Fanon's Dialectic of Experience

, FANON'S DIALECTIC OF EXPERIENCE , FANON'S DIALECTIC , 0F , EXPERIENCE , ATO SEKYI-OTU Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1996 Copyright © I996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon's dialectic of experience / Ato Sekyi-Otu. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-674-29439-4 (cloth: alk. paper).-IsBN 0-674-29440-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Fanon, Frantz, I925-I96I-Contributions in social sciences. I. Title. H59·F28s45 I996 300-dc20 For Mansa With deepest .love and immeasurable gratitude ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted in so many ways to several people for the gestation and completion of this book. I must first express my gratitude to Alkis Kontos for insisting a long time ago that I write on Fanon, and for years of intellectual stimulation and unflinching friendship through joyful and tragic times. Alkis, firstling of the common humanity Fanon envisioned, thank you. I would also like to thank other friends and colleagues who, through a judicious admixture of coercive flattery, tough love, and gentle censure, prodded me to keep on keeping on, especially at those moments when the mind was willing but the spirit flagged: Lorraine Markotic, Herb Addo, Fred Case, Himani Bannerji, Patrick Taylor, Althea Prince, Paget Henry, Anani Dzidzienyo, loan Davies, Modupe Olaogun, Mwikali Kieti, and James Oscar, Jr.-particularly the last named, for sharing with me his sensitivity to Fanon's dramaturgical vocabulary. Thanks are also due to my students at York University, especially successive members of my graduate Social and Political Thought seminar "Marxism and Political Discourse," with whom I first dis- viii"''''''''''''' ACKNOWLEDGMENTS cussed my rethinking of Fanon's project. I am grateful to York University for a sabbatical leave in the 1992-93 academic year which permitted me to write the book. I wish to thank Michelle van Beusekom for her diligent preparation of the manuscript. Many thanks to Lindsay Waters for his prompt attention to my manuscript and Maria Ascher for her superb editorial work. To my children, Efua, Ato, Kurankye, and Kobina, I am enor mously grateful for their loving support and especially for under standing the perverse manner in which I have contrived to rearrange the natural rhythms of sleep, work, and living. As for my wife and best friend, Mansa, I think she probably knows why this book is dedicated to her. CONTENTS Abbreviations for Works by Frantz Fanon x Prologue I 1 REREADING FANON IO Postindependence Hermeneutics IO Narrative as Dialectic 24 Dialectic as Politics 3I 2 IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE 47 History as Antidialectic 47 Aristotle as Witness 55 Antidialectic as Space 72 Struggles over the "Dividing Line" 87 The Dividing Line as the "Divided Line"? 99 3 BEWILDERING ENLIGHTENMENT IOI Narrative, Catastasis, Dialectic I 0 I "The Weary Road toward Rational Knowledge" III Baneful Inconsequence? The Life History of the "National Bourgeoisie" I23 4 POLITICAL JUDGMENT I57 The Ambiguity of Exclusion Reprieve of Prodigal Reason Allegories of Appropriation Woman the Measure 2II Epilogue: The Record and the Vision 23 6 Notes 243 Index 269 ABBREVIATIONS FOR WORKS BY FRANTZ FANON AR Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Translation of RA. BS Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Translation of PN. DC A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Translation of SR. DT Les Damnes de la terre. Paris: Fran~ois Maspero, 1968. PN Peau noire, masques blanes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952. RA Pour la revolution afrieaine: Eerits Politiques. Paris: Fran~ois Maspero, 1969. SR Sociologie d~une revolution. Paris: Franc;ois Maspero, 1968. WE The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Translation of DT. Note: Translations that I have revised are marked "RT." " FANON'S DIALECTIC OF EXPERIENCE PROLOGUE The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language. -TONI MORRISON, Playing in the Dark Is it perhaps in the nature of intellectual artifacts to defy in the rhythms of their fame and demise all semblance of sequential order? In the decade or so immediately following the untimely death of Frantz Fanon in 1961, writers produced a steady stream of commen taries on his life and work-journalistic assessments, scholarly pa pers, and full-length books. Irene Gendzier's Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, published in 1973, may conveniently be taken as marking the end of this first prolific wave of Fanon studies. Then, in the remainder of the 1970s, came a period of relative neglect and intermittent attention. Some doctoral dissertations apart, Emmanuel Hansen's Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (1977) stands out as the major published work on Fanon in that period. A veritable renaissance of Fanon studies occurred in the 1980s. Someday a historical sociology of knowledge will perhaps shed some light on the reasons for this remarkable revival. Among its notable products are: L. Adele Jinadu, Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution (1980, 1986); Jock McCulloch, Black Soul, White Arti fact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (1983); Hussein 2 "'" PROLOGUE Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (19 85); and Patrick Taylor, The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture and Politics (19 89). Although Taylor's book is not exclusively devoted to Fanon, it identifies Fanon's texts as a paradigmatic instance of what he calls "liberating narrative"-as distinct from "mythical narrative"-in Afro-Caribbean discourse. As exemplifications of this "liberating narrative," Taylor offers a sustained and compelling account of the philosophy of existence and conception of culture that informed Fanon's psychiatric practice and political project. The significance of that political project for contemporary postimperial history has been eloquently evoked by no less a witness of our times than Edward Said. In his magisterial Culture and Imperialism, Said salutes the "visionary and innovative quality of Fanon's final work [The Wretched of the Earth]" for "the remarkable subtlety with which he forcibly deforms imperialist culture and its nationalist antagonist in the process of going beyond both toward liberation."1 But it is to the collective enthusiasm of so-called colonial discourse theorists and postcolonial critics that we owe the current explosion of interest in Fanon. Headed since the mid-198os by Homi Bhabha and inspired by postmodernist visions of the auspicious impurity of being, these theorists and critics have discovered in Fanon a preco cious if sometimes perfidious ancestor. I applaud the tremendous contribution of Bhabha and kindred scholars to the Fanon renais sance. But although I am not unmindful of the preoccupations of these critics, I depart from their overwhelming concentration upon the significance of Fanon's work for understanding the psychody namics of otherness and marginality. I revisit Fanon's work as an African who, though trained, employed, and residing in the West, is exercised first and foremost by the disasters of the postindependence experience in Africa. I reread Fanon in light of that experience and the hopes and fears it inspires as South Africa-no doubt a unique society, yet an emblematic instance, in Fanon's eyes, of the colonial condition-reinvents itself: reinvents itself, with Nelson Mandela already delivering stern remonstrances, in ominously Pan-African fashion, against "the forces of anarchy and chaos," against all those benighted enough to think that injustice, despite or rather because of the official abrogation of apartheid, is alive and well; all those who are in consequence misguided enough to proclaim the revolution in permanence. In thus making contemporary African history the PROLOGUE "'" 3 impetus for my return to Fanon, I am attempting to redress an imbalance noted by Kenneth Mostern-namely, the almost exclusive concern of recent Fanon studies with the diaspora of the metropolis.2 Needless to say, my African-situationist reading of Fanon is by no means intended to promote a monopolistic back-to-the-motherland appropriation of his vision. Of course, Fanon belongs to the Carib bean; less restrictively, he belongs to what Paul Gilroy has called the "black Atlantic world";3 less restrictively still, he belongs to the world. Still, I am troubled by what seems to me to be a consequence of the geopolitical provenance and preoccupations of these current commentaries on Fanon. And this is their postmodernist commit ments. I believe that in the hands of colonial discourse theorists, such postmodernist commitments result in the evisceration of Fanon's texts: they excise the critical normative, yes, revolutionary humanist vision which informs his account of the colonial condition and its aftermath. I argue that the agnosticism of these postmodernist read ings, in common with some nationalist appropriations of Fanon, deprives us of weapons with which to confront some of the urgent questions of the postindependence world: questions of class, ethnic ity, and gender, of democracy and human rights, against assertions of cultural particularity and difference. I elicit from Fanon's texts a normative vision that enables us to confront these issues. Ironically, the implications of an African-situationist reading of Fanon are going to be anything but nationalist. But it is not only with respect to geopolitical orientation, thematic focus, and metapolitical commitments that I part company with the mainstream of the Fanon renaissance. I also want to raise anew the question of the formal character and epistemological status of Fanon's texts. For although there is a great deal Fanon's interpreters disagree on, they are virtually united in according utterances in his texts the unambiguous status of propositional statements and doc trines.

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