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Critical Fanonism
Critical Fanonism
Critical Fanonism
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Critical Fanonism
457
458 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism
Despite its bitterness and violence, the whole point of Fanon's work
is to force the European metropolis to think its history togetherwith
the history of colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abused
immobility of imperial dominion....
I do not think that the anti-imperialist challenge represented by
Fanon and Cesaire or others like them has by any means been met;
neither have we taken them seriously as models or representations of
human effort in the contemporary world. In fact Fanon and Cesaire
-of course I speak of them as types-jab directly at the question of
identity and of identitarian thought, that secret sharer of present
anthropological reflection on "otherness" and "difference." What
Fanon and Cesaire required of their own partisans, even during the
I've given some space to these remarks because it is, preeminently, in pas-
sages such as this one that Fanon as global theorist has been produced.
And yet some have found cause for objection here. Reading the pas-
sage above, they say that given the grand narrative in which Fanon is him-
self inserted, it seems beside the point to ask about the extent to which the
historical Fanon really did abandon all fixity of identity; beside the point
to raise questions about his perhaps ambivalent relation to counternarra-
tives of identity; beside the point to address his growing political and phil-
osophical estrangement from Aime Cesaire. Fanon's individual specificity
seems beside the point because what we have here is explicitly a composite
figure, indeed, an ethnographic construct. It's made clear by the formu-
laic reference to Fanon, Cesaire, and "others like them." It's made clear
when he writes, "of course I speak of them as types": to which some read-
ers will pose the question, why "of course"? And they will answer: because
the ethnographer always speaks of his subjects as types. Or they find the
answer in Albert Memmi, who explains that a usual "sign of the
colonized's depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the
plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is
entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity."4
Thus, while calling for a recognition of the situatedness of all dis-
courses, the critic delivers a Fanon as a global theorist in vacuo; in the
course of an appeal for the specificity of the Other, we discover that his
global theorist of alterity is emptied of his own specificity; in the course of
a critique of identitarian thought, Fanon is conflated with someone who
proved, in important respects, an ideological antagonist. And so on.
These moves are, I think, all too predictable: and, yes, even beside the
point. Said has delivered a brief for a usable culture; it is not to be held
against him that his interest is in mobilizing a usable Fanon. Indeed, this is
his own counternarrative, in the terrain of postcolonial criticism. But
Said's use of Fanon to allegorize the site of counterhegemonic agency
must also be read as an implicit rejoinder to those who have charged him
with ignoring the self-representations of the colonized. Homi Bhabha's
objection that Said's vision of Orientalism suggests that "power and dis-
course is possessed entirely by the colonizer" is typical in this regard.5
Certainly Bhabha's own readings of Fanon are the most elaborated
that have been produced in the field of post-structuralism. And his read-
ings are designed to breach the disjunction Said's essay may appear to
preserve, that is, between the discourse of the colonized and that of the
colonizer. For Bhabha, colonial ambivalence "makes the boundaries of
colonial 'positionality' -the division of self/other-and the question of
colonial power-the differentiation of colonizer/colonized-different
from both the Hegelian master/slave dialectic or the phenomenological
projection of Otherness."6 Accordingly, he has directed attention to (what
he sees as) the disruptive articulations of the colonized as inscribed in colo-
nial discourse, that is, the discourse of the colonized. Bhabha's reading
requires a model of self-division, of "alienation within identity," and he has
enlisted Lacanian psychoanalysis to this end:
From Fanon, he educes the question, "'how can a human being live
Other-wise?"' And he juxtaposes to his reflections on Black Skin, White
Masks the following remarks of Jacques Lacan's:
"In the case of display ... the play of combat in the form of intimida-
tion, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something
that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown
off in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated
form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and
death."8
When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can
have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and
will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white
man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, abso-
lutely as the not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable.
For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities
come into the picture.'1
(Hence for the delirious Antillean, Fanon tells us, "the mirror hallucina-
tion is always neutral. When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced
it, I always ask the same question: 'What color were you?' Invariably they
reply: 'I had no color"' [BS, p. 162 n. 25].)
Bhabha cautions, however, that
The place of the Other must not be imaged as Fanon sometimes sug-
gests as a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the self, that rep-
resents a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be seen as
the necessary negation of a primordial identity-cultural or psy-
chic-that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the
'cultural' to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.
["RF," p. xviii]
At times Fanon .... turns too hastily from the ambivalences of identi-
fication to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cul-
tural discrimination; he is too quick to name the Other, to personalize
its presence in the language of colonial racism. ... These attempts ...
can, at times, blunt the edge of Fanon's brilliant illustrations of the
complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial rela-
tion. ["RF," pp. xix-xx]
10. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 161 n. 25; hereafter abbreviated BS.
462 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism
14. Maria Koundoura, "Naming Gayatri Spivak," Stanford Humanities Review (Spring
1989): 91-92; hereafter abbreviated "N."
466 Henry Louis Gates,Jr. Critical Fanonism
gence or mere parallelism. Again, the Fanonian text casts the problem in
sharpest relief.
Stephan Feuchtwang has recently argued, in an essay entitled
"Fanonian Spaces," that
So I want to turn, finally, to yet another Fanon, the ironic figure ana-
lyzed by the Tunisian novelist and philosopher Albert Memmi. Memmi's
Fanon is, emphatically, not the Fanon we have recuperated for global colo-
nial discourse theory. He is, indeed, a far more harried subject, a central
fact of whose life is his dislocation from the "actual Third World." Of
course, we know from his biographers and from his own account that
Fanon, whose mother was of Alsatian descent, grew up in Martinique
thinking of himself as white and French: and that his painful reconstitu-
tion as a black West Indian occurred only when he arrived at the French
capital. Yet at this point-again, in Memmi's narrative-Fanon loses him-
self as a black Martinican: "Fanon'sprivate drama is that, though henceforth
hating France and the French, he will never return to Negritude and to the West
Indies," indeed, he "never again set foot in Martinique."2' Yet his attempts
to identify himself as an Algerian proved equally doomed. As Fanon's
biographers remind us, most Algerian revolutionaries scant his role and
remain irritated by the attention paid to him in the West as a figure in
Algerian decolonization: to them-and how ironic this is to his Western
admirers-he remained a European interloper.
Though he worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia, in neither
country did he even understand the language: his psychiatric consulta-
tions were conducted through an interpreter (see M, p. 5). And the image
here-of the psychoanalysis of culture being conducted, quite literally,
through an interpreter-does speak eloquently of the ultimately mediated
nature of the most anticolonialist analysis.
Far from championing the particularities and counternarratives of
the oppressed, Memmi's Fanon is an interloper without the patience or
interest to acquaint himself with the local specificities of culture: "He grew
impatient, and failed to hide his scorn of regional particularisms, the
tenacity of traditions and customs that distinguish cultural and national
aspirations, not to speak of contradictory interests" (M, p. 5). And while
Memmi's own insertion in colonial politics is certainly complex, his ver-
sion is consistent with that of the revolutionary elite of postindependence
Algeria.
Memmi's Fanon was devoted to a dream of a third world, a third
world where he could look into a mirror and have no color: yet he lived in
the Third World, which rebuffed his most ardent desires for identifica-
tion. What remained for him, Memmi writes, "but to propose a com-
pletely novel man?" (M, p. 5).
We've seen inscribed on the Fanonian text (as well as in contemporary
colonial discourse theory more widely) the disruptive relation between
narratives of subject-formation and narratives of liberation. Here,
Memmi is quite blunt: Fanon does, on the one hand, claim an absolute dis-
21. Memmi, review of Fanon, by Peter Geismar, and Frantz Fanon, by David Caute, New
YorkTimes Book Review, 14 Mar. 1971, p. 5; hereafter abbreviated M.
Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 469
22. Memmi, "Franz Fanon and the Notion of 'Deficiency,"' trans. Eleanor Levieux,
Dominated Man: Notes towards a Portrait (New York, 1968), p. 88.
23. Fanon, The Wretchedof the Earth, p. 35.
470 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism
24. This paper was originally prepared for and delivered (in abridged form) at the
1989 Modern Language Association panel on "Race and Psychoanalysis," at the invitation
of Jane Gallop, which partly explains why my references to Fanon are largely to his first
and most overtly psychoanalytic book, Black Skin, White Masks. Since Fanon's oeuvre
receives scant attention in my paper, I should remind readers unfamiliar with his works that
early and late Fanon (say) cannot be simply conflated, and that many oppositional critics
regard the later essays to be his most valuable contribution. See, for example, Towardthe
African Revolution:Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York, 1967). Finally, I'm
grateful to Hazel Carby, Jonathan Culler, K. A. Appiah, Arnold I. Davidson, Benita Parry,
and Henry Finder, who commented on an earlier draft, even though I have failed to
respond to their criticisms as I would have wished.