Josie Fanon - Remembered by Assia Djebar

"At the beginning of autumn 1961 Frantz Fanon, a West Indian psychiatrist who has recently acquired, the same year, an international reputation with the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, returns to Tunis to see the G.P.R.A. He's been the representative of the 'Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic' in Ghana and Guinea. That is where he felt the first onset of his illness. His wife, Josie, was to tell me at length about those days of waiting and uncertainty in Tunis. The verdict seems worrying: lukemia has made its presence known. They quickly decide that Fanon should get the best care possible: he agrees to go for treatment to the United States. In New York the Algerian delegation to the United Nations includes among its members some of Fanon's personal friends.

The Legacy of Frantz Fanon

Hamza Hamouchene, CounterPunch

Frantz Fanon died a few months before Algeria’s independence in July 1962. He did not live to see his adoptive country becoming free from French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. This radical intellectual and revolutionary devoted himself, body and soul to the Algerian National liberation and was a prism, through which many revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and one of the reasons the country became synonymous with Third World revolution.

The Castaway (Albert Camus)

Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books

Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer Harvard, 224 pp, £11.95, November 2014, ISBN 978 0 674 41675 8

Camus brûlant by Benjamin Stora and Jean-Baptiste Péretié Stock, 109 pp, €12.50, September 2013, ISBN 978 2 234 07482 8

Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud Actes Sud, 155 pp, €19.00, May 2014, ISBN 978 2 330 03372 9

Unpacking Fanon’s books and putting them back again …

by Nigel Gibson, June 2013, Algiers

When Sliman Hachi, the director of the Centre National de Recherche Préhistorique Anthropologiques et Historique (CNRPAH), announced that Olivier Fanon had donated his parents’ books to the Centre, the question that Matthieu Renault and I asked was, “When could we take at look at them?” We were in Algiers for a conference on “Africa Today and Fanon” organized by CNRPAH and Matthieu was leaving the next day. The library was a mixture of Frantz and Josie Fanon’s books, so during a break in the conference I asked Olivier Fanon about the collection. Apparently, these were the books that his father had left when he left the country in December 1956 and, as far as I understand, Josie had boxed them up and taken them to Lyon. We can only assume that they developed a new library in Tunis. Certainly, notes Alice Cherki, Fanon liked to frequent the bookstore owned by a Monsieur Levy and at one point asked his assistant Marie-Jeanne Manuellan to purchase everything in the shop by Freud.

L’Afrique aujourd’hui et Fanon: Colloque International, Alger, Bibliothèque Nationale du Hamma 1, 2, 3 juin 2013

L’Afrique aujourd’hui

et

Fanon

  

Colloque International

-Alger-

Bibliothèque Nationale du Hamma 1, 2, 3 juin 2013

------------------Lundi 03 juin------------------

Algerian Chronicles

Algerian Chronicles

By Albert Camus

Edited by Alice Kaplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95)

Camus: conflicting opinions

Reviewed by Andrew Hussey, Literary Review

  

For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').

Thoughts for independent Algeria’s 50th birthday

by David Porter, Pambazuka

5 July 2012 marks Algeria’s 50th anniversary of national independence from 132 years of the French colonial regime. At the heavy price of a bitter eight-year armed struggle, marked by 300,000-1,000,000 Algerian deaths, large-scale repression, torture and military removal of millions from their homes, this forceful rejection of French control was an immense accomplishment. Algeria’s example of courage, will and sacrifice to gain national liberation from a major Western power was one of the most inspiring and dynamic political models of mid-20th century Third World struggle, well-publicized for many in North America by the writings of Frantz Fanon. Commemorating this achievement at the 50th anniversary is important.

Fifty years after Algeria's independence, France is still in denial

An exhibition in Paris marking the years of colonial rule in Algeria whitewashes the crimes of France's erstwhile empire 

by Nabila Ramdani, The Guardian 

In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first album, Brigitte Bardot was at the height of her fame, and the James Bond film Dr No was made. It was the start of a decade which would forever be associated with creativity and entertainment.

Frantz Fanon: Prophet of African liberation

by Cameron Duodu, Pambazuka

The late 1950s, the era in which Ghana achieved its independence and took its place as the first British territory south of the Sahara to attain the nationhood that the visionaries of Pan-Africanism had demanded for Africa decades earlier, were heady days. Signs of the impending surrender of power to the African populations of the British and French colonies were in the air, and the atmosphere in our part of Africa was quite intoxicating. Of course, few of us knew very much about what was happening elsewhere in Africa.

Algerian Filmmaker Merzak Allouache Struggles with Censorship After Long Career

By Said Khatibi, Alakhbar

Critically acclaimed Algerian director Merzak Allouache tasted success early in his career, but when he tried confronting controversial subjects in his country he was censored.

Merzak Allouache’s movies are groundbreaking inside and outside of Algeria. He has become known as the voice of the people and a politically engaging film director. He knows how to ride the waves of criticism and win the affection of his audience.

Outside the Law – review

Philip French, The Observer 

The still highly controversial colonial war that France fought in Algeria from the mid-1950s until the granting of independence in 1962 has only been patchily reflected in the cinema. It figures significantly in the background in films as different as Alain Resnais' Muriel and Michael Haneke's Hidden, and in 1966 there was Lost Command, a Hollywood version of Jean Lartéguy's French bestseller The Centurions about a battalion of Indo-China veterans reassembling for another bitter colonial conflict in Algeria. The only truly memorable movie is the Marxist The Battle of Algiers (1966), set in the early days of the revolution, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and initiated by Yacef Saadi, a leader of the FLN (National Liberation Front). Banned in France for several years and regarded as one of the greatest political movies ever made, The Battle of Algiers was shown by the Pentagon to all senior officers and civil advisers going to Iraq and Afghanistan to show "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas".

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.

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Racism and Colonialism as Praxis and Process

Excerpt from the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Marxists Internet Archive

Racism is not a mere ‘psychological defence’ of the colonialist, created for the needs of the cause, to justify colonisation to the metropolitan power and to himself; it is in fact Other-Thought produced objectively by the colonial system and by uper-exploitation: man is defined bythe wage and by the nature of labour, and therefore it is true that wages, as they tend towards zero, and labour, as an alternation between unemployment and ‘forced labour’, reduce a colonised person to the sub-human which he is for the colonialist. Racist thinking is simply an activity which realises in alterity a practical truth inscribed in worked matter and in the system which results from it. But, on the other hand, and conversely, since the elementary structures of the simplest forms are inscribed in inorganic matter, they refer to various activities (both past and present) which either indefinitely reproduce or have helped to produce these human seals as inert thoughts: and these activities are necessarily antagonistic.

Algeria and the defeat of French Humanism

Chapter six of The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, by James Heartfield, Sheffield Hallam University, 2002. Marxists Internet Archive 

The founding of the modern French state is unique in history. The state is created in the name not just of the French citizen, but of all mankind. The document adopted by the Constituent Assembly in June 1789 is headed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The declaration is a sincere expression of the sentiments of the revolutionaries who created the state. It was also a beacon to liberals across Europe,^[1] and as far afield as Haiti in the West Indies, where the ‘black Jacobin’ Toussaint L’Ouverture was inspired to lead a slave revolt.^[2] The most adamant of the French revolutionaries deplored slavery as they deplored feudal privileges. ‘The moment you pronounce the word “slave” you pronounce your own dishonour’, said Robespierre, who also defended the civil and voting rights of free blacks in the West Indian colonies.^[3] Even after the restoration of a more centralised power under Napoleon Bonaparte’s military leadership, France remained a beacon of the universal rights of man to radicals and liberals across Europe. Napoleon’s army swept through Europe welcomed by some as an army of liberation. The Jewish ghettoes were emancipated. The Code Napoleon is, to this day, the basis of many countries’ civil law. Revolutionary France represented the hopes of the Enlightenment, of reason and of humanism for progressive Europe.

Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria

'Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria', the third chapter of T. Deanen Sharpley-Whiting's book Fanon, Conflicts and Feminisms (1998) is online here.

History of Algerian Independence

From the Marxists Internet Archive

French Colonization: For over 300 years Algeria was an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire – after the empire helped overthrow Spanish captivity of Algeria in 1518. The autonomous Algeria was very powerful, with a fleet that ruled all the Mediterranean while European nations payed taxes to cross it – those who refused to recognize Algeria’s claim to the sea would have their ships captured and ransomed off. As capitalism advanced throughout Europe, international trade began to slowly develop in earnest, and property claims over water was a fundamental enemy. In 1815, the United States sent a fleet across the Atlantic to battle Algeria, with mixed results. The following year the English and Dutch sent a second, combined fleet to crush Algerian might – but were unable to beat algerian tactical supremacy. In 1830, the French invaded and successfully suppressed Algeria, capturing the capital port city of Algeirs and by 1834, Algeria was annexed as a colony of France.

'Apostrophizing Algeria: The Ghost In Derrida'

by Grant Farred 

This essay is a version of the lecture that Grant Farred gave at the Teach-In at Rhodes University in 2010. It is a draft of a chapter of new book to be titled 'Conciliation'.)

. . . this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do.

 Specters of Marx. 

Everywhere one turns in Specters of Marx there are, as we well know, ghosts. Revenant King Hamlet, Hamlet, troubled prince of Denmark, and the King as visor effect. Then there is Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, Max Stirner and, the opening ghost and the subject of a memorable Jacques Derrida dedication, the slain South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani. 

The Algerian War 1954-1962

An archive of documents at The Marxists Internet Archive

Long Live Free Algeria, Confederation Communiste Libertaire 1954

Why the Communist Voted in Favor of the Government, Jacques Duclos, March 1956

Declaration of Pierre Frank at His Trial, Pierre Frank, 1956

Letter to the Europeans of Algeria, Algerian Communist Party, October 1957

Minutes of a Meeting between the FLN and the PCF, 30 May 1958

Michael Pablo on The Arab Revolution, November 1958

The Manifesto of the 121, 1960

Frantz Fanon: A Portrait by Alice Cherki

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon’s discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared. . . . Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming—so alive."— from the Introduction