Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Solidarity: On the Practice of Third World Intercontinentalism PDF
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Solidarity: On the Practice of Third World Intercontinentalism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1q88v5dj Author Bose, Anuja Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Solidarity: On the Practice of Third World Intercontinentalism A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science by Anuja Bose 2017 © Copyright by Anuja Bose 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Solidarity: On the Practice of Third World Intercontinentalism by Anuja Bose Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Raymond A. Rocco, Chair How was France consolidated as an imperial state, and how was its imperial form challenged from the colonies? This is the question I address in this dissertation by turning to the works of Frantz Fanon. I argue that Fanon’s first published work Black Skin, White Masks offers a critique and diagnosis of how the French imperial state was consolidated through racialized relations of social solidarity. In this work, Fanon shows that race mediated how social solidarity was articulated and practiced such that colonial subject-citizens were simultaneously included into and excluded from republican citizenship. Caught in the double bind of inclusion and exclusion, the possibility of forging any substantial sense of social solidarity between black and white citizens in France and its colonies was forgone. In Fanon’s subsequent writings - A Dying Colonialism, Towards the African Revolution and The Wretched of the Earth – he demonstrates ii that the racialized social solidarity of imperial France and the international political community more broadly, were challenged by practices of regional political solidarity between the Third World masses in the post-war era. Specifically, I argue that his writings articulate two sets of political practices that the masses of the Third World engage in to transform the imperialist structure of France and international state system 1) the practice of vigilance in response to being vulnerable to undemocratic rule internally and being subject to imperial domination externally and 2) the practice of sacrifice as a way to share and distribute the burdens of waging armed resistance against powerful imperial states. These practices form the basis of Fanon’s distinctive account of Third World political solidarity as a form of intercontinental populism between formerly colonized nations that could obliterate the bonds of racialized fraternity that defined colonial relations, and continued to define core and periphery relations in the postcolonial era. iii The dissertation of Anuja Bose is approved. Carole Pateman Melvin L. Rogers Robin D.G. Kelley Raymond A. Rocco, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv For Rethi Devi Bose and in memory of Nassim Mobasher v Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………...viii Vita…………………………………………………………………………………………………..xi INTRODUCTION: Frantz Fanon on the Question of Empire and Solidarity…………….1 I. Fanon and Third World Political Thought II. Organization of the Dissertation CHAPTER 1: Race and Fraternity under French Colonialism…………………………26 I. Fraternity and the Colonial Family Romance II. Race and Social Structure III. The Double Bind of Language and Race IV. Republican Racism and the Problem of Inclusion V. Conclusion CHAPTER 2: Intercontinental Solidarity and Decolonization…………………………60 I. Decolonization Beyond the Nation-State: Federalism and the Turn to the Third World II. The Dialectic between Pan-Ethnic/Racial Solidarity and National Consciousness III. International Consciousness as Intercontinental Populism IV. Conclusion: Critical and Revising Dialectics CHAPTER 3: Vigilance and Intercontinental Solidarity……………………………….113 I. International Political Solidarity in Liberalism and Marxism II. Seriality and Colonization III. Contesting Seriality Through Vigilance IV. Conclusion: Practices of Vigilance as Practices of Freedom vi CHAPTER 4: Sacrifice, Political Violence and Intercontinental Solidarity…………...172 I. Sacrifice and Democratic Citizenship II. Sacrifice and Political Violence III. Beyond Algeria: Sacrifice as the Foundation for Third World Solidarity IV. From Algeria to Africa: Distributing the Burdens of Sacrifice V. Conclusion CONCLUSION: Frantz Fanon as a Theorist of Third World Political Thought……….211 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………...217 vii Acknowledgments The journey from articulating a faint idea for a dissertation, to defending the prospectus, to completing the final version, has been a long and arduous process. I am grateful to the members of my committee who have lent me invaluable support and guidance along the way. I wish to thank my chair, Raymond Rocco, who has patiently seen me through every step of the doctoral program, offering me practical and scholarly advice from day one, while always creating an intellectual space for me in the field of Race, Ethnicity, Politics at UCLA to nurture my interests in political theory and the study of race & racism. It would simply not have been possible for me to envision and complete this project without his support and the intellectual community he created for us political theorists at UCLA. I am also immensely fortunate to have begun this project soon after Robin Kelley moved to UCLA. My conversations with him have enriched this project tremendously, and his unwavering encouragement has carried me through to the end. He is just the teacher and mentor I needed, and I am lucky that he appeared at the right time. I also offer my deep gratitude to Carole Pateman and Melvin Rogers. Both have been exemplary role models for me who engage and expand the political theory canon to deepen our understanding of domination and democratic citizenship in their own original and insightful ways. Outside of my committee, Victor Wolfenstein and Mark Q. Sawyer played an important role in creating an intellectual home for me at UCLA to develop the ideas of this project. I am very fortunate to have crossed paths with them in graduate school, and to have benefitted from their legacy of advancing the study of race & racism in Political Science. viii
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