Living Fanon : global perspectives

309 Pages·2011·2.12 MB·English

by  Gibson, Nigel C (ed.)

Living Fanon
CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY
Manning Marable (Columbia University) and Peniel Joseph (Tufts University)
Series Editors
This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlining the importance of
the study of history as a form of public advocacy and political activism. It focuses on postwar African
American history, from 1945 to the early 1990s, but it also includes international black history, bringing in
high-quality interdisciplinary scholarship from around the globe. It is the series editors’ (firm belief that
outstanding critical research can also be accessible and well written. To this end, books in the series
incorporate different methodologies that lend themselves to narrative richness, such as oral history and
ethnography, and combined disciplines such as African American Studies, Political Science, Sociology,
Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
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By Duchess Harris Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya
By Gerald Horne Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization
By Quito Swan Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level
Edited by Peniel E. Joseph Living Fanon: Global Perspectives Edited by Nigel C. Gibson
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By Matthew Whitaker (forthcoming)
Living Fanon
Global Perspectives
Edited by
Nigel C. Gibson
LIVING FANON
Copyright © Nigel C. Gibson, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a
division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and
representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe
and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11496–8 (hc)
ISBN: 978–0–230–11497–5 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Living Fanon :
global perspectives / edited by Nigel C. Gibson.
p. cm.—(Contemporary black history)
ISBN 978–0–230–11496–8 (hardback : perm paper) ISBN 978–0–230–11497–5 (perm paper)
1. Fanon, Frantz, 1925–1961. 2. Fanon, Frantz, 1925–1961—Political and social views. I. Gibson,
Nigel.
CT2628.F35L58 2011
961—dc22
2011009436
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Living Fanon?
Nigel C. Gibson
One Requiem on a Life Well Lived: In Memory of Fanon

Lewis R. Gordon
Two Frantz Fanon and Abane Ramdane: Brief Encounter in the Algerian
Revolution
Beläid Abane
Three Fanon and the Possibility of Postcolonial Critical

Ato Sekyi-Otu
Four Notes from the Underground, Fanon, Africa, and the Poetics of the
Real
Miguel Mellino
Five Reflections on Fanon and

Douglas Ficek
Six The Great White Error and the Great Black Mirage: Frantz Fanon’s
Critical Philosophy of Race
Robert Bernasconi
Seven The Times and Spaces of (De-)Colonization: Fanon’s
Countercolonialism, Then and Now
Stefan Kipfer
Eight Rupture and New Beginning in Fanon: Elements for a Genealogy of
Postcolonial Critique
Matthieu Renault
Nine Fanon and the Biopolitics of Torture: Contextualizing Psychological

Practices as Tools of War
Lou Turner
Ten Fanon, Fifty Years Later: Resisting the Air of Our Present Time

Alice Cherki
Eleven Fanon and the Women of the Colonies against the White Man’s
Burden
Seloua Luste Boulbina
Twelve The Emergence of the Subject in Politics: Some Reflections on the
Algerian Situation and on the Work of Frantz Fanon
Karima Lazali
Thirteen Wretchedness Grant Farred
Fourteen Fanon and the Land Question in (Post)Apartheid South Africa

Mabogo Percy More
Fifteen The Nation and Its Politics: Fanon, Emancipatory Nationalism, and
Political Sequences
Michael Neocosmos
Sixteen Of Force, Power, and Will: Rousseau and Fanon on Democratic
Legitimacy
Jane Anna Gordon
Seventeen Fanon and Political Will Peter Hallward
Eighteen Fidelity to Fanon Richard Pithouse
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
he idea of this book was born on a walk on Frantz Fanon Boulevard in
TAlgiers with Matthieu Renault in 2009 during the second Pan-African
Culture festival. Matthieu’s enthusiasm, advice, and help with translations has
been invaluable. This collection could not have been completed without the
generosity of the translators, Anthony Reed, Axelle Karera, Izzy Hollis, Marlène
Élias and Michael Stanish, nor without Laura Tetreault’s yeowoman copyediting
and brilliant indexing.
Any edited book is a collective endeavor and this book really depended on
the patience, good humor, and commitment of all the contributors. I also want to
mention two of the original contributors whose papers couldn’t be published in
the volume, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Jacques Depelchin. Nelson’s
“Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences” was published in
the C.L.R. James Journal (Volume 15:2009) and Jacques’ “Humanity Is
Expecting More from Us: The Militant Life of Two Healers: Fanon and Césaire”
was presented at the eighth Seminar of Francophonie at Universidade Estadual
de Feira de Santana-Bahia, December 2010.
Introduction
Living Fanon?
Nigel C. Gibson
A picture from Rome, 1959,
eyes intently scrutinizing a report Your face
close to the text
still the intensity of youth But for a few weeks
you lost your sight
You have no time for coffee house revolutionaries or those who stockpile their mental
resources
you said to Sartre,
red eyed, at the small of the small hours, while assassins waited at your hospital bed
But Lumumba should have known better, you insisted The enemy never retreats with
sincerity The enemy was also within
When they came for Abane
You chose to mourn
and keep those dark secrets to yourself
Were you not also gambling with your life on a trip through Mali?
But then you had no time
for those who hoard life
A jeep ride to the Southern front The drama unfolded rat-a-tat-tat Monrovia, Bamako,
Timbuktu
Dodging the secret service agents coming after you
The French combing the skies force you down onto endless impassable roads the
infinite details of deserts
and little sleep
Little sleep
You have little patience for sleep You
who still deny the illness
that thief in your blood
draining the revolution
I see you reading complicated histories Of ancient Africa and old empires Eyes close
to the page
Things are not so simple
Things are not so simple
and so little time in that “African Year”
to put vision into motion.
The new North African Syndrome: Revolution
To put Africa in motion … behind revolutionary principles … this was really the work I had chosen.
Frantz Fanon
ritical reflection on living, lived experience, and a lived experience that for
Cthe colonized could be summed up as a “living death” is essential to
understanding Fanon’s thought, his humanism, and his revolutionary
commitment. And Living Fanon expresses the multifaceted and contradictory
dimensions of life, a life that Fanon, in his final year, declared was dedicated to
an Africa “in motion behind revolutionary principles” (1967b:177). To catch the
motion and intensity of Fanon’s life, of a body which always questions
(1967a:232), and the dialectic of what he called his revolutionary principles is
one task of Living Fanon.
What better way to begin a celebration of a “living Fanon” than with a new
1
“North African syndrome”: Revolution—or at least a series of revolts that have
rocked regimes across North Africa and the Middle East. Fanon argues that
decolonization is a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order—
often against the odds—willed from the bottom up (1968:35). In periods of
revolution radical change becomes the “new normal” and the idea that
revolutionary change is impossible is simply the rantings and ravings of the
conservatives and reactionaries of the ancient regime. Creating Tahrir Squares
across national boundaries, the pan-Arabian revolts have opened up political
space. Social media has become concretely related to social transformation, and
the retaking of public space as the idea of the “right to the city” has become less
about visiting rights than a collective project of social transformation. Masses of
people, standing up to so much violence—from military and secret police to
torture and brutality—have made concrete Fanon’s Marxist opinion that people
change as they change the world: “They were scared. They are no longer
scared,” many argued, from Tunisia to Syria and from Egypt to Yemen,
wondering why it had taken so long. “When we stopped being afraid we knew
we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government.
2
This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.” Fanon insists
that the mental liberation and the radical change in consciousness that
accompany revolution begin with the “revolution in our minds,” questioning