Name – Hinaba Sarvaiya
Roll No.: 09
Enrollment No.: 4069206420210032
Paper no: 203
Paper name: The Postcolonial Studies
Sem: 3 (Batch 2021- 2023)
Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
-Frantz Fanon's
Frantz Fanon:-
Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and political theory, and its influence across the global South has been wide, deep, and enduring. In his lifetime, he published two key original works: Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) in 1961. Collections of essays, A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution Algérienne 1959) and Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution Africaine), posthumously published in 1964, round out a portrait of a radical thinker in motion, moving from the Caribbean to Europe to North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa and transforming his thinking at each stop. The 2015 collection of his unpublished writings, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, will surely expand our understanding of the origins and intellectual context of Fanon’s thinking.
Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria, where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry at Bilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society. Fanon published in academic journals and revolutionary newspapers, translating his radical vision of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization for a variety of audiences and geographies, whether as a young academic in Paris, a member of the Algeria National Liberation Front (FLN), Ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, or revolutionary participant at conferences across Africa. Following a diagnosis and short battle with leukemia, Fanon was transported to Bethesda, Maryland (arranged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) for treatment and died at the National Institute for Health facility on December 6, 1961.
Let's discuss about Colonialism, Racism and Violence in The Wretched of the Earth:-
Colonialism, Racism, and Violence:-
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a critical look at colonialism, the practice of taking political control of another country with the intention of establishing a settlement and exploiting the people economically. Colonialism began in Europe around the 15th century, and it is still practiced today in some parts of the world. Fanon, a French West Indian from Martinique, a French colony located in the eastern Caribbean Sea, had a personal interest in colonialism, and his book focuses on the ways colonialism historically sought to oppress and subjugate much of the Third World through blatant racism and repeated violence. At the time Fanon wrote his book in 1961, many colonized nations were struggling for independence, and the damage of hundreds of years of racism and exploitation was acutely felt by many. The Wretched of the Earth serves as a sort of guidebook for understanding the colonized and their struggle, and in it, Fanon ultimately argues that colonialism, an inherently racist and violent practice, can only be overcome by using violence in return.
Fanon maintains that colonialism divides the world into light and dark—or in this case, black and white—in a process he refers to as Manichaeanism. Manichaeanism is a Persian religious practice from the 3rd century that is based on the basic conflict of light and dark, and, Fanon claims, it serves as the basis for the racist practice of colonialism. Since “the colonial world is a Manichaean world,” Fanon says, the colonized individual is seen as the “quintessence of evil” and is considered void of any morals or ethics. Manichaeanism assumes that light—the white settler—represents good, whereas dark—the black colonized individual—represents evil. To Fanon, colonialism is rooted in this basic racist belief. Based on the same Manichaean concept, the colonial world is likewise divided into the civilized and the savage. In keeping with the themes of light and dark, the white colonist is considered civilized, and the colonized is a savage. The colonized individual is “reduced to the state of an animal” and is referred to in “zoological terms.” Under the racist practice of colonialism, the colonized individual is completely dehumanized. According to Fanon, colonial countries are further divided into two separate “sectors”: the “colonist’s sector” and the “’native’ quarters.” The colonist’s sector is clean and well maintained; but the “native” quarters, which are crowded and neglected, are “disreputable place[s] inhabited by disreputable people.” At the very foundation of colonialism, Fanon thus argues, is a basic principle that seeks to separate and oppress people based on the color of their skin.
In addition to a system of racism, Fanon argues that colonialism is also a system of violence, which seeks to control and oppress the colonized through violent means. From the beginning, Fanon claims that the colonial situation “was colored by violence and their cohabitation—or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer—continued at the point of the bayonet and under canon fire.” Colonial control was taken by violence and is maintained in much the same way. The colonized world—which again is separated into the colonizer and the colonized—is divided by military barracks and police stations. In a colonized country, Fanon says, “the spokesperson for the colonizer and regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier.” The mere presence of the dividing border between the worlds maintains order through intimidation and the threat of violence. Fanon argues that for the colonized, “all he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity.” Thus, Fanon implies, there is no end to the violence of colonialism—it doesn’t stop once power is established. Rather, violence is a constant presence that is front and center in lives of all colonized individuals.
Fanon refers to the widespread violence in colonial countries as “atmospheric violence,” which he claims is perpetually “rippling under the skin.” To Fanon, this constant violence is proof that colonialism cannot be overcome through peaceful or passive means. The colonized masses, Fanon asserts, “intuitively believe that their liberation must be achieved and can only be achieved by force.” For the colonized, “violence is a cleansing force,” and it also rids them of the “inferiority complex” forced upon them by the racist ideology of colonialism. As a practice rooted in violence, Fanon thus argues that colonialism must be answered in kind.
Algeria:-
Fanon’s move to Algeria in 1953 marks an important turning point in his thought. He continues to write on anti-blackness in select essays and occasions, but Fanon’s shift is deep and meaningful. Whereas Black Skin, White Masks was concerned exclusively with the structure of an anti-black world and how that world bears on the body and psyche of the colonized, Fanon’s time in Algeria and later travels to sub-Saharan Africa broaden his analysis. Instead of a question of blackness, colonialism becomes for Fanon a larger, more general question of the oppressed in the global south. The Wretched of the Earth is the boldest and most important expression of this shift, but the time he spends analyzing Algeria on its own terms reveals Fanon’s increasing sensitivity to difference inside the colonial experience. Also, many of his most important writings in this period were published in French language newspapers across the continent of Africa, in particular the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) newspaper El Moudjahid (for which he served on the editorial board), which hosts some of his most interesting reflections. This shift in his thinking, as well as some of the later points of emphasis and theoretical transitions, bolster Ato Sekyi-Otu’s argument in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1997) that Fanon’s work ought to be read as a series of political experiences or stages in and at the basis of an unfolding of a long, complex system of thought.
Three essays are of particular significance in this period: “Algeria’s European Minority” (“La minorité européenne d’Algérie”), “Algeria Unveiled” (“L’algérie se dévoile”), and “The Algerian Family” (“La famille algérienne”).
Fanon’s reflections in “Algeria’s European Minority” offer an important and insightful example of applying the anti-colonial dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks. The key anti-colonial insight in that text was how to measure—the imperial function of whiteness in the Black psyche—structures the world. Liberation, in Black Skin, White Masks, looks a lot like displacing measure in the name of the questioning subject. Measure, here, means simply the ideal or standard according to which “the human” is evaluated. Fanon’s argument in Black Skin, White Masks is that “the human”, an idea that comes from the European tradition, is a fundamentally racial idea deployed as a tool of alienation for the colonized.
Violence in The Wretched of the Earth:-
Without question, the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) changed Fanon’s global profile as a thinker of anti-colonial struggle, revolutionary action, and post-colonial statecraft and imagination.
In many ways, Wretched is a fulfillment of the short, suggestive promissory notes on anti-colonial struggle found in the many essays, editorials, and letters written in the time following Black Skin, White Masks. Those occasional writings and major essays shift focus away from anti-Blackness as a core theme and toward a broader sense of the effects of colonialism on the psyche, cultural formation, and political organization. That shift in focus allows Fanon to think more broadly about the meaning and purpose of revolutionary struggle.
The opening chapter to Wretched is surely the most famous, in part because of the sheer power and provocation of its reflections, in part because it is the focus of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known Foreword. Fanon’s concern with violence is critical for understanding the trajectory of Wretched, which ambitiously moves from political agitation to cultural formation to postcolonial statecraft to global philosophical re-orientation. It all begins with violence.
Violence is important for Fanon as a precondition to liberation, something George Ciccariello-Maher in Decolonizing Dialectics (2017) links to a broader concern in Fanon with decolonizing methodology and revolutionary praxis. Violence as precondition operates in two directions: internal to the colony among the colonizers and external in the formative conflict between the colonized and the colonizer. Internal to the colony, Fanon breaks the colonized into three groups. First, there is the worker whose relationship to both the colonized and colonizer is organized around its capacity to work. This is a complicated relationship, one that is both a relation of dependency (material needs are supplied by the colonial system) and naturally revolutionary (exploited, yet also that upon which the colonizer depends). Second, there is the colonized intellectual, a compromised figure who plays a crucial role across the body of Wretched, whether in relation to cultural renewal or to political resistance. The colonized intellectual mediates the relation of the colonized for the colonizer, translating the terms of colonial life into the language, concepts, and thinkable politics of the colonial power. There is potential in the colonized intellectual, insofar as it is a figure whose epistemological roots cross with the life of the colonized masses, but any potential is compromised, if not outright obliterated by the role the intellectual plays: to aid and abet the colonizer. Third, there is the lumpen proletariat, a term borrowed from Karl Marx’s analysis of the dialectic’s remainder and translated into the conditions of colonialism. The colonial lumpen are disposable populations that provide nothing to the colonial system (displaced people, slum dwellers, subsistence farmers), and therefore, from the outside, remain the greatest threat to the system. In a certain sense, this is a formalization of Fanon’s earlier reflections on the role of the fellah in colonial Algeria—the group lying outside the system of urban colonial and anti-colonial struggle, a figure of purity and pure revolutionary power.
Words:- 2,088
Works Citation:-
Drabinski, John. “Frantz Fanon.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 14 Mar. 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/.
FANON, FRANTZ. “Concerning Violence (the Wretched of the Earth).” On Violence, 2007, pp. 78–100., https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv120qr2d.9.
Fanon, Frantz, et al. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2021.
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