Though it is not possible to discipline the readings of Fanon, a sober engagement with his work will enable the reader to discover the universalism he championed and the pitfalls of identity politics he cautioned against.
Frantz Fanon has never been more alive than he is now. Once a marginal presence in academia, there is now no major university that does not have him on some prescribed reading list. Before he entered the halls of the classroom, Fanon was a common name among Black militants in the US. Martin Luther King Jr noted that Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was a Bible for proponents of the Black Power movement. Revolutionaries in Latin America often cited Fanon.
Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed owes much to Fanonist thinking. The arrival of postcolonial studies cemented Fanon’s place in academia. In events in the US in the past decade, such as the Black Lives Matter movement or campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war, one could find Fanon being oft quoted. A new generation discovers its Fanon, and it reads him the way it wants to.
There will always be a battle over interpretations of complex thinkers and texts. Who read Marx better, Karl Korsch or Karl Kautsky? Korsch was the better philosopher and Kautsky the better economist; these strengths were on display in their respective readings of Marx. However, neither of these great intellectuals could lead a Marxist revolution. That was in the hands of VI Lenin, who differed from both in his reading of Marx.
Did this make the Leninist reading better or truer than that of Korsch or Kautsky? The Soviet Union thought so. Once the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold on the state, alternate readings of Marx and Marxism were dealt a blow by the all-powerful Party.
For the most part, however, decolonization in academia is just a harmless inanity. The calls to “decolonize the curriculum” is just another chic way of making a case for more diversity in the reading list. Since “diversity” was a term the corporates easily appropriated, the academics who fashion themselves as doing something different needed something more provocative. So now, “decolonize” can be added as a suffix to pretty much anything — science, philosophy, music, museums, technology, Shakespeare, sex, zombies — without having to make any practical sense.
Interpretations are a matter of power, and political movements seeking power, especially those that claim to be guided by texts, will aim to discipline the manner in which the relevant texts are read. Whether the text is read by an academic in a university or an activist who is using the text in quotidian politics, it is an operation of power. No one interprets innocently, and when one tries a correct, better, truer interpretation, one is automatically judging others. What I am going to try to do is to look at some consequences of reading Fanon in certain ways.
After the blossoming of Fanon scholarship, Fanon has been engaged in a variety of disciplines. But there are two broad questions that any study of Fanon, for the sake of academia or activism, has to inevitably encounter, namely those of decolonization and identity.
Decolonization as a violent event
There is nothing that the contemporary activist, especially those who imagine themselves waging a decolonial struggle, loves more in Fanon than the first incendiary chapter “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth. To narrow it further, the words on the first page, “decolonization is always a violent event”, are taken as a mantra to justify violent acts in the world today if they can be seen as serving the cause of the oppressed.
Whether Fanon is enthusiastically advocating for violence or coldly analyzing it is a matter of interpretation, although good evidence from the text, especially the fifth chapter on “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”, strongly indicates the latter. But even if the first chapter is read in isolation from all else that Fanon has written, and his provocative statements are taken as imperatives over his piercing analyses, what do these statements mean when taken in other times and contexts?
Among the interesting interlocutors of Fanon are Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who got it perfectly when they asserted that “Decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Any sober reading of The Wretched of the Earth’s first chapter will make it clear that Fanon is using no metaphors. He is talking about an existential war, where one “species” of people, the colonizers, are substituted by another (Fanon 2004: 1).
This is not a polite dialogue, an academic conversation, an intellectual disagreement, or a sober negotiation. On the contrary, “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists” (Fanon 2004: 3). One kills or is killed.
The Algerian war of liberation played out like that. Algerian rebels led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) killed the French, military and civilians alike. In some attacks, French women were raped. The French colonialists responded with brutal massacres. Cycles of attacks and reprisals continued till the French realized it was no longer tenable to remain in Algeria.
When Fanon made a chilling remark in 1958 that the FLN was justified in questioning “the very principle of existence of such a minority (French) in the Algeria of tomorrow” (Fanon 2018: 598), he was talking about the physical, not a metaphysical, annihilation of the French from Algeria. Even though as a humanist, he was desirous of solidarity between the French and the Algerians in a struggle for a better world, he also knew that decolonization gives no quarters. Anti-colonialism was a precondition for a universal humanism.
Until then, there were no pacts between the oppressors and the oppressed, and the oppressed would do whatever it takes to secure their liberation. Tuck and Yang also explicitly hint at such a scenario when they respond to the question “What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?” that “decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity” (Tuck and Yang 2012: 35). That is, those identified as “natives” involved in the process of decolonization owe no obligations to the lives, liberties, and properties of those who are identified as “settlers”.
A Fanonist spirit indeed. But context matters, too. Fanon was not just writing about a life-or-death struggle; he was actively involved in one. Even as his words talked about killing, the possibility of him being killed loomed over him, a fact that he accepted as a consequence of his commitment. There were a few assassination attempts made on his life.
Additionally, it was not entirely inconceivable that the FLN could target him in an internal purge. His friend, the leftist Algerian thinker Abane Ramdane, was killed in one such fratricidal attack. There was little that protected him and his ideas. He definitely did not have the First Amendment.
Decolonization as protected speech
All talk of radical decolonization in universities in the West is squarely protected by comprehensive free speech laws. The extensive academic freedoms offered, not to mention generous research funds from the state and/or private donors, allow decolonial scholars to speculate and desire the destruction of the very system that protects them. In contrast, try imagining academics in other places voicing for much simpler things and the consequences they could face — in Havana defending press freedom, in Beijing supporting Tibetan autonomy, or in Tehran calling for women’s rights.
Some radicals in the US, after the October 7 attacks on Israel, invoked Fanon to justify violence, including killing, as a legitimate form of resistance. Whether they were morally wrong or right is a question beyond the scope of this piece. What we ask here is the extent of the self-professed commitment to decolonization as imagined by Fanon.
Consider the swift change of tone after Donald Trump’s return to power. Soon after crackdowns on campuses, which intensified under Trump’s presidency, decolonial slogans were complemented or replaced by appeals to the right to free speech and assembly. Besides being logically incongruent, a decolonization that invokes Fanon in corridors of the university and constitutionally protected free speech when in trouble with the police is nothing but a metaphor.
In Fanonist reading, a decolonial struggle does not operate within constitutional paradigms. If anything, it involves the complete overthrow of the existing constitution and the creation of a new one. The replacement of one ‘species’ of people by another also naturally brings about the replacement of a political system by another.
This entails that the existing political system is an existential enemy. The decolonial struggle is Manichean. The native can seek neither truth nor justice within this system. But the clamor for the defense of free speech in current systems that are accused of being ‘colonial’ sits oddly with the claim that one is thinking and doing decolonization. A decolonialist is not one who should claim liberal rights and the one who claims liberal rights cannot be a decolonialist. Unless this decolonization is nothing but a metaphor.
Decolonization as tokenism
For the most part, however, decolonization in academia is just a harmless inanity. The calls to “decolonize the curriculum” is just another chic way of making a case for more diversity in the reading list. Since “diversity” was a term the corporates easily appropriated, the academics who fashion themselves as doing something different needed something more provocative. So now, “decolonize” can be added as a suffix to pretty much anything — science, philosophy, music, museums, technology, Shakespeare, sex, zombies — without having to make any practical sense or theoretical coherence.
Many have dismissed these ventures as ‘woke’ for being purely performative without bringing any actual change, except carving spaces in the academia for a decolonial “caste”. Olufemi Taiwo’s Against Decolonization is a brilliant assault on this trend. He asserts that “the preoccupation with decolonization is likely to block serious analyses of endogenous practices and ideas that need to be severely criticised for our societies to move forward” (2022: 32). Important anti-caste leaders in India expressed similar views.
What happens when a decolonial struggle wins through violence? Fanon was not only concerned about this, he was also apprehensive about the way certain struggles were going. Given the FLN’s intolerance of dissidence, there were many things that Fanon said in allusion. The dangers of a one-party state, the emergence of an immoral and mediocre caste of exploiters, a national leader who promotes this, narrow ethnic nationalisms that turn the colonized against themselves, all of this and more figures in chapters 2–4 of The Wretched of the Earth.
All of this came to pass in postcolonial Algeria, where the FLN ran a dictatorship and crushed any opposition to its power. A civil war between the extremist organization Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the FLN led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Fanon was lucky to not witness this — his wife Josie, who saw the descent of independent Algeria into the maelstrom, committed suicide.
Indeed, far more worrying in the world today than academic decolonialists are supporters of right-wing movements and tin-pot dictatorships in many countries of the ‘Third World’ using decolonial vocabulary to justify their politics. Islamists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindu nationalists in India, and Sinhala-Buddhist supremacists in Sri Lanka are some examples from South Asia.
Fanon argued that “colonialism and its derivatives do not […] constitute the present enemies of Africa” and that “the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology” (Fanon 1988: 186). He was concerned that far too much emotional investment was being put in identity, often considered immutable and essentialist, rather than broader forms of political solidarities. When an identity becomes political, it seeks out enemies. Once the external colonial enemy is gone, what becomes of this identity? If it has built itself on violence, it finds traitors, dissidents, non-conformists, and minorities and wreaks violence against them.
Fanon was aware of these pitfalls of identity politics from the time he wrote his first book Black Skin, White Masks. Yes, Fanon did say that “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force” (2004: 51). But if not tempered by a progressive ideology and if centered too much on identity, it soon becomes an ethnic cleansing force, as several ‘Third World’ conflicts have shown.
In a world that is being shaped by security states powered by hi-tech, doing violence will have consequences, as will advocating for the same, no matter what the cause. If Fanon’s writings on violence are taken out of context and projected as a guide for practice today, then those taking this line should be willing to accept all that follows. Constitutionality and the rule of law cannot become the first line of defense to those who swear by decoloniality and the law of revolution.
If Fanon is accorded a sober engagement, we get a thinker who anticipated the crisis of postcolonial states, who incisively brought to the fore the inherent contradictions at the heart of identity politics and a universalist who believed that we are more than what we were born as. It is not possible to discipline the readings of Fanon, but one can hope that such a complicated thinker is read in a disciplined way. If stirring passages and rousing quotes are all one takes from Fanon, then one might just read The Holy Bible. Because, much before Fanon, the assurance that “the last shall be first” came from God.
References:
Fanon, Frantz. 1988. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and Freedom. Eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury.
Taiwo, Olufemi. 2022. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. London: Hurst.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”, Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1.
very interesting indeed.