "men with dark hair and dark skin were looking
at us, hatchets in
their hands and hatred in their eyes". The revolution in the third
world, as perceived by
Fanon, should be the work of peasants and not the dock workers who
they also met in
Ilhéus, "muscly, healthy, they knew how to laugh and sing". "Compared
with the peasants,
the proletariat in Brazil is an aristocracy", wrote Beauvoir
(1963:549). Sartre also drew
attention to the social inequality which Brazilian black people
suffered from, as he became
aware that all his contacts were white from the middle and upper classes:
"We have never seen in the salons, in the universities, or even in the
auditoriums chocolate or milky coffee-coloured faces. Sartre made this
observation aloud during a conference in São Paulo and then corrected
himself: there was a black man in the room - a television technician"
(Beauvoir 1963: 561)
Evidently, Sartre and Beauvoir did not find in Brazil anybody
who thought that
Brazilian black people were victims of racism; on the contrary, they
met with a unanimous
discourse in which the segregation of black people was seen to be of
an economic nature,
and therefore the struggle for liberation should be one of classes.
They did not seem
entirely convinced since, according to Beauvoir, "the fact is that all
the descendents of
slaves continued to be proletarian; and in the shanty towns poor white
people feel superior
to black." That may be so. But Sartre's success in Brazil was a result
of his conferences
about colonialism and the historic necessity of the fight for
independence by the peoples of
the Third World.
In Brazil, Sartre's anti-racism and anti-colonialism had to
co-exist alongside the
republicanism of their audience - a literary middle-class made up of
students, writers and
intellectuals. For Sartre, Brazil was not simply a European transplant
like the United States;
after all, "all [Brazilians] that I have met, have been influenced to
some extent by the nago
cults" (Beauvoir 1963: 561). Here, assimilation and integration did
not seem like some
ingenious discourse of domination; on the contrary, they seem to have
amulatado [1] the country, as Freyre wanted and as Jorge Amado, their host, believed. In
fact, Sartre and
Beauvoir were already familiar with both their ideas. We must remember
that extracts from
Cacau had been published in Les Temps Modernes (Amado 1954), which
also published a
favourable review of the French edition of Casa Grande e Senzala
(Pouillon 1953), and
that Quincas Berro D'Água would be published by the same magazine
after his return to
Paris (Amado 1961).
To understand Sartre's position, it is important to
remember that the post-war world
quickly became polarized in two axes. In the first, there was a
contraposition between the
north and the south with regard to the issues of de-colonisation and
racism. Sartre had
actively participated in the construction of the position held by the
south. He wrote the
preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de la
langue française
(Sartre 1948, 1949), in which he embraced negritude - the movement of identity
affirmation and cultural, ethnic and racial reconstruction of Africans
and Afro-Caribbeans -
despite the fact that he made use of the old conception of racism in
his doctrine. Negritude,
according to him, was anti-racist racism. Since the 1950s, however, he
started to open up
the pages of his journal to a new theory of racism in the post-war
period: the type of racism
which, despite being conceptionally denied, actually occurred and was
experienced in the
social and political practices of the colonizers and colonized. In
relation to the second axis,
polarization was between the intellectuals who defended the bourgeois
and liberal order, on
the one hand, and those who spoke up for the interests of workers and
peasants, from a
Marxist or other ideological points of view. The first axis is marked
by races and by de-
colonization; the second by the struggle of the classes and by
anti-imperialism. Thus, Sartre
and Fanon represented a fusion of anti-imperialism, anti-racism,
de-colonization and the
struggle of the classes.
In Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s, however, these two
axes did not meet: liberals and Marxists, whites and blacks, both had the same
anti-racist project of building a
mixed race nation, Brazilian and post-European, which overcame the
polarity between
whites, on the one hand, and black and indigenous peoples on the
other. The only thing that
divided them was the defence of the bourgeois order or a commitment
towards class
struggle. Races therefore, disappeared, with the conceptual and
political overexposure
given to the idea of social classes. The same happened in all of Latin
America, including in
socialist Cuba, which Fanon wanted to become acquainted with (Gordon, Sharpley-
Whiting and White 1996: 4) and which Sartre came to know in 1960.
If Fanon's thinking had not been the result of the
convergence of these two axes,
Guerreiro Ramos, black activist and sociologist, could have introduced
him to Brazil in
1960, since he had some affinity with his ideas. Not only him, but all
the other members of
ISEB [2], as observed Renato Ortiz (1998:51):
"What is noticeable about Fanon's and ISEB's writings, is
that they are both
based on the same fundamental concepts: alienation and the colonial
situation. The original sources are also, in both cases,
identical: Hegel, the
young Marx, Sartre and Balandier."
If Guerreiro did not take up Fanon's ideas, it was because
the type of de-alienation
and de-colonization he was looking for did not involve class struggle.
He probably knew
Fanon, since he read Présence Africaine (Fanon 1956, 1959), Esprit
(Fanon 1951, 1956,
1959) and Les Temps Modernes (Fanon 1956, 1961), as well as French
academic journals.
The fact is that to formulate his indictment against the cultural
colonization of "light" and "dark" Brazilians, Gerreiro used some of the same sources as Fanon,
but not all of them.
They had the same inclination for Hegel and for existentialism,
however when considering
their different national situations and personal projects, Gerreiro
was led to hold nationalist
and populist positions (Paiva1980), separating him from the
revolutionary doctrines which
preached violence as a means of social transformation or which argued
for the maintenance
of different cultures between colonized and colonizers [3].
Furthermore, the São Paulo black press during the 1960s,
which was made up of
men and women who came from a more precarious class situation than
Guerreiro himself,
seemed to overlook Fanon and his solidarity campaign for the African Liberation
Movements, but continued to be in tune with Senghor and Sartre's
discourse of 1948 on
négritude, which they directly cite [4].
Fanon and the revolutionary left
The silence of the Brazilian left in relation to Fanon, both
among blacks and
whites [5], certainly needs to be understood as profound political
disagreement, because of the
innumerous indirect signs of his presence from the 1960s onwards. Some
facts need to be
mentioned so that we can understand how this difficult relationship
between Fanon and the
Brazilian left was established.
In 1966, the journal Tempo Brasileiro published an article
by Gérard Chaliand, in
which the author inserts a footnote to comment: "Based on some of the
most contestable of
Fanon's analyses - those about African peasants. In relation to this
subject see the best
and, in fact, the only Marxist analysis of Fanon's thought: 'Fanon et
les problèmes de
l'indépendance' La Pensée. n.107". He was referring to Nghe (1963),
one of Fanon's great
adversaries in the African world.
Brazilian Marxists, therefore, followed Marxist criticism -
and also liberal (Arendt
1970) - in relation to Fanon's political conceptions. In Brazil, the
left revered Fanon, but
read him in French, and did not cite him; imposing on itself a
respectful silence. The
Monthly Review (MR) Marxists, whose articles were regularly translated
and published by
Brazilian journals, did not behave in the same way. The reason for
this reverence and
silence with regard to Fanon can be found, perhaps, in his centrality
to the struggles that
were emerging in the United States at that time, where Afro-American rebels also
considered themselves to be colonial subjects, an attitude that was
summed up well by the
words of MR's editors:
If you don't already know it, mark well the name of Frantz
Fanon who has become
perhaps the most revered spokesman for the colonial
oppressed. His justly famous
book Les Damnés de la Terre has just been issued by Grove
Press under the title of
The Wretched of the Earth, and we recommend it highly."
(Monthly Review, n.
17(1), 1965)
In November 1966, Goldman (1966) writes a 5-page review of
Studies In A Dying
Colonialism, and creates a fitting phrase about what Fanon meant to
the black rebellion at
that time:
"Fanon is popular because he is talking, above all, about the
struggle itself
and he is talking from inside the Revolution, as a
participant. The young
black radicals who read him, who internalize his vision and respond with
such great fervor to his ideas are, after all, people who are struggling
intensely against a system they are not at all sure they can
bring down. To
Fanon the important thing is the transformation, the inner mutation that
occurs during the struggle, the way the "wretched of the
earth" are freed
during the inevitable confrontation between oppressor and oppressed. And
there is one further idea that Fanon, a Negro doctor from Martinique who
wrote about the Algerian Revolution, suggests to these young
radicals: that
the system they are fighting and the one he was fighting are one and the
same, and that both he and they oppose a common oppressor in
the name of a
common vision." (Goldman 1966: 58)
Did Fanon have the same significance among Brazilian blacks?
What is certain, is
that finally in 1968 a Brazilian edition of Les Damnés de la Terre was
released but was
quickly taken out of circulation by the organs of political
repression, but not before it fell
into the hands of dozens of militants. It was explosive food for
thought for both the class
struggle and for the racial democracy project. Buchanan (1968: 19-20),
in the Revista da
Civilização Brasileira, writes: "We must remember that Malcom X - who,
together with
Frantz Fanon, was Carmichael's main inspiration - was the only black
American leader who
applauded Kennedy's assassination."
In the same journal, the communist literary critic Werneck
Sodré (1968:198), in a
annual review of the year's releases, writes: "Colonialism, in its
brutality, is reflected in
Frantz Fanon's work, "The Wretched of the Earth", which studies the
effects of torture". In
this sentence we hear the echo of the tortures which started to become
routine during the
military regime, and also a display of some sympathy for
interpretations similar to those of
Goldman (1966: 55):
"One of Fanon's most important contributions to social thought
[...] is his
brilliant analysis of the relationship between mental disorder and
colonialism, between sexual maladjustment and political repression."
For some, brilliant psychoanalyst and bad politician; for
others, radical ideologue,
Fanon would have to wait for a new left to receive a sympathetic
reading. Even the black
leader Abdias do Nascimento (1966, 1968), in his articles at the time,
set out the influences
of the black movement, analysed the international situation, focused
on négritude and black
culture, talked about the rape that is the origin of the Brazilian
miscegenation, mentioned
the African liberation struggles, the "North American black uprising",
but said nothing of
Fanon:
"Paraphrasing Toynbee, and due to specific historical
conditions, there is a
new decisive role to be played by black people in the United
States towards a
new - political and cultural - direction for coloured peoples
of all the world.
It is, so to speak, the bringing together of the legacy left
by the current
generation of great black people - Leopold Sédar Senghor, Kwame
N'Krumah, Langston Hughes, Jomo Keniata, Aimé Cesaire, Sekou Touré,
Nicolás Guillén, Peter Abraham, Alioune Diop, Lumumba, James Baldwin,
Mário de Andrade" (Nascimento 1968: 206).
Abdias was very close to ISEB and to Guerreiro Ramos and
both had great respect
for Toynbee, something that was common among "isebianos" (ISEB
members) as Vanilda
Paiva [6] explains. Frantz Fanon became an important reference for Abdias
only after 1968,
when the Brazilian black leader became aware of Fanon's work, widely translated,
discussed and commented on in the United States, where he was then
exiled. The Genocide
of the Brazilian Black man (Nascimento 1978) marks the moment where
Fanon's ideas
come to influence Abdias' writings.
The same occurs with Octávio Ianni and many other exiled
Brazilian intellectuals.
In his Imperialismo y cultura de la violência em América Latina
[Imperialism and the
Culture of Violence in Latin America] (Ianni 1970) he had already
taken on board Fanon's
discourse and that of the Montly Review Marxists. The same is true of
Clóvis Moura
(1994). When Ianni returned to Brazil in the 1980s and was
re-integrated into the university
environment, he made the reading of Fanon compulsory for his classes
and recommended it
to black students who came to him [7].
If, as according to José Maria Pereira, "Fanon was a name
crossed out by the left"
in the mid 1960s, this was certainly not the case for the whole of the
left, in particular for
those that were outside party politics. Catholics, for example, who
increasingly gained
influence as the communist parties were decimated by political
repression, did not totally
condemn the revolutionary violence of the colonised and anti-racism,
to which the name of
Fanon was intricately linked. The journal Paz e Terra (Peace and
Earth), an entity very
closely linked to the catholic left, published in its 7th edition a
translation of an article by
Raymond Domerge, which used the very same "The Wretched of the Earth"
as a parameter
to draft a blueprint for Catholic political action in face of the
emergence of revolutionary
struggles in the Third World.
"This long sequence of citations [Fanon's] seemed to us
necessary to show how
violence, when it becomes the norm, can suddenly irrupt in
the form of armed
violence. Revolutionary violence is nothing but the
transposition of a previous
violence which has its roots in a type of economical
exploitation" Domergue
(1968:51).
Still in 1968, it was the revolutionary pedagogue Paulo
Freire, who was also much
influenced by Catholic existentialist thinking and by ISEB's
anti-colonialist nationalism,
who most absorbed Fanon's readings. In his Pedagogia do Oprimido
(Pedagogy of the
Oppressed), Freire (1970) was perhaps the first Brazilian to embrace
Fanon's ideas.
According to Freire himself, he became aware of the
Martinican revolutionary
between 1965 and 1968. This is what he insinuates in two passages of
Pedagogia da
Esperança (Pedagogy of Hope):
"[...] later on, much later on, I read in Sartre (the Preface
of 'The Wretched
of the Earth', by Franz Fanon) as being one of the expressions of the
connivance of the oppressed with the oppressors" (Freire 1992:19)
"They [the African peasants] were encouraged by all this, as I was
encouraged by reading Fanon and Memmi, when re-reading the originals of
Pedagogia. Possibly, when establishing their co-existence with Pedagogia
do oprimido, and referring to the educational practice to
which they were
accustomed, they must have felt the same emotion that took
hold of me when I
started getting into 'Condenados da Terra' and the 'The
Colonizer and The
Colonized'. That pleasant sensation which takes hold of us
when we reaffirm
the reason for our sense of security." (Freire 1992:141)
The last passage suggests that he read Condenados when he had
already finished
the manuscript of Pedagogia, since Freire talks about the "re-reading
of the originals". As
the manuscript is dated to 1968 and the first edition to 1970, this is
a plausible
interpretation. But, at the same time, Freire indicated that he read
Fanon in the Mexican
edition of 1965. The fact is, therefore, that he became aware of Fanon
between 1965 and
1970, a period of radical changes in his thinking:
"Absorbed by practical work since the creation of his method,
he was obliged
to stop when the Goulart government fell. Up until that point
Freire had little
time for theoretical work, and he was now able to return to
his starting point
of 1959. 'His theoretical work had been effectively left
behind'. Until then,
Freire had been unable to digest new influences and
theoretically incorporate
new positions; for this reason, his ideas could not keep pace
with his practice
and he lacked, at that moment, the theoretical and methodological tools
which would allow him to re-interpret reality and profoundly revise his
pedagogical discourse. A more consequential effort in this
direction would
come later and 'Pedagogia do oprimido' is its outcome." (Paiva
1980: 141)
Either way, the Brazilian intellectuals who were open to
Fanon's radical and
revolutionary influence met in 1968, free from party political
loyalties and detached from
well-established philosophical tendencies.
Another notable figure who was open to Fanon's influence was
Glauber Rocha.
Some writers such as Xavier (2004: 21) even managed to discern Fanon's
direct influence
on the young Rocha's writings.
"In Glauber, the feeling that geo-politics is an axis of
confrontation (where
cinema is one of its vectors) in which the oppressed become
visible (and are
likely subjects in the process) is expressed through violence.
Basing himself
on Frantz Fanon, he makes this feeling explicit in "Por uma estética da
fome", stressing the demarcation of places and the structural
conflicts which
come from the economic-social, cultural and psychological barriers
separating the world of hunger from the developed world."
Xavier makes a connection between Fanon and Glauber in the
following sentence:
"From the 'cinema novo': above all, an aesthetic of violence
is revolutionary
rather than primitive, this is the starting point for the
coloniser to perceive
the existence of the colonised; only by becoming aware of his
only possibility,
that is violence, the coloniser can understand, through its
horror, the force of the culture he is exploiting. Whilst he does not take up arms
the colonised is
a slave: it was necessary for the first policeman to die for
the Frenchman to
notice the Algerian." (Rocha 1965: 169).
But Glauber, himself, did not remember having read Fanon at
this time. It is far
more likely that he had read Sartre, since he says in another text:
It was during JK's (Jucelino Kubitschek) time, while I was still in Bahia when
I heard about anti/"Ufanistic" nationalism. While still young, when Arnaldo
Carrilho went to Itamaraty, he took Cinema Novo's 'Paixão' (Passion) to the
international festivals. This is what "Brazyl" needed to culturally de-colonise
itself in the world. Dialectically, one of the priorities was the development of
internal markets (economy/culture) but before Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched
of the Earth' reached me, recommended by the playwright Antônio Pedro,
and before modernism, we could already feel Jorjamado's murmur, ready to
break the chains of ideological submission, the complex core of colonial
inferiority, our cancer, the main weapon used by the invaders" Carrilho
Arnaldo 80", Rocha 2004:455)
It seems that Glauber is only aware of Fanon in 1968, through
the Brazilian edition
of The Wretched of the Earth. But Xavier is right: in Glauber, Fanon
seemed to be fully
alive, not half-heartedly, he becomes a way of thinking and not just a
name. Xavier's thesis
is corroborated by Mendonça (1995).
It is also revealing that both intellectuals who were
initially receptive to Fanon's
ideas were white - though they had not even come across Black Skin,
White Masks - and
they were iconoclasts in search of a new language, a new way, a
third-world way of making
cinema or educating. Both left Brazil after 1968.
When Black Skin, White Masks was finally published in Brazil,
after having
circulated among young militants in photocopies as black consciousness
training manuals,
it was already 1983. It was published by Fator, which specialised in
psychoanalytical
works. Furthermore, despite the fact that it was published in Rio de
Janeiro, Fator was
based in Salvador, where the Movimento Negro Unificado - MNU (Unified Black
Movement) edited its newspaper which had a national circulation.
Undoubtedly there was a
convergence of editorial interests in a work that is very much influenced by
psychoanalysis, and the commercial interest in feeding a new market
created by a middle
class with race consciousness, since Fanon had become training
literature. Florentina Souza
says:
"... the Nego magazine, the MNU-Bahia bulletin, in its first issue
published reading
suggestions from Amílcar Cabral's Obras escolhidas, África -
literatura, arte e cultura
(Selected Works, Africa - literature, art and culture), organized by
Manoel Ferreira and, in
its third issue, Fanon's book Black Skin, White Masks..." (Souza 2005: 163).
Young black students during the 1970s and 1980s
Sartre, and his way of reading Fanon, had an enduring
influence among blacks and
whites. In 1978, the chief-editor of the newspaper Versus - from
Convergência Socialista,
whose black militants were very active in the foundation of Movimento
Unificado Contra a
Discriminação Racial (Unified Movement against Racial Discrimination),
which preceded
MNU - found images in Sartre's preface to the Wretched of the Earth to
express what took
place on the staircases of São Paulo's Municipal Theatre:
"On one occasion Sartre wrote about black issues. He said something
unforgettable, and I will cite it from memory...'What did you
expect to hear
when these black mouths found themselves freed from their muzzles? That
they would shout out nice, friendly words?' Are the muzzles
being torn off in
Brazil? Indeed they are. So, this is what we saw in São Paulo, on a
historical night. Black mouths shouting against injustice and
oppression.
Fists raised, in the twilight of that moment when, in a big
city, tired men go
home. Gentle words were not heard - and it's good that this was so. The
humiliation of centuries, only the resilience of the people
could have put up
with this." (Faerman 1978:1)
In the same way, the Versus section Afro-latino-America was
launched in 1978 with
the headline "Nem almas brancas, nem máscaras negras" (Neither white
souls, nor black
masks), a pun on Fanon's title, whilst also alluding to other simple
cognitive references
such as "black man with a white soul"; or traditional ones, such as
Nelson Rodrigues'
observations - "a painted white man is the national theatre's black
man. Just like that! " -
sometimes remembered by Abdias do Nascimento (1996).
Furthermore, Afro-Latino-América was silent on The Wretched of
this Earth,
published in 1968 in Brazil, or Black Skin, White Masks - which had
been circulating
among some black militants since the mid 1970s in a photocopied
Portuguese edition by
Paisagem publishing house from Porto - but in 1978, it re-published in
issue 18 extracts of
Black Orpheus, preceded by the following warning:
"In the current political context, where the Socialist Party
shows itself to be
the more serious alternative for the participation of the
marginalised sectors
of Brazilian society, Jean-Paul Sartre considers the role of the black
socialist. He debates the importance of not losing sight of
the objective
conditions of being a black person and a worker."
However, it was the young black students of the 1970s and
1980s who, in Brazil,
read and lived Fanon with their body and soul, making him an instrument of race
consciousness and resistance to oppression, the ideologue behind a
complete revolution
within Brazilian racial democracy. References to this fact are
plentiful in the literature. I
will only pursue some of these:
In a research project co-ordinated by Alberti e Pereira (2006)
in the CPDOC, about
the contemporary black Brazilian movement, eight militants
spontaneously cite Fanon
when talking about their training: Amauri Mendes Pereira, Gilberto
Roque Nunes Leal,
Hédio Silva Júnior, José Maria Nunes Pereira, Luiz Silva (Cuti),
Mílton Barbosa, Regina
Lucia dos Santos and Yedo Ferreira. In a similar research, conducted
by Márcia Contins
(2005), six militants also mention Fanon.
From interviews with these militants, Michael Hanchard (1994:
116) also registers:
"Thus members of Black Soul in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo-whose
activities included passing around copies of Stokely Carmichael's Black
Power and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth for group discussion,
among other items - were (mis)identified as part of the
conspiracy theory
held and propagated by civilian and military elites. There is no
documentation available on the surveillance and perceptions of
Black Soul
and the black movement in general during this period, due to
the nature of the regimes during the dictatorship. However, a high-ranking
official of the
National Information Service, the resourceful intelligence arm
of the state,
confirmed during a personal interview that several black activists were
closely monitored in the 1970s because of the state's belief
that they were
mere cogs in the ever-turning wheel of communist conspiracy." (Hanchard
1994: 116)
Thirteen years after the publication of Hanchard's book, when
the archives of the
political police (DEOPS) had already been opened to researchers, Karin
Kosling was able
to document the repression suffered by MNU:
"In a report by the DEOPS Information Division about a public act
organised by MNU, on 7/7/1980, Milton Barbosa, an important MNU
militant, cited Fanon to criticise imperialism" (Dossiê 50-Z-130- 3773.
DEOPS/SP, DAESP. in Kosling 2007: 161)
Analysing police documentation, Kosling didn't have any doubts
about listing the
main intellectual influences on young black rebels:
"Writers like Fernandes, together with Eldridge Cleaver and
Frantz Fanon,
among others, introduced the issue of class struggle into the
MNU debates"
(Kosling 2007: 161)
Analysing police documentation, Kosling didn't have any doubts about listing the
main intellectual influences on young black rebels:
"Writers like Fernandes, together with Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon,
among others, introduced the issue of class struggle into the MNU debates"
(Kosling 2007: 161)
Florentina de Souza, looking at other sources - two important
black newspapers -
agrees with regard to Fanon:
"The influence that black writers in Brazil received from
African literature
written in the Portuguese language, which arrived in Brazil in
newspapers,
magazines and books, was notable; as was the influence of the
translation of
Fanon's works and Garvey and DuBois' texts which had been circulating
within the Brazilian black movement since the 1930s" (Souza 2005: 162)
Reading some statements from black militants from the 1970s, I have the
impression that Fanon's reception in Brazil was no different to his
reception in the United
States as reported by Goldman. Amauri de Souza, an important figure in
the Rio de Janeiro
MNU says:
"Quando eu comecei a ler Alma no exílio, que foi a experiência
do Cleaver,
que era uma das principais lideranças dos Panteras Negras, e logo depois
entrei no Fanon, li os dois ao mesmo tempo... Foi uma loucura!
Aquilo era
demais! Fanon era a crucialidade, a violência como a parteira
da História.
Preconizava a violência do colonizador, o ódio... O Fanon era um pouco
mais para mim do que era Che Guevara, porque o Che era um
revolucionário que tinha morrido, portanto perdeu, e foi aqui
na América e
não era negro. O Fanon era negro. Foi uma proximidade maior que eu tive
com ele. E era terrível... O Fanon não foi morto na luta, eles ganharam,
fizeram a revolução... E na minha cabeça, aquilo me
apaixonou." (Entrevista
a Verena Alberti e Amilcar Pereira: fita 2 - lado A e B)
"When I started to read 'Soul on Ice', which was the
experience of Cleaver,
one of the main leaders of the Black Panthers, and soon
afterwards I got into
Fanon, I read both at the same time... It was crazy! That was amazing!
Fanon was so important, violence as the midwife of History. It
advocated the violence of the coloniser, the hatred... Fanon meant more to me than Che
Guevara, because Che was a revolutionary that was dead, therefore he had
lost, and it was here in America and he was not black. Fanon
was black. I
felt a greater affinity towards him. It was terrible... Fanon
didn't die in the
struggle, they had won, they made the revolution... And I fell
in love with all
that, in my head." (Interview with Verena Alberti and Amilcar
Pereira: tape 2
- sides A and B).
But the first (and perhaps the only) systematic reflection
about Fanon's thinking
was only made in 1981 by black intellectuals in a Brazilian academic
journal and signed by
a collective, Grupo de Estudos sobre o Pensamento Político Africano
(GEPPF) [Study
Group on African Political Thinking], which signifies a midway point
between academic
and political reflection. The group was made up of activists, students
and teachers from the
Centro de Estudos Afro-asiáticos (Centre for Afro-Asian Studies, Cândido Mendes
University), directed by José Maria Nunes Pereira.
"It is clear [by reading Fanon] that while racism is the
consequence of a
situation of socio-economic domination, it has its own mechanisms of a
psychological order which give it certain autonomy. However,
this situation
continues to feed - and feeds itself upon - racism. It is
applicable not only to
the colonial situation, but also to neo-colonial and
capitalist societies with a
large contingency of labour from the old colonies. In the
first case, as we
have seen, the fundamental function of racism is the
legitimation of direct
occupation and exploitation. In the neo-colonial
situation, race
discrimination is used with the same objectives, with the necessary
adaptations to a new reality. It supports the mechanism of neo-colonial
subordination." (GEPPF 1981: 22).
But by reading the article, it can be seen that there are
still clear limits to the
acceptance of Fanon as a political strategist, especially with regard
to his belief in the
potential of peasant revolution:
"He [Fanon] does not make a real class analysis of the colonial society.
There are references to classes or layers of society. The
proletariat, the
lumpenproletariat and the peasantry deserve some attention
[since] they lack
characterization. There are references to the bourgeoisie and
to the local
elites, possibly consisting of members of the bourgeoisie. His analysis
favours the urban-rural polarization." (GEPPF 1981:15).
If the group criticizes the excessively classist and
economicist position held by the
traditional left, for whom the black movement still represented a
serious danger of dividing
the exploited classes, it also distances itself from those within the
black movement who
separate themselves from the Marxist matrix.
"We believe that the position of those who try to minimize the
race issue by
simply and purely diluting it in the 'social', and the
position of those who
argue for the absolute independence of anti-racist
organisations (and their
involvement in party politics) relative to the rest of
society, hinder - albeit
involuntarily - the death of the 'racial democracy' ideology." (GEPPF
1981:25)
The academic reception
Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting e White (1996) divide the
development of studies about
Fanon into four phases. The first phase was marked by the
revolutionary literature of the
1960s, which in Brazil, as we have seen, was embraced by Glauber's
ideas about the
Cinema Novo and Paulo Freire's conception of the pedagogy of the
oppressed. The second
phase, which they denominated biographic, did not have representatives
in Brazil, and was
practically ignored. Not only is there no biography of Fanon written
by a Brazilian author,
there isn't as yet a single biography of Fanon edited in Brazil. There
are only some
biographical notes (Ortiz 1995; Cabaço e Chaves 2004). The third
phase, marked by Fanon's interest in political theory, would also have been totally ignored
if it wasn't for the fact
that Renate Zahar (1974) was reference reading for Grupo de Estudos do
Pensamento
Político Africano (1981). It is worth pointing out Ianni's book on
imperialism already
mentioned above. But also in relation to this phase, Fanon is only a
reference, and these
studies did not generate thinking in Brazil about his political ideas
on a wider scale, or of a
more original nature. The fourth and last phase, that of post-colonial
studies, is still
practically new in Brazil, and reaches us only through the
commentaries of Bahba, Gilroy,
Gates Jr. or through Brazilian critics of post-colonialists, such as
Sérgio Costa (2006).
In Brazil, unlike in the United States, black mobilisation
during the 1970s did not
lead to the entry of black people in large numbers into universities,
and the creation of
NEAB (Núcleos de Estudos Afro-Brasileiros) [Centre for Afro-Brazilian
Studies] is
relatively recent in the country. The Associação Brasileira de
Pesquisadores Negros
(Brazilian Association of Black Researchers) is dated only from 2000.
Fanonian studies in Brazil did not really become a subject of
research with a certain
degree of autonomy, and references to Fanon, as well as being sparse,
seem to pursue
different lines. A quick search through university thesis and
dissertation databases shows
that Fanon is read in Brazilian universities, particularly on
post-graduate courses about
literature, media and arts, social psychology and the social sciences.
When debates which
raged through the 1960s and 1970s are revisited, his work attracts interest.
However, only three Brazilian authors have dedicated articles
or part of chapters in
books to discussing Fanon. Renato Ortiz (1995, 1998) undoubtedly
discusses Fanon more
profoundly and in a more refined manner. Specialising on the French
intellectual world of
the post-war period, Ortiz (1995) prepared a volume on Fanon for a
collection of scientific
dissemination entitled "Grandes Cientistas Sociais" (Great Social
Scientists), published by
Editora Abril. This volume was never published, but years later Ortiz
returned to the
original of his "presentation" in an article in the journal Idéias,
published by the Sociology
Department of the University of Campinas, (Unicamp). Ortiz retraces
the formation of
Fanon's thinking to three central movements of the intellectual world
of post-war France -
the re-reading of Hegel, the debate between Marxists and
existentialists, and, finally
négritude. However, he is silent about Fanon's psychoanalytic
formation. Ortiz's main
concern is related to the Fanonian conception of racism and of the
nation. Some time later,
Ortiz (1998) revisits Fanon, this time in relation to his study about
the thinking within
ISEB, and discovers similar roots to the cultural anti-colonialism of
the "isebian" thinkers -
Hegel, Sartre and Balandier. He does not mention, however, the
important influence of
phenomenology of Catholic origin on the main members of ISEB.
Cabaço e Chaves (2004), in the wake of 9/11, re-read Fanon to
again take up the
key points of his anti-colonialism and his justification of
revolutionary violence. Recalling
the debates of the 1960s, they write:
"[Fanon] shook the 'good conscience' of Western metropolises when he
asserted that 'a colonial country is a racist country', and frightened
colonialist circles by denouncing the violence of the system
and explaining
that 'the colonised man frees himself in and through
violence'; he shocked a
part of the intellectual left taking issue with the
theoretical tools of Marxist
orthodoxy; he provoked the indignation of western communist's
parties by
asserting that 'the history of the wars of liberation is the
history of the non-
verification of the thesis' about the commonality of
interests between the
Metropolis' working classes and colonized peoples; coherent in his
conviction, he accused non-violence and neutralism of passive
complicity
with the exploitation of the colonized and the
'disorientation' of the elites of
the subjugated peoples". (Cabaço e Chaves 2004:69)
In summary, in Brazil, as elsewhere, Fanon definitely entered
the roll of classic
authors. Authors who are compulsory references to the study of some of
the modern
world's phenomena, among which, and in particular, are racism and
political violence. He
positively became part of the Pantheon of black heroes as an author
whose reading
educates the racial consciousness of activists or of Brazilian black
citizens. However, this
took place without the actual development of Fanonian studies in the
country. The reason
for this underdevelopment can be partially found in the small number
of blacks in Brazilian
universities and, as a consequence, in the lack of a deeper reflection
about racism and racial
identities. If this is really the case, the current entry of large
numbers of black people
through quotas, could perhaps lead to a wider range of possibilities.
Notes
[1] Mulato is a person of mixed race. Hence, amulatado is the result of cultural and biological miscegenation.
[2] Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros - Superior Institute of Brazilian Studies; "isebianos" members of ISEB
[3] In A redução sociológica,
1958, Guerreiro explicitly cites Césaire (1955), Diop (1954) and Sartre
(1956) in French, but does not refer to Fanon (1952, 1955). In the
second edition, in 1965, Guerreiro adds references to Balandier (1955)
but still does not mention Fanon.
[4] See the Niger Collection, newspaper edited by José Assis Barbosa and José Correia Leite, in São Paulo, 1960. Coleção Mirian Ferrara, IEB-USP.
[5]
In an interview with Verena Alberti and Amilcar Pereira (19.12.2006),
José Maria Nunes Pereira, who directed Asian Studies at Cândido Mendes
University, between 1973 and 1986 comments: "Fanon was a crossed out
name in the left".
[6]
"Alias, era comum entre os isebianos, influídos pela leitura de
Toynbee, a referência aos países subdesenvolvidos como "proletariado
externo" do mundo ocidental". (In fact, it was common among 'isebianos'
(ISEB Members), who were influenced by Toynbee, to refer to
underdeveloped countries as 'external proletariat' of the western
world.)" (Paiva 1980:159, note 33)
[7] Personal information was passed on to me by Valter Silvério, UFSCar professor and Ianni's ex-student.
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