“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.
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