Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, one of its chief goals is the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent. Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of blacks and non-European others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of humans to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.”[6] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[7]

In his writings, Fanon also highlighted the damage inflicted upon humankind as the result of colonizing practices. Like Césaire, Fanon was convinced that when humans, through repeated acts of self-deception, eventually habituate themselves to treat other humans as animals and objects, they perform a violence on themselves that has a tendency to produce ripple effects throughout the entire social body, including the “white” part of the body politic.[8]

However, as Rabaka observes, although “Negritude […] was the very foundation upon which Frantz Fanon developed his discourse on decolonization,” from the beginning “Fanon was not an uncritical disciple of Cesairean Negritude.”[3] Fanon’s appreciation of the movement was not without misgivings and sharp criticisms. For example, through the influence of his brother, Joby, came to see Césaire’s “cultural nationalism” as promoting a “vanguardism and top-down” approach that Fanon would later attack in his book, The Wretched of the Earth.[4] Likewise, although reluctantly, Fanon concluded that some (but not all) aspects of Sartre’s critique were correct.[5] As Memmi explains, Sartre had argued that Negritude a mere weak phase in the black emancipatory struggle; consequently, Négritude is reduced to mere negativity.[6] Fanon agrees that Négritude is a response to the violence of colonization; however, he does not agree that Négritude is mere negativity. Consequently, I find Memmi’s criticisms of Fanon overly severe and driven too much by his particular psychological reading of Fanon’s failure to return to his West Indian roots. On my interpretation, Fanon’s relation to the Négritude movement and his acceptance in part of Sartre’s critique is ambivalent and more multilayered than Memmi is willing to grant.[7] On the one hand, Fanon chides Sartre’s view of Négritude for having forgotten that “the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man.”[8] On the other hand, Fanon’s agreement with Sartre’s assessment that Négritude was a phase through which one must pass rather than abide, might be interpreted as something akin to akin to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism.”[9] According to Spivak’s account, the subjugated group, in order to move beyond binaries such as colonized/colonizer, develops an essentialist identity to promote group pride and unity, to advance and achieve specific, socio-political goals, and to foster healing. This stage thus has a decidedly therapeutic function; once its purposes are accomplished, it (qua essentialist narrative, not qua positive social identity narrative) is altered and expanded in order to address new historical contexts and conflicts; hence the denomination, strategic essentialism. In other words, Fanon can reject essentialzed notions of blackness and still affirm the crucial aspects of Césairean Négritude—the development and continued fostering of a positive, black, social identity, a non-repetitive “return” to and ongoing reappropriation of African values, and a revolutionary call to decolonization and a historically attuned humanism.

Notes

Césairean Négritude expressed through his powerful prose and his distinctively black surrealist poetry provided a way for the oppressed to transgress the boundaries of a white world with into a “violent affirmation” of black identity. Thus, Negritude serves both a socio-political critical function and a productive, creative function enabling the decolonization process to reach not only society in general but also, to sound a Du Boisian note, the very souls of black folks. With these goals in mind, Fanon too, following in Césaire’s footsteps, advocates a “critical return to the precolonial history and culture of the colonized nation, a radical rediscovery of the precolonial history and culture of the colonized people”;[2] however, this Césairean rediscovery of or return to the precolonial past must not be understood as a quest for some paradisiacal, unsoiled, utopian originary moment, but rather as a critical engagement with the African tradition in order to bring its past to bear upon the present emancipatory struggles.[3]

As was mentioned earlier, this notion of “return” is one of the most important, yet misunderstood aspects of Césaire’s thought.  For Césaire, the process of decolonization requires a recovery of a pre-colonial African past. The colonized must strip away the layers of white mythology, which decade after decade  taught them to be ashamed of their history and culture, while forcing them to embrace white European values. Thus, in order to go forward and to carve out a new present and future, the colonized must return to their ancestral roots “to learn the lessons of Africa’s tragedies and triumphs.”[4] Here it is important to stress that this Césairean return is not a call to a romanticized, infallible Africa that must somehow be recreated in the present.  Rather, it is a call to rediscover African values—values emphasizing a communal existence and a sharing of goods with one another rather than individualistic, consumer, and market-driven socio-political and economic structures. Thus, Césaire encouraged a return to Africa’s past with the aim of a non-repetitive translation into contemporary society of those socio-political principles, cultural values, and ancestral practices lacking in Western “enlightened civilization.”

but we thought that Africa could make a contribution to Europe. It was also an affirmation of our solidarity. That’s the way it was: I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. […] And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Matinicians and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me.[2]

As part of his aim to establish a positive black identity, Césaire drew from various elements of his French educational training and created something new, something bearing the distinctive marks of the African spirit. For example, Césaire in no way denied the French influences shaping his work. “Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me.”[3] Even so, Césaire states emphatically that while elements of the French literary tradition function for him as a “point of departure,” his goal has always been “to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage.”[4] Here one might draw an analogy between Négritude’s relation to French culture and literature and the relation between African American jazz and European classical music. That is, just as African American musicians infused European musical practices with their own distinctive African-inspired rhythms, phrasings, and improvisatory emphases creating a new and unquestionably African-American music, Césaire, Senghor, and others took elements of the French intellectual traditional and reharmonized them to sound with a decisive African tonal center. “French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character.”[5]

With this new language as his weapon, Césaire begins his Discourse on Colonialism with a triple staccato firing of single sentence paragraphs, each carefully crafted to condemn Europe’s so-called civilizing mission.[6] Listen to Cesaire’s diagnosis of a “decadent,” “stricken” [atteinte], “dying” Western civilization[7]—a Europe revealed as “morally [and] spiritually indefensible.”[8]

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.[9]

Of course the culprit in view is European civilization, “Western civilization,” whose Enlightened and progressive vision has proved “incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”[10]

Unlike the white Marxists, including Sartre, Césaire and the Négritude writers could not separate the class problem from the race problem, nor did they overlook the connection between capitalism and colonialism. As Rabaka observes, “Césaire understands European civilization to rest on the colonization of non-Europeans, their lives, labor and lands. His Negritude, like Du Bois and James’s discourse, was a revolutionary humanist enterprise”,[11] attuned to the sufferings of all those exploited by the machinery of colonialism and slavery.  Although appreciative of Marx, the Negritude movement (and Fanon as well) sought to expand and revise Marxist teachings not only to include but to give top priority to race-based economic exploitation.[12]As Césaire puts it, the Communists “acted like abstract Communists” in their failure to address the “Negro problem.”[13] In contrast, the colonized and enslaved, given their concrete experience of racialized existence past and present, do not have the option to overlook the race question; thus, concludes Césaire, Négritude has a crucial role to play in the ongoing reformation of Marxism. “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.”[14]

Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, it has one of its chief goals the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent.  Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of black others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of human others to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.“[15] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[16]

The well-known Martinician surrealist poet, Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), first coined the term “Négritude” in 1939 in his work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and is, along with Léopold Sedar Senghor, one of the founders of Négritude.[2] As one is made aware rather quickly when engaging the literature, it is perhaps better to speak of Négritude movements or variations on Négritude themes. Reiland Rabaka, for example, distinguishes between Sartrean Négritude, Césairean Négritude, and Senghorian Négritude.[3] Over against Sartre’s claims, Senghor emphasizes the positive value of Négritude in the ongoing process of African identity formation. As Rebaka observes, “Negritude, for Senghor, was […] an affirmation of African humanity that was perpetually open to revision and redefinition.”[4] Senghor, very much like Fanon, sought to present a more genuine humanism rather than the pseudo-(racist)-humanism of Europe. That is, Senghor believed that all cultures have something distinctive and important to contribute to humankind and thus promoted, as Rabaka notes, “cultural borrowing” (Senghor’s term).[5] However, Senghor is clear that whatever Négritude might appropriate from other cultures, including European culture, would be put to use to strengthen its own (African) tradition and values. Here the idea is to uphold the uniqueness of each culture or contributing group while respecting the values of others and seeking together to better humankind. Moreover, and here again we find common ground between Senghor and Fanon, Senghor’s version of Négritude in a more authentic humanistic key “breaks free from Sartre’s Hegelian dialectical progression and Manichean thinking, and openly acknowledges that ‘the’ world, as it actually exists, is not merely a series of binary oppositions between blacks and whites, or Africans and Europeans.”[6] Rather, the world, for Fanon and Senghor, consists of multiple choruses and rhythmic movements whose distinctive qualities have the potential to create a symphony—a sounding together; when each part allows the other to be heard, difference can translate into consonant harmony as the various parts contribute toward common goals advancing human flourishing. However, intolerable dissonance sounds when one part seeks to reduce all others to its own voice, a unison voice allowing no variation, improvisation, or syncopation.[7]

As Rabaka explains, Césaire’s prose-poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, was viewed by Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and numerous others as a revolutionary text.[8] During Césaire’s day, educated blacks in the West Indies did everything they could, given their oppressive colonial situation and French education, to deny their blackness; they saw themselves as white and identified with the French elite.  Thus, Césaire’s poem, calling blacks back, not only to their “Caribbean history and culture,” but to their “pre-colonial and anti-colonial indigenous, continental and diasporan African history and culture” scandalized both blacks and whites. In addition to his notion of “Négritude,” the second most important term in Césaire’s poem, Notebook, is his notion of “return.” Gaining a better understanding of these two conceptions will enable us to see the deconstructive as well as constructive aims of his project.

In an interview with René Depestre found at the end of Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire describes Négritude as “a resistance to the [French] politics of assimilation”;[9] it was the creation of a third way, a way beyond the false dichotomy of a civilized European world and a barbarian African world. For Césaire and others, the struggle for a positive African identity was a “struggle against alienation,” and “[t]hat struggle gave birth to Negritude.”[10] In light of the degrading, demeaning constructions of blackness internalized by Antilleans, Césaire recognized the need both to deracinate the negative Eurocentric depictions that the colonized had come to accept, and to recapture and reinvigorate the term nègre with positive, life-affirming, and culturally significant connotations. As Césaire explains, Antilleans had come to associate shame with the term nègre; consequently, they sought “all sorts of euphemism for Negro; […] That’s when we adopted the term nègre, as a term of defiance. […] There was in us a defiant will, and we found a violent affirmation in the words nègre, and negritude.”[11] Because blacks had been forced to live a white world, as Césaire puts it, in a “atmosphere of rejection,” they came to see themselves as inferior.[12] As a result, Césaire was convinced that blacks must create a new identity for themselves, an identity affirming the concrete reality and beauty of phenotypic differences: black skin must not be seen as a sign of negativity, ugliness, evil, and so forth. Along the same lines, black history must be reconceived, or rather discovered through black eyes and reinterpreted to the world, as “a history that contains certain cultural elements of great value.”[13] In short, Césaire states, “we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect, and that this heritage was not relegated to the past, that its values were values that could still make an important contribution to the world.”[14]

Clearly, Foucault believes in and prefers “these partial transformations” noted in the previous paragraph; however, he is suspicious of global “programs for a new man,” which have been used by various groups to exploit, manipulate, and even attempt to eradicate those portrayed as foreign, other, or enemy. In light of these statements, we may conclude that it is humanism as an ideology, as a grand over-arching metanarrative that Foucault disavows passionately. His comments do not suggest a complete rejection of the concerns for the marginalized and oppressed with which humanism is commonly associated. Nor does his critical philosophical attitude downplay the importance of freedom. His project, in fact, requires free beings with rational capacities. “I shall characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”[2] Yet, Foucault, in contrast to Fanon, is reticent to accept the idea of human rights as necessarily linked to some kind of universal, transcultural  human nature.  For Fanon, who presupposes a shared nature common to all humans irrespective of “race,” ethnicity, gender, and so forth, it follows that all humans possess certain rights which should never be violated. For example, because human begins are free agents in a way different from all other animals, they ought not be treated as things. To do so is to violate one of their fundamental rights qua human beings.  Foucault, as I have argued, assumes a minimalist metaphysical position in that his account takes for granted that humans possess rational and volitional capacities. However, as I read Foucault, even if he were to make explicit his minimal metaphysical commitments, he would not want to claim that certain fundamental rights follow naturally or necessarily from these rational and volitional structures. Rather, I imagine that he would claim that whatever rights appear in our archaeological and genealogical analyses of an historical episteme are specific to the particular socio-political institutions and cultural practices of that episteme. If this is correct, then it sounds a significant philosophical dissonance between these two thinkers; interestingly, this dissonance. Rather than ending on a dissonant note (as the two thinkers do have a great deal in common), one might point out that both Foucault and Fanon are critical of “Man,” that is, “Man” as sovereign subject and originator of all meaning.  Given this critical stance, a harmonization of the two thinkers’ position might translate as follows: the particular socio-historical “Man” in needed of de-throning just may turn out to be equivalent to the white, male, European imperialist imposed qua norm.  If so, then that particular subject construction is indeed worth putting to rest.

Returning to Fanon, his vision throughout his works was underwritten by a call to human solidarity, a challenge to both blacks and whites and to all human beings to “move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born.”^[3] Uninterested in debates as to which “race” was superior and which inferior, Fanon asks, “[w]hy not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?”[4] Like Foucault, Fanon refused to accept contingent, historically-formed narratives as universal and necessary truths.  Nor was Fanon content to succumb to the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment. Note, for example, the ambivalence in his largely negative description of Europe’s mixed contributions to human history:

The Third World must start over a new history of man which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of community, the fracture, the stratification and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation and, above all, the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off.[5]

Rather, Fanon sought to transform and re-form a truly universal humanism appreciative of all cultures, embracing the “reciprocal relativism” of each for the purpose of mutual enrichment and genuine fraternité[6]—humanism as a symphony composed of many cultural voices, each of which has a distinctive part contributing to the beauty of the whole (ongoing) composition. Fanon’s historically-sensitive humanism neither turns a deaf ear to the cries of lives lost to the colonial project, nor chases frantically after “European achievements,” “increased productivity,” or a nostalgic return to nature.[7] Fanon’s quest began and concluded with a call to “reexamine the question of man,” “to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”[8]

Notes

[1] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 316.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 238.  Another passage highlighting this same begrudging acknowledgment of positive aspects of Europe is the following:  “[a]ll the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time or another in European thought. But the Europeans did not act on the mission that was designated them” (ibid., 237). Fanon, of course, continued to draw upon (not uncritically) the insights of Sartre, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and numerous other European thinkers.  See also, Robert Young, Postcolonialism, 274–83, esp. 276.  Differentiating Fanon from other Anglophone and Francophone Marxists, Young writes: “He [Fanon] always remained intellectually centered in Paris, and never resisted European thought as such, as much as he resisted European domination of the colonial world. A product of the western-educated elite, Fanon used the resources of western thought against itself” (276).

[6] Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 44.  In the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon expresses similar sentiments: “we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times. It is not a question of stringing the caravan out where groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front, and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less and talk to each other less and less. […] if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers” (238, 239).

[7] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 237, 238.

[8] Ibid., 237, 236. As Young emphasizes, we must avoid flattening Fanon’s complex, multilayered view of Europe, in particular the European intellectual tradition. Referencing Fanon’s closing remarks in The Wretched of the Earth issuing a call to leave Europe behind, Young reminds us that “Fanon’s own theoretical formulations remain European in orientation, above all towards Sartre,” who “was one of the very few European philosophers and intellectuals who made the issue of colonialism central to his work” (Postcolonialism, 281).

We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; […] they will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.[4]

Here Foucault admits that those living post-Enlightenment are nonetheless shaped by the effects of that socio-political, cultural, philosophical, and institutional event. In other words, he acknowledges that an event from a past episteme (the Classical episteme of the 17^th and 18^th centuries) can and does shape the subjects of a subsequent episteme (the Modern episteme of the 19^th and 20^th centuries). The “determinism” he mentions is of course historical, contingent, and thus mutable. Our task as free (and I would add, rational) beings then becomes to investigate, analyze, and expose those limits that have been presented and accepted as necessary. Fanon wholeheartedly agrees.

Foucault then criticizes what he views as a conflation of the (European) Enlightenment-event and (European versions of) humanism. The latter, humanism, he characterizes as a “set of themes” emerging periodically, “over time, in European societies” and “always tied to value judgments.”[5] Foucault observes that humanism as a concept is too vague, having multiple contents in different periods and having been employed and claimed by a wide range of groups—for example, Christians, Marxists, and Stalinists alike have carried programs of social “reform” under the banner of humanism. Yet, he adds, “[f]rom this, we must not conclude that everything which has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected, but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection.”[6] Though the first part of Foucault’s statement is itself vague, we may plausibly interpret it to mean that not everything characteristically or commonly associated with humanism—fighting for workers’ rights, prisoners’ rights, patients’ rights, upholding the dignity of human beings, speaking out against various forms of socio-political and economic exploitation of humans, and so forth—ought to be neglected or jettisoned. Such an interpretation coincides with Foucault’s own leanings as manifest in his writings on the prison and medical industries.

For Foucault to criticize the term “humanism” simply because its meaning changes over time seems completely inconsistent with his general theoretical commitments. Is it not the case that “madness,” “criminal,” and countless other concepts change in relation to their historical context (episteme), institutional “affiliation,” and function within differing discursive communities? Assuming an affirmative answer, I contend that what Foucault takes issue with is the ever-changing notion of humanism functioning “as an axis for reflection.”[7] A few pages later, for example, he enumerates specifically the three axes “whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics.”[8] No doubt, knowledge, power, and ethics are also context-specific and manifest different meanings in different discursive disciplines and epistemai. Yet, there is something more basic about these concepts structurally speaking. That is, whatever they mean in a particular historical period, they occupy a fundamental place in each episteme and exert a wide-reaching influence over the body politic, shaping who we are individually and collectively. These three axes play a central role in Foucault’s “historical ontology of ourselves,” which, as he maintains, must answer the following questions: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?”[9]

None of the above is meant to suggest that Foucault embraces openly a traditional humanism entailing the acceptance of some shared, transhistorical, transcultural quality, qualities, or essence. Because Foucault holds that the Enlightenment-event brought with it—even as it simultaneously failed in some ways to take advantage and develop this insight—an awareness of its own “historical consciousness,”[10]he is suspicious of humanisms that staticize some (preferred) quality or qualities of human beings and then refuse any philosophical (or other) interrogation of those petrified, alleged essences.

Foucault’s advocacy for a critical ethos via an historical ontology of ourselves takes its cue from Kant and the latter’s interest in exploring our limits; however, Foucault’s concern is not with discerning what epistemological limits we must take care not to exceed. Rather, his concern with limits has to do with analyzing—and hence adopting an on-going, permanent ethos of interrogation—what “is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory” to see whether these alleged immovable and transhistorical givens (i.e. limitations) are perhaps “singular, contingent, and the products of arbitrary constraints.”[11] In sum, Foucault seeks “to transform the [Kantian] critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over [franchissement].”[12]

Foucault’s critical project, as he himself explains, is not transcendental in the Kantian sense but thoroughly historical, genealogical, and archaeological. Elaborating how his methodological approaches, as well as how his aims differ from Kant’s, Foucault states that his version of criticism does not seek to make “metaphysics possible” or to make metaphysics a science; rather, it involves an historical analysis of “the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.”[13]

Foucault then highlights his amended archaeology, or what I described previously as his expanded archaeology, which, as he explains, does “not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge [connaissance] or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events.”[14] Here he underscores the historical, contextualized character of his investigations, which is also to admit that knowledge unearthed via his expanded archaeology is partial, historically-restricted, and thus always open to revision. From the many discursive events it analyzes, archaeology proceeds synchronically, extracting historical conditioning rules (historical a prioris), to which genealogy operating diachronically provides a fitting counterpart. Genealogy’s task—at least one of them—is to retrace the various contingencies that have shaped us in order to open up a new space for self-(re)formation or constituting ourselves anew. In sum, Foucault’s critical philosophical ethos “[seeks] to give a new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”[15] Once again, we find significant overlaps in Foucault and Fanon, namely, both are concerned with unmasking the historical, contingent, and socio-political character of subject-formation, which is all too often disguised as necessary and universal.

Notes

[1] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 312.

[2] Ibid., 312.

[3] Ibid., 313.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 314.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 318.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 314.

[11] Ibid., 315.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 316.

Nonetheless, might it be possible and worthwhile to recover certain humanistic themes both ancient and modern, improvising and reharmonizing them in a more historically-attuned multi-key composition whose final movement continues to be written? Once again, it is helpful to bring Fanon and Foucault into conversation. In the closing section of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon underscores the need for the colonized subject to be future-oriented and to actively reject the white mythos while creatively carving out a new present. For Fanon, given his Algerian context, this included promoting physical violence and outright war if need be in order to pave the way for a new humanism in which no man or woman would be subjected to an enslaved or colonized existence.[2] Yet, his advocacy for violence was never glorification of violence;[3] rather, it was understood as analogous to the violence that must be performed in surgery in order to remove or at least halt the spreading of disease so that healing may begin.[4] In other words, because of the entrenched, systemic, oppressive character of colonialism in which the world of the colonized is transformed into a normalized lawless space, Fanon believed the decolonization phase could only be accomplished through violence, that is, through an armed struggle for liberation.[5] Commenting on the instrumental role of violence in Fanon’s thought, Ahluwalia writes, “[c]olonialism forces violence to become a cleansing agent which has the cathartic effect of creating a new identity both at the individual and collective levels.”[6] Even if one ultimately remains committed to non-violent forms of revolution, one must at least make every effort to grasp, or better, to feel in some way the bloody history of Algeria where men, women, and children were massacred en masse repeatedly for the sake of Europe’s “mission.”[7] Fanon, no doubt, felt that the burden of that history, and its carnage convinced him that violence—at least with respect to Algeria’s part in the unfolding drama—was the required passageway through which the colonized must travel in order “[f]or Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, [… to] make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”[8]

Notes

[1] Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 62.

[2] As Fanon puts it, “I was committed to myself and my fellow man, to fight with all my life and all my strength so that never again would people be enslaved on this earth” (Black Skin, White Masks, 202).

[3] Contra claims by critics such as the notable Hannah Arendt that Fanon makes violence an end in itself, David Macey contends that “[t]he violence Fanon evokes is instrumental and he never dwells or gloats on its effects. […] The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence” (Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 475). For a similar argument against Arendt’s conclusion, see also, Young, Postcolonialism, 281.

[4] Ahluwalia develops this analogy between colonialism and disease, relating it to Fanon’s medical training and his strategy for decolonization.  See, for example, Out of Africa, 63–6.

[5] As Fanon’s writings attest, the Algerian struggle for liberation was no doubt his concrete working paradigm. See also, Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, esp. the chapter entitled, “The Wretched of the Earth.” Given the atrocities committed against the Algerian people, Macey draws attention to the appropriateness of Francis Jeason’s book title, L’Algérie hors la loi (ibid., 476).

[6] Ibid., 64.

[7] Macey catalogues several vivid examples of the long history of violence carried out by the French on the Algerian people. In 1845, for instance, there were three occasions in which civilians (including children) and freedom fighters were driven into caves. The French troops then lit large fires in the entranceways, causing the people inside to die from “asphyxiation and smoke inhalation” (Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 476).

[8] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 239.