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Anthony C. Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon and the Future of
Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2014. Jadaliyya
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Anthony Alessandrini (AA): This book started as a way to
bring together and expand on a lot of pre-existing work I had been doing on the
life and work of Frantz Fanon. As I worked on the book, though, I came to
realize that the larger topic I was dealing with was the question of how to
address the work of a political thinker like Fanon, who was so intricately
involved in the struggles of his time, within the context of our own, different
struggles. The fact that Fanon died so young and lived so intensely has made
him a figure ripe for hagiography. So one danger is that he will be referred to
(or gestured toward) rather than read carefully. On the other hand, he has
sometimes been dismissed as a figure “of his time” through the same gesture,
with a simplified version of his ideas—for example, his complex and agonized
writings about violence in the colonial context—ventriloquized and then easily
dismissed.
For years, I have found Fanon’s work good to think with, in terms of
our contemporary political and intellectual moment, in part because he was so
unsparing in his approach. So I wanted to write a book that worked closely with
Fanon’s texts in order to bring them into dialogue with our own context,
without assuming that Fanon’s work would necessarily provide all the answers to
the important questions that he raised—questions that we continue to address
today. This necessitates an active, unsparing, and sensitive engagement with
his work.
Two key words that emerged as I worked on the book were
“singularity” and “solidarity.” The first term became a way to mark the
difference between the context and struggles from which Fanon’s work emerged
and those of our own time. Sympathetic readers today often treat Fanon as a contemporary,
but in the most literal sense, he is not. I argue that making his work relevant
to our contemporary moment requires an effort on our part, in order to bridge
the very real differences that separate us.
This, in turn, led me to think about the relationship between
a rereading of Fanon’s work and a rethinking of what we mean by “solidarity”
today. It is a term that is more often invoked than thought through, in a way
not dissimilar to the way that Fanon is sometimes invoked as a generic “third-world
revolutionary.” But attention to the specificity of Fanon’s life and work leads
us to a very particular narrative: a Martinican who comes to France (after
fighting in a French uniform in World War II), trains as a doctor, and takes up
a government post in Algeria. Fanon did not go to Algeria to join a revolution,
but when the Algerian Revolution broke out in earnest, he came, over time, to
put himself completely at its service, to the extent that by the end of his
life, he would be writing about the struggle of “we Algerians.” There are
important lessons here about the nature of solidarity that speak very directly
to our moment, but paradoxically, one can only get at the contemporary
relevance of these examples by attending to the singularity of Fanon’s life and
work.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the
book address?
AA: Most of the book is set up as a series of dialogues, in
order to bring Fanon’s work into conversation with a number of contemporary
writers, texts, and contexts. One strand that runs through all of these
chapters involves the question of humanism. Fanon’s own engagement with
humanism was a vexed one: while he is among those figures most responsible for
the necessary and radical questioning of the Eurocentric and colonial nature of
traditional humanism, he has also been seen (rightly, in my view) as the
initiator of a potentially new form of postcolonial humanism. Much of this book
involves unpacking the work Fanon and others have done to create new forms of
struggle under the name of humanism, without falling back into a simple
nostalgia for the degraded forms that have gone before.
After an introduction to Fanon’s life and work, the book
begins by looking at some of the important work in the field of “Fanon Studies,”
especially over the past two decades. Chapter two brings together Fanon and
Edward Said; I argue that while both Fanon and Said are eloquent in their
critiques of the Eurocentric nature of traditional humanism, they are also
interested in carrying on a struggle with humanism from within, and that this
struggle is largely determined by their own involvement in the Algerian and
Palestinian liberation struggles, respectively. The third chapter continues the
argument about emergent humanism from the previous chapter, bringing together
Fanon and Michel Foucault. Connecting these two figures reveals surprising
similarities, including a shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism
in the interest of imagining new forms of political thought and action.
The fourth chapter takes this discussion of humanism in a
slightly different direction, by bringing Fanon into conversation with the
Antiguan novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid. In part, this means reclaiming
Fanon as, among the many other things he was and is, a Caribbean writer who
engaged, as does Kincaid, with the work of imagining a new human subjectivity
after the traumatic histories of slavery and racism. Chapter five reads Paul
Gilroy’s work through the framework provided by Fanon. When we re-read Gilroy
through Fanon, we find ourselves in a better position to appreciate the
strategic humanism of Gilroy and Fanon, a strategy, like that found in the work
of Said, Foucault, and Kincaid, oriented towards a future that has not yet
come.
Chapter six, “‘Any Decolonization Is a Success’: Fanon and
the African Spring,” brings Fanon’s work to bear on our present political and
cultural moment, specifically the popular revolutions and uprisings ongoing
throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Against the tendency to describe
the popular uprisings beginning in late 2010 as the “Arab Spring,” I wonder
whether Fanon, had he lived to see them, might not also want to describe them
as a version of what he called the African Revolution. Using his work as a lens
for thinking through these ongoing struggles might allow us to begin to
undermine, in our own intellectual and political work, the split between North
Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa that Fanon saw as one of the most painful and
dangerous legacies of colonialism. Fanon’s work also allows us to re-think our
notions of solidarity as they present themselves to us in the current context,
especially in terms of re-imagining forms of solidarity that work along other
than national lines.
The book’s conclusion argues that focusing upon the
singularity of Fanon’s life and work, far from locking him into the historical
past, can in fact provide us with important lessons about solidarity that are
crucial for political thought and action today. It can also help us to bring
together some of the emphases from his “early” work in Black Skin, White Masks
and his “late” work in The Wretched of the Earth. Seeing aspects of Fanon’s
Martinican context at work in his commitment to the Algerian Revolution, for
example, allows us to refuse the too-simple division between “early” and “late”
Fanon. It also allows for an important re-casting of our idea of solidarity as
it can be read out of Fanon’s life and work, which can in turn inspire new
kinds of solidarity in the present and future.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your
previous research?
AA: As I mentioned above, I have been working with Fanon for
many years now; in fact, this book is a culmination of approximately twenty
years of reading, teaching, and writing about Fanon’s work. In a more general
sense, this book also fits with my larger interest in bringing together
postcolonial studies and Middle East studies. I was trained originally in an
English department, studying postcolonial literature and theory, and then I
subsequently studied in a Middle East studies program. It struck me as strange
that there seemed to be a space between the two fields; in particular, it was
striking that scholars in postcolonial studies were not as focused on the
Middle East and North Africa as they were on other regions. This seemed
especially odd because two of the foundational figures in the field—Fanon and
Edward Said—were so closely tied to liberation struggles in Algeria and
Palestine, respectively. My sense is that over the past decade or so, there has
been much more work that bridges postcolonial studies and Middle East studies.
I hope that my book can be part of this larger movement.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of
impact would you like it to have?
AA: Needless to say, I would like scholars working in the
field of Fanon Studies to read and engage with this book. More generally, I
would like to think that it would be of interest to scholars across a fairly
wide range of disciplines. I am particularly interested to see if it will be of
interest to those working in literary and cultural studies—which is, at the end
of the day, still my home field—since one argument that runs throughout the
book is about the important role of imaginative writing in the struggle for
social justice. This is a strand that also runs throughout Fanon’s work, and it
speaks, among other things, to the style of his writing, especially in a book
like Black Skin, White Masks.
However, from the time I conceived this book, I wanted it to
be something that would appeal to non-specialist readers. I would be
particularly grateful to have this book read by students who are approaching
Fanon’s work for the first time. The book includes a brief biographical
introduction to Fanon and his work, and in many ways, I would love it if the
book could serve as an introduction or companion volume that could be read
alongside Fanon’s great works.
Most of all, I think, this book has been envisioned as a
pedagogical work. Much of it came directly out of my classroom experiences.
When I taught at Kent State University, I had the chance to offer a graduate
course that focused on Fanon and Foucault; similarly, I first brought the work
of Fanon and Kincaid together in my freshman English classes at Kingsborough
Community College, where I now teach. My conversations with students made me
think that it would be valuable to put all these writers into conversation with
each other. Over the years, my students have taught me a great deal about how
to read Fanon, and I hope that this book, in return, might speak to a new
generation of students who are just beginning to read (and wrestle with) his
work.
Finally, I am hoping that this book might speak to political
activists who are carrying forward the legacy of Fanon’s struggle against
racism and for decolonization. Throughout the time I was working on this book,
I was incredibly inspired by the popular struggles for justice and freedom that
blossomed and spread throughout the world, from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria and
Libya and Bahrain, to Spain and Greece and Turkey, and here in New York City
and throughout the United States. The image that we chose for the cover, by
Christiane Gruber, is from the Gezi Protests in Istanbul in the summer of 2013;
it represents some of the spirit that I felt as I was writing it. The book is
now entering the world at what feels like a much less optimistic moment, but
without question, these struggles continue, in many forms and many places. I
hope this book might help to bring some of Fanon’s life and work into the lives
of others, and to spread the spirit of resistance that runs through all that he
wrote and did to those carrying on these struggles today.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AA: I have a couple of collaborative book projects that are
in the process of unfolding, including one that focuses specifically on the
question of solidarity today, and another on film and cinema studies in the
Middle East and North Africa. In the shorter term, I have a chapter coming out
in a collection dealing with the Egyptian Revolution—my chapter focuses on
attempts (and failures) towards establishing solidarity between New York and
Cairo—edited by my Jadaliyya colleague Reem Abou-El-Fadl, and another chapter
in a forthcoming collection that is due out this fall, Retrieving the Human:
Reading Paul Gilroy. There is also some thinking going on towards a new book,
but this is still in the painfully preliminary stages.
Excerpts from Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural
Politics: Finding Something Different
From “Conclusion: Singularity and Solidarity: Fanonian
Futures”
This returns us to Fanon’s more fundamental point, one that
is inevitably missed by those who read him as an advocate of violence:
colonialism, simply put, is a state of violence. As he writes, in the passage
from The Wretched of the Earth referred to by Sekyi-Otu, “colonialism is not a
machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is violence in a state
of nature…”[1] In other words, surveying the Manicheaism of the colonized
world, Fanon simply provides a description of what he sees before him: violence
is. This is crucial to note, because only by acknowledging this fact, and the
subsequent situation imposed by colonialism—one which, as both Gilroy and
Sekyi-Otu have noted, the sphere of anything that might resemble politics has
been completely obliterated—can we understand the remainder of Fanon’s
statement regarding colonialism: “…and only gives in when confronted with
greater violence.” What I want to argue is that we do not have to automatically
assume that Fanon’s “greater violence” is necessarily identical to the violence
of colonialism.
Indeed, what Fanon presents us with is the question that continues
to haunt our contemporary political context: how best to resist violence. Too
often, in the realms of both political thought and political activism, this has
come down to a sterile debate regarding the merits of violence versus
nonviolence, whether these are thought of as tactics or as principles of
struggle. I believe Fanon points us towards an understanding that resists
reducing the question of how to oppose violence to a binary choice between
these two possibilities. Indeed, an appropriation of his work might lead us to
re-envision this supposed (Manichaean) division between these two “choices” as
part of a larger continuum of resistance, rather than imagining that there is a
self-evident line in the sand that can be drawn between “violence” and “nonviolence.”
For Fanon presents us with a conundrum: If the fundamental description of
colonialism can be summed up as “violence is,” then can “nonviolence” have any
real meaning? We need to find a better way to describe the opposition to the
state of pure violence that is colonialism than the negative term
“nonviolence.”
Fanon himself, of course, has some withering things to say
about nonviolence as a response to colonial violence in The Wretched of the
Earth. But it should be noted that in Fanon’s analysis, a particular strategy
of “nonviolence” enters the struggle for decolonization from a particular
direction and, he suggests, for a particular set of purposes. The passage in
question follows immediately upon his statement regarding colonialism as violence
in its natural state, and, as Fanon specifies, it represents the “critical,
deciding moment” when “the colonial bourgeoisie, which had remained silent up
till then, enters the fray”:
They introduce a new notion, in fact a creation of the
colonial situation: nonviolence. In its raw state this nonviolence conveys to
the colonized intellectual and business elite that their interests are
identical to those of the colonial bourgeoisie and it is therefore
indispensible, a matter of urgency, to reach an agreement for the common good.
Nonviolence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around the negotiating
table before the irreparable is done, before any bloodshed or regrettable act
is committed. But if the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed
around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start
burning and killing, it is not long before we see the “elite” and the leaders
of the bourgeois nationalist parties turn to the colonial authorities and tell
them: “This is terribly serious! Goodness knows how it will all end. We must
find an answer, we must find a compromise.”[2]
I read this passage as suggesting that Fanon’s real target
here is not nonviolence itself as a political tactic or an ethical principle,
but rather the production of an opportunistic discourse of “nonviolence” by the
elite nationalist leadership as a way to bring into being the forms of
“compromise” that will in turn cement their status in the resulting
postcolonial (or, more accurately, neocolonial) context. The colonized
intellectuals and national bourgeoisie who take up the mantle of “nonviolence,”
in other words, do so not as part of a larger ethical position, or as one facet
of a truly anti-colonial strategy, but rather as a tactic to separate themselves
from the “violent masses.” As a result, Fanon suggests, these leaders “now find
themselves catapulted to the forefront of negotiations and compromise—precisely
because they have always been careful not to break ties with colonialism.”[3]
If this form of compromise politics, carried out around the negotiating table,
is allowed to determine the outcome of the struggle for decolonization, it will
end in the sort of neocolonial situation that Fanon identifies in the Republic
of Gabon, where President Léon M’ba, upon his arrival in Paris, can declare
solemnly: “Gabon is an independent country, but nothing has changed between
Gabon and France, the status quo continues.” “In fact,” Fanon concludes, “the
only change is that Monsieur M’ba is president of the Republic of Gabon, and he
is the guest of the president of the French Republic.”[4]
This outcome, needless to say, has nothing in common with the
transformative energy that Fanon sees as defining true decolonization; indeed,
this compromise politics appears as the colonial power’s best strategy for
defeating the movement for decolonization and imposing a state of
neocolonialism. But Fanon is not suggesting that this result should be blamed
upon the taking up of a strategy of nonviolence per se. Indeed, as he says
explicitly, this strategy of “nonviolence” as espoused by nationalist elites
should be seen as “in actual fact a creation of the colonial situation.” But
precisely the same can be said, as we have seen, about the spontaneous eruption
of anti-colonial violence. In other words, in the initial stages of
decolonization, there is no “choice” between violence and nonviolence; violence
is, and the only question is how to best overthrow the state of violence that
is colonialism in order to bring about another context altogether, one in which
such political choices would have some meaning. What Fanon opposes, I suggest,
is not nonviolence per se, but rather a discourse of “nonviolence” that is
demanded only of the colonized, and which thus implicitly ignores or endorses
the ongoing and all-defining violence of colonialism.
[…]
In the contemporary context, the political situation that
might be most clearly illuminated through a critical appropriation of Fanon’s
theory of (non)violence is that of Israel/Palestine.[5] For many years, and
most insistently since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000,
commentators in the West, including those who declare themselves to be
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, have asked: “Why don’t the Palestinians
choose nonviolence?” (A related rhetorical gesture is to phrase the question
as: “Why is there no Palestinian Gandhi?”) In fact, there is a rich history of
Palestinian nonviolent resistance that stretches back to the British Mandate
period, including the General Strike of 1936, which lasted six months, making
it the longest general strike in modern history.[6] Since the beginning of the
occupation in 1967, Palestinian resistance has taken a number of nonviolent
forms, including the development of alternative institutions like women’s and
youth committees, education and medical relief committees, and prisoner
organizations. There have also been the many acts of nonviolent civil
disobedience and resistance that marked both the first and second intifadas,
including actions such as tax strikes, the setting up of ad-hoc schools for
students under curfew, and the boycotting of Israeli goods. While such actions
have not been as eagerly captured by television cameras as confrontations with
Israeli soldiers, they have represented the greater part of the resistance to
Israeli occupation and apartheid policies; the coordinated hunger strikes by
thousands of Palestinian prisoners are just the latest example of this legacy
of nonviolent resistance.[7]
At the same time, the pattern first established by the
British authorities in their response to the General Strike of 1936 prefigured
the dilemma that Palestinian resistance movements have faced continuously since
then: the strike was brutally suppressed by the British, and many of its
leaders were ultimately killed, imprisoned, or exiled. This repression did not,
however, prevent the experience and inspiration of the General Strike from
providing models for future generations of Palestinian activists.[8] This has
been the recurring pattern in the history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance:
one generation sees its attempts to establish new forms of resistance violently
suppressed, and the next generation must use the historical memory provided by
these earlier struggles to begin again and to invent new strategies of
resistance.
There are two important things to be noted about these forms
of nonviolent Palestinian resistance in the Fanonian context. The first point
is that they are all forms of resistance, and thus to be distinguished from the
form of “nonviolence” as compromise on the part of the national bourgeoisie
that Fanon criticizes in The Wretched of the Earth. The second point, which
must also be kept in mind, is that these movements, and the violent responses
they have faced, have been deeply conditioned by the colonial context of
Israel/Palestine, as well as by the international context that surrounds it.
[…]
The second point, regarding the larger international context
that surrounds these forms of nonviolent resistance, is equally important in
moving us away from the facile belief in a binary “choice” between violence and
nonviolence. The importance of understanding this larger context can be found
in the title of a 2010 article by Yousef Munayyer: “Palestinian Nonviolence
Relies on Global Non-Silence.” Munayyer begins by noting that he is often faced
with the question, “When will there be a Palestinian Gandhi?” His first
response is a straightforward one: “Like many resisting oppression, Palestinian
Gandhis are likely to be found in prisons after being repressed by Israeli
soldiers or police or in the hospital after being brutally beaten or worse.”[9]
But the point here is not merely that Israeli violence has consistently trumped
Palestinian nonviolence—since, as Munayyer takes pains to point out, this
nonviolent resistance has not ceased, even in the face of harsher and more
bloody repression over the past decade. His real point has to do with the
international forces that simultaneously allow this state of Israeli violence
to continue while intensifying the demand for Palestinian “nonviolence,” and it
is a very Fanonian point:
The international community…cannot simply call on
Palestinians to abandon violence in the face of Israeli occupation and remain
silent when the nonviolent activists are politically repressed. This only
reinforces the idea that the use of force reigns supreme and that Palestinians
have no choice but to accept hardships at the hands of their Israeli lords.
Sadly, the same leaders who call on Palestinians to abandon violence have been
silent in the face of Israeli repression. By condemning violent Palestinian
resistance while remaining silent in the face of Israeli crackdowns and
political arrests, they are simply endorsing violence against civilians by one
side instead of the other.[10]
[…]
Again, we find ourselves at a distance from the conventional
notion of a “choice” between violence and nonviolence. The more important
question has to do, as Fanon suggests in The Wretched of the Earth, with how to
best found a movement for decolonization that functions as a resistance to
violence, and how to bring into existence a new context not determined by the
violence of colonialism—for, as he takes pains to remind us, both spontaneous
violence and compromising nonviolence, as initial responses to colonization,
are equally creations of the colonial context.
NOTES
[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by
Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 23. For some reason, Philcox chooses
to translate Fanon’s “la violence à l’état de nature” as “naked violence”; I
have altered his translation accordingly.
[2] Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 23-24.
[3] Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 24.
[4] Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 28.
[5] For an interesting recent application of Fanon’s work to
Israel/Palestine—albeit one that works along quite different lines than those I
am setting out here—see Matthew Abraham, “The Fanonian Specter in Palestine:
Suicide Bombing and the Last Colonial War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112
(2013): 99-114.
[6] See the pamphlet that I produced on this issue for the
American Friends Service Committee: Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance to
Occupation Since 1967, AFSC Middle East Resource series (Fall 2005). For an
important analysis of these questions of violence and nonviolence, both
historically and in the present moment, see Wendy Pearlman, Violence,
Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011). For the earlier history of Palestinian nonviolent
resistance, see Souad R. Dajani, Eyes Without Country: Searching for a
Palestinian Strategy of Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1995). For an overview of recent Palestinian nonviolent resistance in the West
Bank, see Raja Shehadeh, “The Rise of Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance: A
Conversation with Mustafa Barghouti,” The Daily Beast (7 March 2013).
[7] For more on these hunger strikes, see Richard Falk and
Noura Erakat, “Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity,”
Jadaliyya (11 May 2012).
[8] For more on the General Strike, and its continuing
influence on Palestinian society, see Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The
1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayettesville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2003).
[9] Yousef Munayyer, “Palestinian Nonviolence Relies on
Global Non-Silence,” Guardian (21 May 2010). For a more extended analysis, see
Yousef Munayyer, “Palestine’s Hidden History of Nonviolence,” Foreign Policy
(18 May 2011).
[10] Munayyer, “Palestinian Nonviolence.”
