Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, women, veils, and land.

by Ria Faulkner, World Literature Today, 1996

Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies.

Fanon and Feminism

by Laurie Cashdan, News & Letters

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts & Feminisms. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting's new book on conflicting attitudes of feminists to the Martinican revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon is sure to stir up new controversies regarding the value of Fanon's writings for feminism. We cannot afford to allow anti-Fanon feminist arguments to remain unchallenged, she shows, if we are to work out a radical humanist vision for today.

Fanon and space: colonization, urbanization, and liberation from the colonial to the global city

by Stefan Kipfer, Environment and Planning: Society and Space,  2007, volume 25, pages 701 - 726.

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called `spatial turn' in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of `space' in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for `third-space' thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian-Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation.

Behind the Scarfed Law There is Fear

Alain Badiou, Lacan.com, 2004

1. A few likeable Republican women and men once put forward the idea that a bill banning scarves from the hair of schoolgirls had to be drafted. First, ban the scarf from school. Then, ban it from elsewhere and everywhere if possible. Did I hear "a law"? A Law! The President of the Republic was as limited a politician as he was unsinkable. Totalitarianly elected by 82 percent of voters, including all of the Socialists, i.e. those from whom a good number of the likeable Republican women and men used to be recruited, Chirac nodded his assent: a law, yes, a Law against a few thousand young girls who put the aforementioned scarf over their hair. Those hairless, mangy things! Muslims, moreover! This is how, once again, likewise to the surrender in Sedan, Pétain, the Algerian War, Mittérand's deceits and the villainous laws against workers without working papers, France has astonished the world. After the tragedies, the farce.

Some Thoughts on 'Algeria Unveiled'

by Chris McMichael

In 'Algeria Unveiled' Fanon takes the veil as a starting point for an exploration of the new Algeria that was being created through the revolution. The veil appeared to stir a profound and visceral orientalism on the part of the French occupier. The veil maintained an ambiguous status in the mind of the coloniser. It was read as a convenient confirmation of all the most pernicious stereotypes about Algerians in particular and Arabs in general. It stood as confirmation of Algeria's backwards patriarchy, of its primitive insularity and of the passivity of Algerian women. In turn these features were used to justify the occupation: such people were begging to be colonised.

Fanon Reading Group Text Five: 'Algeria Unveiled'

'Algeria Unveiled', the first chapter of Towards the African Revolution, is online here and here.