Fanon as Example and Figure: A Conversation Between Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Let me say from the outset that it would be a mistake to make Fanon into a clay model for revolution,” says Gayatri Spivak. I’ve asked her about Göran Olson’s 2014 celebrated documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, which she prefaced. Herself the author of an influential body work that includes A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and more recently a translation of Aimé Césaire’s play A Season in the Congo, she engaged Olson’s film in signature critical mode. As a counterpoint to the documentary, her preface avoids the often repeated story of Fanon as a champion of counter-violence.  “Instead,” she says, “one must understand that in the initial chapters of The Wretched of the Earth, which a lot of people read as an apology of violence, Fanon is actually claiming complicity with what was surrounding him. That is, the violence of colonization.” “I will be as violent as they are, when they hold my life as worth less than theirs,” says Frantz Fanon, the healer. 

The Podcast for Social Research, Episode 14: Violence and Resistance – Frantz Fanon

In the fourteenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research, Anjuli, Tony, and Ajay talk through the life, work, and legacy of Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and philosopher of decolonization who was also a veteran of World War II and an adherent of the Algerian revolution. This conversation takes up major texts in Fanon’s oeuvre (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth) as well as profound theoretical controversies that radiate from them—idiocy, the literary dimensions of Fanon’s work, his strangeness of form and methodology, the psychological inflections of his writing, the political structure of states and colonies, the best footnote in all of twentieth-century philosophy, and particularly the nature and meaning of violence as praxis, “perfect mediation,” symbol, and atmosphere—violence as reason to despair—and as reason not to.

When Law Is Not Justice: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak interviewed by Brad Evans

The New York Times

Brad Evans: Throughout your work, you have written about the conditions faced by the globally disadvantaged, notably in places such as India, China and Africa. How might we use philosophy to better understand the various types of violence that erupt as a result of the plight of the marginalized in the world today?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: While violence is not beyond naming and diagnosis, it does raise many challenging questions all the same. I am a pacifist. I truly believe in the power of nonviolence. But we cannot categorically deny a people the right to resist violence, even, under certain conditions, with violence. Sometimes situations become so intolerable that moral certainties are no longer meaningful. There is a difference here between condoning such a response and trying to understand why the recourse to violence becomes inevitable.

Political violence threatens an already battered democracy

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

When I joined the liberation struggle led by the ANC/SACP alliance in the late 1960s, it entailed support for armed struggle. Until then I had been a liberal without the benefit of any exposure to the ANC and its allies, which had been absent from public politics in the aftermath of the Rivonia arrests.

I then abandoned my reading of Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose conceptions of morality and care for the well-being of other human beings had inspired me. I did not abandon their injunction to combat indifference to “evil”, or remove their works from my bookshelf. But I did not see them as relevant to a life in which I had taken a course that entailed the use of force to combat and bring down the apartheid regime. I did not romanticise armed struggle, but saw it as a necessary choice with which I wanted to associate myself.

Frantz Fanon: A democratic philosopher

Richard Pithouse, Mail & Guardian

If there’s a philosopher of the moment it is, by some distance, Frantz Fanon. This is not surprising given that Fanon offers compelling accounts of the pathologies of both the colony and the postcolony – spaces that some of the young people at the fore of the new ferment in South Africa feel they must inhabit simultaneously.

Did Mandela ‘sell out’ the struggle for freedom?

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

For every generation to find its own path, to know what ought to be adopted from what has gone before and what has been done by previous generations, it is important to engage from an informed position.

It is the earlier work of previous political and social movements that determine the conditions under which those who come later address unfinished forms of oppression and the errors or mistakes of those who went before them. It is through engagement with the present in the context of this inheritance that they may be able to make informed choices that contribute to the broader national debate that needs to unfold.

The strongest victims in the world

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

The violent and public beating of non-violent black protesters at the University of Free State demonstrated white Afrikaner impunity on full display. It was a reminder of the continued ways in which white people’s violence in South Africa is a tool that takes direct aim at black people’s bodies.

The violent racist does not bother with acts of vandalism or bother with the destruction of property: That would be a waste of time and energy. Over centuries the violence has evolved into an efficient and highly effective machine. Kick the head and wound the body. Send a clear message – no warning shots. There is nothing symbolic about the violence whites have carried out in South Africa in the past and on Tuesday we saw that it continues to be as literal as it ever was.

Achille Mbembe on Fanon, Violence and Sartre's introduction to Les Damnés de la Terre

#BlackSpring in “BALTIMORE" from the forthcoming Nina Simone tribute album

Some Are Soldiers, Others ‘Straatmeide”

Siphokazi Magadla, The Con

Reports that Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), called Minister of Small Business Development, Lindiwe Zulu, “a straatmeid” following a verbal exchange that came close to a physical altercation between Zulu and EFF Member of Parliament, Godrich Gardee, is a crude reminder of the sexist double-standards faced by female guerillas in the aftermath of war where they are expected to conform to dominant ideas of feminine respectability.

I told you so: The return of Angry White Men

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

Yesterday reports were published of a black taxi driver who was attacked with an axe by an enraged white male motorist in Johannesburg. The paramedics came to the scene of the attack and attended to the unharmed perpetrator of the crime, leaving the bleeding black male victim on the side of the road. When they were called out on their behaviour, apparently they got angry and left him there bleeding.

South Africa's War on Women

T.O. Molefe, The New York Times

CAPE TOWN — Two years ago, when Jyoti Pandey, a 23-year-old Indian physiotherapy intern, was gang-raped and fatally beaten by six men on a bus in New Delhi, there was a moment of soul searching among South Africans.

We knew such brutal acts are commonplace here, yet could not recall the last time we reacted with anywhere near comparable outrage. The sad truth is that many of us had been hardened by the daily news reports of violence committed by men against women and the perfunctory moments the government officially sets aside to reflect on them. The overwhelming visceral response from Indians shook those of us who heard about it from our stupor.

Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement: Charles E. Cobb and Danielle L. McGuire on Forgotten History

The American Prospect

On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said.

In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive.

Raymond Suttner: “The dream has become a nightmare”

http://www.bistandsaktuelt.no/nyheter-og-reportasjer/arkiv-nyheter-og-reportasjer/the-dream-has-become-a-nightmare

Bistandsaktuelt: My project here is to hear what people think about twenty years of democracy and freedom. After the election in 1994 my reading was that there was euphoria, a hopefulness that now seems to have disappeared. What is your comment?

Suttner: There was a promise. A dream of what we wanted to see. And in some ways, without being melodramatic the dream has become a nightmare. In one of my blogs I wrote that one of the reasons why I was grieving prior to Mandela dying was that Mandela represented a vision of a free SA, where leaders acted with integrity. It has turned into a nightmare in the sense that there is a lot of violence, and I think that some of it is fuelled by the rhetoric of the leadership with phrases like “shoot to kill”, militaristic songs and lots of sexual and gender based violence. And then there is the corruption and patronage.

An Extract from Mahmood Mamdani’s Seminal Book on Rwanda from Africa is a Country

Mahmood Mamdani, Africa is a Country

I visited Rwanda roughly a year after the genocide. On July 22, 1995, I went to Ntarama, about an hour and a half by car from Kigali, on a dirt road going south toward the Burundi border. We arrived at a village church, made of brick and covered with iron sheets. Outside there was a wood and bamboo rack, bearing skulls. On the ground were assorted bones, collected and pressed together inside sacks, but sticking out of their torn cloth. The guard explained that the bones had been gathered from the neighborhood. A veteran of similar sites in the Luwero Triangle in Uganda roughly a decade ago, I felt a sense of déjá vu. Even if the numbers of skulls and sacks were greater in quantity than I had ever seen at any one site, I was not new to witnessing the artifacts of political violence.

Suttner's View: How do we stop the violence that is all around us?

Sisonke Msimang on Gender equality, violence and democracy in South Africa

Cast your vote, and do it wisely

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

The opposition may be acting silly, but the decision that McBride should be head of Ipid despite the fact that he has broken our laws and despite the fact that he is a broken man who probably needs help, seems bloody and careless. It seems as though someone in power cares as little for the public as they do for McBride. Again short-term thinking trumps long-term decision-making in a country in which everyone is a victim. It has never been more important than it is this year to vote, and to do so wisely.

The police seem intent on killing ordinary citizens. They Police Commissioner lurches from one bloody disaster to the next. She tells us that police are human beings too. She is right, even though this is not the moment for her to tell us this. They have just killed a child. I forget the name of the town. I forget – as soon as I hear it – the name of the child who was killed. I am inured to the pain of others. The suicide rate amongst cops is shameful. They are stressed out and trigger happy and under-paid and overworked. Their problems are systemic, as deep and as wide as Blood River. We fear them as much as they fear us. This has always been the case in South Africa.

"There is Marikana everyday in South Africa" - an interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo

Address the social factors behind violence

Chandre Gould & Anthony Collins, Business Day, 19 September 2013

THERE are two important factors that appear to be linked to increases in violent crime: increases in relative poverty and high unemployment. While a small proportion of very wealthy South Africans are getting even richer, the cost of living has outstripped increases in social grants, pensions and salaries in most sectors. Based on these factors alone, we can expect violent crime to remain high for the foreseeable future.