What is Fanonism?

Answer 1

A term for the anti-colonial

liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Fanon's work in Algeria led him

to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement

and to publish a number of foundational works on racism

and colonialism. These include Black Skin, White Masks (1952,

translated 1968), a study of the psychology of racism and colonial

domination. Just before his death he published The Wretched

of the Earth (1961), a broader study of how anti-colonial sentiment

might address the task of decolonization. In these texts

Fanon brought together the insights he derived from his clinical

study of the effects of colonial domination on the psyche of the

colonized and his Marxist-derived analysis of social and economic

control. From this conjuction he developed his idea of a

comprador class, or élite, who exchanged roles with the white

colonial dominating class without engaging in any radical restructuring

of society. The black skin of these compradors was

'masked' by their complicity with the values of the white colonial

powers. Fanon argued that the native intelligentsia must

radically restructure the society on the firm foundation of the

people and their values.

However, Fanon, like other early National Liberationist

figures such as the Trinidadian C.L.R. James and the Cape

Verdean Amilcar Cabral, did not advocate a naive view of the

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pre-colonial. Fanon's nationalism was always what Edward Said

in Culture and Imperialism has defined as 'critical nationalism',

that is, formed in an awareness that pre-colonial societies were

never simple or homogeneous and that they contained socially

prejudicial class and gender formations that stood in need of

reform by a radical force. As Said has noted '[Fanon's] notion

was that unless national consciousness at its moment of success

was somehow changed into social consciousness, the future

would not hold liberation but an extension of imperialism' (1993:

323). For Fanon, the task of the national liberator, often drawn as

he himself was from a colonially educated élite, was to 'join the

people in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving

a shape to . . . which will be the signal for everything to be called

into question' (1952: 168) (see cultural diversity/cultural

difference).

Although Fanon is sometimes recruited to the banner of a

naive form of nativism, he took a more complicated view of

tradition and the pre-colonial as well as of its role in the

construction of the modern post-colonial state. Fanon, of course,

recognized and gave a powerful voice to the fact that for the

new national leaders 'the passionate search for a national culture

which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate reason

in the anxiety shared by many indigenous intellectuals to shrink

away from that western culture in which they all risk being

swamped' and to 'renew contact once more with the oldest and

most pre-colonial springs of their people' (1961: 153-4). But he

also recognized the danger that such pasts could be easily

mythologized and used to create the new élite power groups,

masquerading as the liberators of whom he had warned.

A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract

populism that believes it can discover the people's true

nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous

actions, that is to say actions which are less and less

attached to the ever present reality of the people. A

national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a

people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and

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praise the action through which that people has created

itself and keeps itself in existence.

(1961: 154-5)

Throughout his historical analysis, Fanon never lost sight of

the importance of the subjective consciousness and its role in

creating the possibilities for the hegemonic control of the

colonized subject, and of the neo-colonial society that followed

political independence. In studies such as 'The Fact of

Blackness' (1952) he addressed the importance of the visible

signs of racial difference in constructing a discourse of prejudice,

and the powerful and defining psychological effects of this on

the self-construction of black peoples. Much of Fanon's work

gives definition to the radical attempt to oppose this in the

discourses of the black consciousness movement that emerged

in America and Britain in the 1960s and which drew much of its

inspiration from Fanon's work. Although it might be argued that

later theorists such as Amilcar Cabral presented a more effective

political programme for implementing the radical transformation

of the native colonial intelligentsia in what Cabral called, in a

memorable phrase, 'a veritable forced march along the road to

cultural progress'(Cabral 1969), it was in the interweaving of the

specific and personal with the general and social that Fanon's

distinctive and profoundly influential contribution was made.