## 1. The Problem of Blackness



In 1952, Fanon published his first major work *Black Skin, White
Masks*. Though just 27 at the time of its publication, the work
displays incredible literacy in major intellectual trends of the time:
psychoanalysis, existentialism, phenomenology, and dialectics, as well
as, most prominently, the early Negritude movement and U.S.
based critical race work in figures like Richard Wright. Modest in
length, the book is notable for its enormous ambition, seeking to
understand the foundations of anti-Black racism in the deepest
recesses of consciousness and the social world. The book is
Fanon's major work on blackness. In fact, his focus shifts in
the years following the publication of *Black Skin, White
Masks,* moving away from blackness as a problem--perhaps
*the* problem--of the modern world and toward a wider
theory of the oppressed, colonialism, and revolutionary resistance to
the reach of coloniality as a system. But that shift is unthinkable
without Fanon's early meditations on anti-Black racism.
Fanon's reflections on anti-Black racism and how it forms, then
deforms, the subjectivity of white and Black people both, is crucial
for understanding the multiple levels of colonial subjugation and the
terms of its overcoming. There is something about anti-blackness as
treated in *Black Skin, White Masks* that is a concrete,
uncomplicated distillation of coloniality as such. Fanon's first
book, then, can be said to set out the basic structure of his anti-
and de-colonial work, initially and emphatically in the terms of
describing the effects and affects of anti-black racism.



Fanon's method in *Black Skin, White Masks* is a
complicated question and one of the more interesting bits of scholarly
discussion. The primary approach in the text is
existential-phenomenological, something borne out in the rich,
textured personal narratives that seize upon the essential structures
of the narrativized event of anti-blackness, and also indicated in the
title of the fifth chapter--*L'experience
vecu* (*experience vecu* translates the key
phenomenological notion of *Erlebnis,* properly rendered in the
Richard Philcox translation as "lived-experience"). Lewis
Gordon's work on Fanon has argued for the centrality of
existentialism and existential framing of key questions across his
oeuvre, especially in Gordon's early work *Fanon and the
Crisis of European Humanity* (1995) and recently in *What Fanon
Said* (2015). The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty also lends credence to the phenomenological
characterization, but Fanon's sustained engagement with the
Negritude movement, psychoanalysis, Hegelian thought, and
Marxism (something evidenced most clearly in later works and
documented in Reiland Rabaka's multi-volume interpretation of
Fanon, Negritude, and revolutionary Africana theory) opens up
the question of methodology to any number of interpretations and
remains one of the more engaging areas of Fanon-interpretation. Homi
Bhabha's innovation as a reader of Fanon has been to draw out
the post-structuralist dimensions of his thought, thereby weaving
Fanonian themes into contemporary postcolonial theorizations of
hybridity, language, subjectivity, and time. We see much the same in
Anthony Alessandrini's provocative book on Fanon and cultural
studies, *Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics* (2014),
which puts Fanonian thinking in dialogue with Michel Foucault, Edward
Said, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy, among others. In the end,
Fanon is a unique thinker who blends personal narrative and
political strategizing with heady social theory and numerous
philosophical twists and turns.



The introduction to *Black Skin, White Masks* contains key
conclusions and foundational pieces of analysis summed up
Fanon's simple declaration: that Black people are locked in
blackness and white people are locked in whiteness. As well, Fanon
offers a sketch of the relationship between ontology and sociological
structures, asserting that the latter generate the former, which, in
turn, lock subjectivities into their racial categories. The chapters
that follow are in many ways a long, sustained argument for these
assertions, venturing into questions of language, sexuality,
embodiment, and dialectics. Perhaps most importantly, Fanon's
opening gambit introduces the central concept of the zone of
non-being. The zone of non-being is the "hell", as Fanon
puts it, of blackness honestly confronted with its condition in an
anti-Black world. The anti-Black world, the only world we know, hides
this non-being to the extent that it ascribes a place and role to
abject blackness. But the truth is the zone of non-being. In an
interesting and crucial twist, Fanon, in the Introduction, does not
describe descent into this zone as nihilism or despair. Rather, he
counters with a vision of subjectivity as "a *yes* that
vibrates to cosmic harmonies" (1952 [2008: 2]). Descent into the
zone of non-being produces this *yes* and its revolutionary
power, revolutionary precisely because the anti-Black world cannot
contain or sustain the affirmation of Black life as life, as being, as
having a claim on the world. This claim and this *yes* is the
positivity of what becomes political violence in Fanon's later
work.



Across the core chapters of *Black Skin, White Masks*, Fanon
draws together the existential experience of racialized subjectivity
and the calculative logic of colonial rule. For Fanon, and this is
critically important, colonialism is a *total project*. It is a
project that does not leave any part of the human person and its
reality untouched. This is no more evident than in the opening chapter
to *Black Skin, White Masks* on language. Fanon's
reflections on language, racism, and colonialism begin with a wide
claim: to speak a language is to participate in a world, to adopt a
civilization. The claim reflects in many ways the philosophical milieu
of mid-century French and German philosophy, which in phenomenology,
existentialism, and hermeneutics explore the very same
claim--that language, subjectivity, and reality are entangled as
a matter of essence, not confusion or indistinction. But the colonial
situation makes this all the more complicated. If speaking a language
means participating in a world and adopting a civilization, then the
language of the colonized, a language imposed by centuries of colonial
domination and dedicated to the elimination or abjection of other
expressive forms, speaks the world of the colonizer. To speak as the
colonized is therefore to participate in one's own oppression
and to reflect the very structures of your alienation in everything
from vocabulary to syntax to intonation. It is true that many
Afro-Caribbeans speak pidgin and creole as part of everyday life. But
Fanon, in a claim that does not age well in Caribbean theory, measures
pidgin and creole expression against French, arguing that
Afro-Caribbean speaking, in those registers, is a fallen, impoverished
version of the metropolitan language and thus participates in
inferiority. In this way, vernacular speech speaks the
colonizer's world into existence in naming the colonized as
derivative, less than, and fundamentally abject. Caribbean theory from
the 1970s to the present has largely been dedicated to defending the
legitimacy of creolized language and cultural forms, against Fanon and
against colonial languages as the measure of being and knowing.



But there is no alternative for Fanon. In one of the most important
moments of the book, Fanon discusses the problem of diction and racial
embodiment. The black person can perfect speech, learn to speak
perfect French and *sound* like a sophisticated Parisian. That
*might* promise a certain kind of liberation from the
alienation in and through mastery of proper French. That is, if the
black colonial learns to speak as well as the white Parisian, then
perhaps there can be equal participation in language and its world.
Yet, this is impossible because of what Fanon terms the
*epidermal* character of race. To be black and speak with
perfect diction is still to be black, and therefore marked as special,
unique, and surprising. Fanon's anecdotes in the opening chapter
describe this as the surprise of white French people at the
articulateness of a black French speaker. Surprise is a reminder of
inferiority, not in the content of one's presence, but rather on
the bearing black skin has on the white mask of perfect diction. There
is no escape from the epidermal skin. Embodiment frames linguistic
performance and limits its significance. Fanon also remarks on how
this fated-to-failure emphasis on diction in turn alienates the black
person from his or her fellow black people--the desire to be
white, Fanon's characterization of the drive to perfect diction,
means alienation from blackness and this lands the black subject,
again, in the zone of non-being.



The second and third chapters of *Black Skin, White Masks*
theorize interracial sexuality, sexual desire, and the effects on
racial identity. Fanon's theorizations return to one and the
same theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in the
desire to be white or to elevate one's social, political, and
cultural status in proximity to whiteness. In that sense, all
depictions of interracial sexuality (exclusively heterosexual) are for
Fanon fundamentally pathological. The black woman who desires a white
man suffers under the delusion that his body is a bridge to wealth and
access. Mayotte Capecia's novel *I Am a Martinican
Woman* (1948) guides Fanon's analysis and he takes her book
to be exemplary of the black woman's psyche and of the limits of
interracial desire. The black man who desires a white woman suffers
under the delusions of what her body offers: innocence and purity.
Fanon draws this from Germaine Guex's book *La Nevrose
d'abandon* (1950) and expresses it directly when writing, in
the voice of Guex's Black man, "When my restless hands
caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity
and make them mine" (1952 [2008: 45]). The white body and Black
desire for that body function much as language does in the opening
chapter to *Black Skin, White Masks*: the passage to standing
in the world, made impossible by the epidermal racial scheme, and
therefore fated to alienation at every turn. Fanon's analyses
are provocative, associative, and infused with the language of
psychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology. And, thus, in each turn
of the story, interracial desire is pathological, not because of the
content of the characters and their desire, but because anti-Black
colonialism is a total project that has infiltrated, modified, and
calcified all aspects of the lifeworld.



The incredibly important fifth chapter to *Black Skin, White
Masks*, titled "The Lived-Experience of the Black Man"
("L'experience vecue du noir"), is
bookended by two chapters examining psychological accounts of the
colonized. In the fourth chapter, Fanon undertakes a systematic
critique of Octave Mannoni's psychoanalytic account of colonial
oppression and in the sixth chapter he works through a psychoanalytic
account of racialized libidinal economy. Both chapters are crucial for
understanding the role of psychoanalysis in Fanon's thought, as
well as an opportunity to see his creativity as a reader who
repurposes colonial or colonial-tinged methods and analyses for the
sake of clarification of the effects of anti-Black racism under
colonial domination. Fanon's conclusions are not surprising, of
course. Psychoanalysis, like his original readings of interracial
relationships, provides Fanon a language for describing all the
effects and affects on desire under anti-Black racism, and how
gendered notions of power, embodiment, and selfhood are structured
*from the inside* by the colonial practice of racism. What he
uncovers in his critique and repurposing of psychoanalysis are new
layers of pathology on the part of the colonizer, of course, but also
of the colonized who cannot function as intact psyches. As well, Fanon
argues in some detail against the capacity of European psychoanalysis
to understand the colonial situation. Blackness requires modifications
in method, especially if that method is to open space for resistance,
rebellion, and liberation.



But "The Lived-Experience of the Black Man" is really the
key chapter in the book. In that chapter, Fanon deploys the conceptual
tools developed in previous chapters in order to debunk the remaining
legacies of racial essentialism. A good bit of this was undertaken in
the first chapter, where Fanon critically reads Aime
Cesaire and his articulation of Negritude around the
question of language. The existential-phenomenological character of
the fifth chapter, however, adds real depth and texture to
Fanon's position. It begins and returns repeatedly to an
anecdote in which a white child points to Fanon and declares
"Look, a Negro!" Fanon explores how this phrase is akin to
a racial slur, how racism is integral to the declaration itself rather
than being an addition to it: to say "Negro" is to say an
anti-Black slur. In developing this account, Fanon revisits Jean-Paul
Sartre's account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity of
the other, here infusing that account with a rich treatment of the
structures of an anti-Black racist lifeworld. The white gaze fixes
blackness, making it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing
blackness into itself. As well, Fanon discusses Sartre's account
of anti-Semitism in *Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the
Etiology of Racism* (1948), noting how it is inadequate to the
phenomenon of anti-Blackness as a form of racism. Whereas the
anti-Semite fears the Jew because of his alleged power and
super-capacity, the anti-Black racist detests the Black person because
of his alleged weakness and incapacity. That is, anti-Semitism
reflects a panic about Jewish superiority, anti-Black racism reflects
contempt for Black inferiority. With this complex in place, Fanon
returns with some important sympathy to Cesaire's version
of Negritude, exploring the limits and possibilities of poetry
for an alternative vision of Black life. Negritude may be
naive and fundamentally wrong at the level of ontology, but it
does alter the affective relation of Black people to themselves. That
is no small accomplishment. Across these discussions, Fanon develops
his notion of the inferiority complex, which is his subtle and
important account of how anti-Black racism is internalized by Black
people and how that internalization adds complexity to the pathologies
of living under colonial rule. Negritude, whatever its limits,
is an antidote and Fanon's appreciation for it is one of the
more compelling parts of the chapter.



The seventh and final full chapter offers a critical reading of
dialectics, filtered through both Alfred Adler's psychology and
G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy. At stake in the chapter is
recognition--recognition of blackness, of subjectivity, and
therefore of humanity. This is one of the most enigmatic ideas in
*Black Skin, White Masks*. Fanon is deeply critical of
dialectical thinking, while at the same time drawing deep, important
lessons from it. In particular, Fanon is concerned with how a
dialectics of recognition *might* simply mean elevation of the
Black person to a sense of humanity created by and modeled on white
people. The entirety of the text, of course, has been dedicated to
disputing that move and offering alternative ways of thinking about
the future. So Fanon rejects the nascent, or sometimes explicit,
conception of recognition that appeals to a pre-constructed idea of
the human--suspicious, rightly, that such an idea is always
racialized. And so too he is suspicious of any dialectical method that
leaves a sense of measure intact--namely, a dialectical method
that proceeds from a logic of recognition. Fanon resists at every turn
the desire for recognition if that recognition proceeds from an
inevitably colonial sense of standard or measure. Rather, in terms of
Hegelian methodology, Fanon is interested in the risk of life at the
center of Hegel's dialectic, and how that dialectic both exposes
the conceptual dependency of the colonizer on the colonized
*and* how confrontation, the work of negation in dialectical
thinking and struggle, aims to destroy pre-existing forms of relation.
If those pre-existing forms of relation are destroyed, then a certain
kind of revolution is possible, one in which the humanity of the
colonized black person might emerge, on its own terms, for the first
time. Fanon's imagination turns to the future as unprecedented.
What could blackness be *after* colonialism?



The conclusion to *Black Skin, White Masks* follows through on
this notion of futurity and a dialectics dedicated to the destruction
of pre-existing forms of relation. Fanon's conclusion is written
in very short paragraphs or provocative, declarative sentences. Across
the final pages, Fanon outlines a theory of history and memory that
underpins his vision of Black liberation, including most prominently
the notion that we are not bound to history, we are not slaves to the
past, and therefore any kind of future is possible. Fanon rejects the
idea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea would
link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link
inextricable from imagining justice. In place of the past, Fanon
appeals to the openness and undetermined character of the future. What
does Fanon want for black people? In perhaps the most famous line of
the book, Fanon concludes with the plea: "O mon corps,
fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!" ("O my body,
always make me a man who questions!") (1952 [2008:
206]). Subjectivity in the interrogative is therefore Fanon's
solution to the problem of racial entrapment, the opening motif of how
white people are trapped in whiteness, black people trapped in
blackness. The man who questions has broken out of that trap.



The effusive optimism and hope of the Conclusion aside, *Black
Skin, White Masks* is an essentially pessimistic book. That is,
the book describes a psychological, linguistic, ontological, and
libidinal landscape that is structured through and through by
anti-Black racism. No desire or mode of being is left untouched.
Fanon's evocation of a total break with the past in the
Conclusion confirms this pessimism and shows that his sense of
liberation is tied to an apocalyptic revolutionary
praxis--something we see developed over the following decade.



In the immediate half-decade that follows the publication of *Black
Skin, White Masks,* Fanon revisits key claims about anti-blackness
and the possibilities of Black life that enrich, deepen, and widen his
formulations in 1952. One of the questions that arises quite naturally
from *Black Skin, White Masks* is how well, if at all, the
concept of blackness developed therein travels across the Caribbean to
the United States, or from the Caribbean to Africa. Fanon does not
spend much time discussing the United States; while some of his
unpublished work, recently collected in the volume *Ecrits
sur l'alienation et la liberte*, shows a keen
interest in the work of Richard Wright, and the early rustlings of the
early civil rights movement (along with Wright) are mentioned in
*Black Skin, Whites Masks,* Fanon's move to refine and
nuance his account of blackness turns to Africa. In the 1955 essay
"West Indians and Africans" ("Antillais et Africains"),
Fanon renews his critique of the Negritude movement and its
nostalgic orientation toward the continent. In a provocative
association, Fanon concludes the essay by linking "the great
white error" of colonialism with his characterization of
Negritude thinking as "living in the great black
mirage". (1964 [1994: 27]) Alongside that criticism of
Negritude, Fanon blends personal history, reportage, and a bit
of existential-historical sensibility in discussing the
*differences* between Afro-Caribbeans (West Indians) and black
Africans. Fanon's occasion is the Second World War and the
experience of West Indian and black African soldiers fighting side by
side, which allowed intimate exchange about racial identity. These
exchanges, on Fanon's account, return again and again to the
notion that West Indians are not Black enough, perhaps not Black at
all, which he implies adds to the psychological and moral appeal of
Negritude. A key lesson to draw from this essay, especially in
light of the work that follows it, is that Fanon's skepticism
about blackness as an identity--inextricably bound to
anti-blackness--moves him further and further away from concerns
about the Black experience. This move is deeply connected to his time
in Algeria, as we see below.


 As well, Fanon's well-known essay from 1956 "Racism
and Culture" ("Racisme et culture") re-engages the question of
blackness and argues for a deep, abiding connection between
anti-blackness and cultural formation more broadly. The essay,
delivered at one of the most important gatherings in the history of
black Atlantic thought, the 1956 Congress of Negro Writers and
Artists, de-links racism from the psyche and the interpersonal,
lodging racism instead inside the very workings of
culture. Fanon's contribution to the 1956 Congress broke from
the emphasis on Negritude and Negritude thinking at that
meeting, and his reflections are noteworthy for that reason alone.
Against the emphasis on racial quasi-essentialism, "Racism and
Culture" examines how anti-Black racism is part of the structure
and function of culture, rather than identifying blackness as an
inherent site of resistance. Fanon writes that racism 



> 
> 
> is never a super-added element discovered by chance in the course of
> the investigation of the cultural data of a group. The social
> constellation, the cultural whole, is deeply modified by the existence
> of racism. (1964 [1994: 36]) 
> 
> 
> 



This move positions Fanon against Negritude in familiar and new
ways. It is familiar in that he rejects racialized thinking as central
to Black liberation struggle, entwining race and culture at their
core; nothing from a racist culture can inform liberatory racial
thinking precisely because the existence of racism "deeply
modifies" what appears in culture *as race*. Fanon
underscores this when he deems blues, an African-American vernacular
art form, a "slave lament" that is "offered up for
the admiration of the oppressors" (1964 [1994: 37]). It is in
some ways new, insofar as he gathers together the multi-faceted
analysis and pessimism of *Black Skin, White Masks* and
distills it all into a vision of race and culture. And like the
conclusion to *Black Skin, White Masks*, and indeed most of his
work, the vision is essentially apocalyptic. "The end of race
prejudice", Fanon writes, "begins with a sudden
incomprehension" (1964 [1994: 44]). Which is to say, for Fanon
the de-linking of racism and culture only comes at the moment that
culture itself, as we have known it, becomes incomprehensible and we
begin the work of assembling new cultural forms. This insight is fully
developed five years later in the central chapters of *The Wretched
of the Earth*.


## 2. 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 minorite
europeenne d'Algerie"), "Algeria
Unveiled" ("L'algerie se devoile"), and
"The Algerian Family" ("La famille
algerienne").



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 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. Liberation
from measure means displacing the racialized idea of the human and
initiating a movement toward, then into, a *new humanism*. When
this notion travels to Algeria in "Algeria's European
Minority", a critical essay addressing the possibility of
revolutionary Europeans in North Africa, we see how it also applies to
the white minority under colonialism. The revolution in Algeria is a
moment of decision for all Algerians, and pointedly so in the case of
the European minority who had lived there for generations and at an
elevated social and political status. The default mode, of course,
would be to associate the European minority with the colonizing power:
France. But Fanon argues that this is not necessarily the case and
that, in fact, revolutionary solidarity across racial-national lines
is possible, even necessary (and, through examples in the text,
actually practiced). Algeria, then, is revealed to be as much an
ideological category for identification with as it is a national,
religious, or racial category. *The Wretched of the Earth* will
explore these possibilities even further as a blueprint for the
colonized global South. But Fanon is particularly meticulous in
"Algeria's European Minority", examining in detail
how each twist and turn of the psyche reflects possibilities and
limits, and in that meticulousness shows the enduring insight from the
opening of *Black Skin, White Masks -* namely, that white
people are locked into whiteness, Black people into blackness.
"Algeria's European Minority" unpacks the process by
which white people can unlock themselves in or be unlocked by
anti-colonial struggle and revolutionary action. In that sense, the
text is an important study of how what comes to be called "race
traitor" politics can and should work in a revolutionary
context.



In "Algeria Unveiled", Fanon explores the relationship
between Islam, tradition, colonial rule, and revolutionary
consciousness. The veil puzzles Fanon and challenges his deepest
political commitment: postcoloniality means an embrace of *the
new*. Revolution is absolute and radical, marking a break with the
past rather than a return to a different version of the past. The
future is the future, and so full of the unprecedented. What does that
mean for traditions that have been suppressed by colonial rule, for
example the veil in Islamic cultural practice? In his work on
blackness, Fanon was quite clear that a return to African
civilization--the imperative of the Negritude
movement--represents a mirage and only doubles the loss of the
past by losing black people in an illusion. But that is not the case
with his treatment of Islamic traditions in Algeria and other parts of
the Maghreb. The suppression of those traditions, on Fanon's
account, marginalize or push tradition into secret--or, perhaps,
keep the tradition in the open, but always as backward, abject, and
contrary to modernity. This means tradition is still alive, not a
mirage, and as alive also valued deeply by communities resisting
colonial rule. Such traditions can be instrumentalized for the sake of
revolutionary action, only to be evaluated *after colonialism*
for their suitability in a postcolonial nation and culture. The same
logic is elaborated in "The Algerian Family", where Fanon
explores the traditional structure of families in Algeria, in
particular how those families set gender identity, power, marriage,
and reproduction in fixed roles. Revolutionary families, he argues,
identify these fixed roles and break with them while *also*
maintaining a conviction that their practices are Algerian--that
is, Algerian in the *new* sense.



These reflections on racial-national identification, religion, gender,
and family all return to the same basic argument: revolution is about
the new. But that does not mean merely rejecting the past and
suspending all tradition. Rather, it means, for Fanon, identifying
sites for transformation inside tradition, with emphasis on those
sites which offer revolutionary or tactical possibilities. These
essays and the many shorter companion pieces from the time show Fanon
puzzling over his dual commitments--to a revolution that is
always for the future and to "the people" who are often
deeply committed to traditions. Thinking through that crossing of
commitments is the task of any revolutionary thought and Fanon's
careful thinking is exemplary.


## 3. Black Africa



In terms of volume, Fanon's turn to Africa in the years
following the publication of *Black Skin, White Mask* is
overwhelmingly occupied with North Africa, and Algeria in particular.
However, he also gives some key attention to sub-Saharan Africa or
what he called "black Africa" in key essays, editorials,
and letters collected in *Toward the African Revolution*.



Though there is some variety in terms of content and particular
thematic sites, Fanon's relationship to sub-Saharan Africa is
fairly consistent. The Algerian experience and ideology that emerged
from it structures Fanon's take on anti-colonial struggle in the
region, but he does not return to questions of anti-Black racism.
Algeria is for Fanon the exemplar of revolutionary struggle. So, when
talking about black Africa, Fanon will urge forgoing deep connections
to or retrievals of pre-colonial Africa--something that reflects
his early critiques of Negritude, for sure, but are in these
later essays really plainly political and strategic. Africa is,
ideologically, a *unity* for Fanon, and that unity is regularly
articulated in terms of shared colonial struggle. Thus, the divisions
between North and sub-Saharan Africa are erased in a shift of
perspective; memories and grievances that might flow from legacies of
the Arab slave trade are part of the disposable past. What matters is
the shared condition in the present, and therefore to the future of
unified anti-colonial struggle. In "Unity and Effective
Solidarity are the Conditions for African Liberation"
("Unite et solidarite effective sont les
conditions de la liberation africaine") (1960), Fanon is
plain in writing that "inter-African solidarity must be a
solidarity of fact, a solidarity of action, a solidarity concrete in
men, in equipment, in money" (1964 [1994: 173]). All of these
solidarities reflect an anti-essentialist approach to revolutionary
struggle, which is consonant with Fanon's work from the
beginning. Also of note is how Fanon, in this context, asserts the
necessity of the neutrality of anti-colonial struggle in Africa with
regard to Cold War alliances. The history of post-independence Africa,
which was the site of so many proxy wars and destabilization efforts
from both sides of the Cold War, bears out Fanon's observation
and assertion.


 Fanon also pauses to pay special attention to Patrice Lumumba who
in 1961, when "Lumumba's Death: Could We Do
Otherwise" ("La mort de Lumumba: pouvions-nous faire
autrement?") was written, was known as a promising and important
revolutionary leader. Lumumba immediately after became emblematic of
both the revolutionary promise and seemingly inevitable neo-colonial
fate of independent black Africa. This short essay is full of
interesting observations, most of which revolve around the failure in
Congo to unify around an anti-colonial ideology. The lack of this
ideology, he notes, is what made Congo susceptible to Belgian and
other European/American meddling, which then made Lumumba a natural
target. Lumumba's bold identification with anti-colonialism
enacted what Fanon most wanted: neutrality in the Cold War, singular
focus on the nation and the continent against colonialism in all
forms. Lumumba's death leads to the greatest threat to
genuinely independent, anti-colonial Africa: national infighting
instead of continental solidarity and the return of intra-national
ethnic conflict that destabilizes what is most in need of
stabilization.



In the end, it remains unclear how well Fanon understood the diversity
of sub-Saharan Africa and its difference from North Africa, where he
spent most of his time on the continent and to which his reflections
are largely dedicated. The occasional pieces leading up to *The
Wretched of the Earth* raise interesting questions and show how
Fanon was dedicated to building lines of solidarity and shared
struggle. African unity was paramount in Fanon's work on the
continent, and he boldly extends the Algerian experience to the
central and southern regions of Africa. At the same time, and this
becomes particularly clear when he reflects on black Africa's
memory of the slave trade, Fanon in *The Wretched of the Earth*
calls for a suppression of memory and historical difference in the
name of broader solidarity among the continent's oppressed
peoples. This has the strength of forging a vision of a future
de-linked from the past--a project consistent with the
revolutionary conclusion to *Black Skin, White Masks*--and
yet seems largely unaware of or unconcerned with the consequences of
forgetting the historical experiences of large swaths of sub-Saharan
Africa. As well, the difference between settler colonies and those
administered from a distance fades a bit when Fanon travels his
reflections to black Africa, a difference that has received a more
nuanced treatment in postcolonial theory since Fanon.



That said, work by Nigel Gibson in *Fanonian Practices in South
Africa* (2011) and Achille Mbembe in *Critique of Black
Reason* (2013 [2017]) and *Politiques de
l'inimitie* (2016), as well as essays by thinkers
such as Mabogo Percy More, Richard Pithouse, and others, have placed
Fanon in critical dialogue with sub-Saharan African political
realities and emerging theoretical movements. This is some of the most
exciting contemporary work in Fanon studies and indicates the rich,
provocative resources in his work for the twenty-first century.


## 4. The Wretched of the Earth



Without question, the 1961 publication of *The Wretched of the
Earth* (*Les damnes 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.



Violence emerges as a critical concept in this moment. Part of the
colonizer's fantasy of power and control lies in a perception of
weakness, of inferiority, that is inherent in the colonized. The
colonized are weak and therefore, in some fundamental sense, deserve
their abject condition. This is consistent with Fanon's
reflection on the inferiority complex in *Black Skin, White
Masks*, but writ large and as a characteristic of a population and
people. If the inferiority of the colonized is an *assumption*
and *psychological reality* of colonial life, then
revolutionary violence cannot but be a shock to the entire system. The
colonizer is shocked into awareness of the *humanity* of the
colonized in the moment in which they are willing to risk their lives
for another future. The colonized are shocked into awareness of their
own potential and, in that potential, find themselves capable for
forming a wide cultural, social, and political identity. Identity
formation is critical in Fanon's analysis; colonialism is a
total project, so the colonized find themselves adrift in abjection.
But violence changes all of that. Violence is simultaneously a saying
of *no* to colonialism and a saying of *yes* to the
possibilities of post-colonial life. The system cannot survive this
shock. And so it means everything to the three classes of colonized
life. The workers see the system on which they are dependent begin to
collapse. Exploitation becomes a site of resistance, rather than
something to be endured for the sake of material needs. The colonized
intellectual is exposed as counter-revolutionary and a key element in
the oppressive system. And the lumpen find an identity for the first
time, moving from disposable excess to anti-colonialism's most
potent revolutionary force.



Violence is therefore tasked with the greatest of pair of intertwined
tasks: elimination of the colonial system at the level of imagination
(how colonizer-colonized relations are naturalized as superiority and
inferiority) and of material reality (exploitative relations of
subordination and extraction), as well as formation of cultural,
social, and political identities. The first chapter of
*Wretched* outlines and amplifies this enormous potential of
revolutionary, anti-colonial violence, and the chapters that follow
elaborate the complexities of post-colonial formations of culture and
politics.



The next three chapters explore in great detail how revolutionary
violence is related to collective identity formation (Chapter Two),
consciousness of national identity (Chapter Three), and perhaps most
importantly the formation of national culture (Chapter Four). What we
see across these chapters is how potent and fecund Fanon's
conception of violence is, as well as how his various meditations on
revolution and identity in the essays between his first and his last
book pay real conceptual and strategic dividends. Conceptually, Fanon
draws the sharpest contrast between what he calls the colonized
intellectual and the revolutionary masses. The colonized intellectual
is exactly what the terms suggests: a go-between who translates the
colonized for the colonizer, in the colonizer's language and for
the political, social, and cultural purposes of the colonizer. The
masses do not drive the colonized intellectual's reflections,
but rather the colonial vision of the world structures everything.
Contrasted to that are the revolutionary masses who make a
*new* political, social, and cultural order through
revolutionary struggle itself. In this characterization, Fanon eschews
vanguardism and all the sorts of elite revolutionary structures that
follow from it. Rather, for Fanon, struggle itself generates
political, social, and cultural identities and concepts; there is no
prefiguring this element of a postcolonial world. Revolution makes
everything revolutionary, and the postcolonial state cannot be thought
without it. And so Fanon's elaboration of this movement also
criticizes atavistic notions of postcolonial state- and culture-craft,
rejecting nostalgic turns to a precolonial African society as a vision
for post-revolutionary society.



If the colonized intellectual and the precolonial forms of life are
not just insufficient for, but actually damaging to, postcolonial
world-making, then the future is a break with the past. Grievances
composed of memories of historical violence (e.g., the Arab slave
trade in black Africa) or ethno-religious and other cultural disputes
give way to revolutionary action that dispenses with, rather than
draws on, memory. The break with the past, at the level of
organization and intellectual formation, is made through revolutionary
violence. So too is the future. There is no pre-existing national
consciousness or national culture, no genius or visionary who
conceives it ahead of time, which means that revolutionary violence
must be purposeful, intentional, and oriented toward world-making. In
this way, Fanon's work on violence is never nihilistic or
random. Strategically, this means everything because conceptions of
politics, culture, and the postcolonial social order hinge on the
proper sense of violence.



*The Wretched of the Earth* concludes with one of Fanon's
most provocative and exciting pieces, evoking in much the same way as
the conclusion to *Black Skin, White Masks* the possibility of
a new future. In 1961, the future is for Fanon the question of the
fate of humanism, a motif he shares with, most notably,
Cesaire's 1955 text *Discourse on Colonialism*.
What is humanism, Fanon asks, if it is held up to the measure of the
world? That is, what does humanism look like if disentangled from the
European concept, which is riddled with histories of violence and
subjugation, and instead reflects or is infused with the liberation
struggles of the global South? In terms of conceiving the
post-colonial nation, Fanon returns to one of his earliest motifs:
measure. Post-colonial nations, created through anti-colonial
violence, cannot be duplications or imitations of European states. In
part, this is a resolutely anti-colonial ideological position: make
for yourself, do not make for the colonizer. But it is also, if not
largely, based in a critique of Europe that understands Europe to be
in crisis itself, to be dependent upon (at every level) structures of
exploitation and extraction. Europe is a "spirit built on
strange foundations" and characterized by "stasis".
(1961 [2005: 237]) Post-colonial states need different foundations,
and so must work with new concepts and new imaginations of
collectivity. Central to this are conceptions and imaginations of the
human itself. "[W]e must make a new start", Fanon writes,
"develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new
man". (1961 [2005: 239]) Fanon does not give this "new
man" content. The new man belongs to the future. The new man is
to come.


## 5. The Case Studies



Fanon's training in psychiatry is a central part of his work,
from the methodological approaches to and characterizations of the
dynamics of anti-Black racism in *Black Skin, White Masks*
through the attention to postcolonial anxieties of cultural formation
and statecraft in *The Wretched of the Earth*.



But apart from method alone, Fanon's published and unpublished
works offer case studies of victims of colonialism, studies which
emphasize the lived pathologies of everyday life under colonial rule.
Many of these are in the unpublished writings collected in
*Ecrits sur l'alienation et la
liberte,* but a key series of case studies are included in
*The Wretched of the Earth.* These studies are generally
under-thematized by Fanon scholars and postcolonial theory scholars
more widely, though a few recent publications indicate a renewed
interest in how concrete psychiatric work might function as part of
the postcolonial theory archive and in Fanon's larger project.
The collaborative study by Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce
*Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics* (2017) goes a long way
toward closing this gap in the literature, examining in detail both
the history and theoretical work underlying Fanon's psychiatric
writings and case studies. As well, David Marriott's *Whither
Fanon* (2018) embeds the psychiatric writings and therapeutic
practice inside Fanon's work on anti-blackness and postcolonial
politics.



Fanon's original studies consider a range of disorders resulting
from colonial violence. Some are mental disorders, by which Fanon
means a generalized sense of anxiety caused by colonial domination and
acted out in discrete parts of the personality. Others bear the
disorder on the body and disfigure the person from the inside out or
create sexual disorders connected to colonial degradations around
femininity and masculinity. As well, Fanon includes a short piece at
the end of *The Wretched of the Earth* on the medicalization of
criminality in Algeria, with particular interest in how those
disorders might be repurposed for the sake of revolutionary struggle.
The studies are very detailed and narrativized, which opens up a new
dimension of Fanon as critical observer. The studies also draw out the
tension between psychiatric treatment and political ideology,
something Fanon would argue is not overlaid on the situation by the
therapist, but instead discovered, in therapy, to have been installed
by the colonial order. The influence of this aspect of Fanon's
work can be seen in the Black Panther Party's work in the United
States on prisoner reintegration and public health initiatives, all of
which were seen as blending care for the oppressed with harnessing
revolutionary potential.


## 6. Legacy and Influence



We could say that, in many ways, Fanon's legacy and influence
outsizes his modest output as a writer. Fanon wrote for about a
decade, which, in any comparison with other major thinkers, is almost
no time at all. The pages produced, as well, are modest. *Black
Skin, White Masks* and *The Wretched of the Earth* are
substantial books composed of original chapters and analysis, but the
other two works *A Dying Colonialism* (1959) and *Toward the
African Revolution* (posthumously published in 1964) are comprised
of short essays, preliminary analyses, and occasional pieces. While
those shorter, preliminary, and occasional works are fascinating and
important, they are a portrait of a thinker in motion, a thinker whose
commitment to *diverse* and *unfolding* revolutionary
sites required both quick takes and patient contemplation. Fanon moved
very quickly through the Algerian struggle and did not hesitate to be
declarative, and his work on black Africa is very much the same,
albeit without the same concrete engagement and intellectual
background. Yet, Fanon is also patient and reflective, something we
see in the psychiatric studies that simultaneously underpin his
broader analyses and suggest other productive avenues for thought.



In other words, looking back six-plus decades later, we can see
Fanon's oeuvre as composed of profound, enduring insights and a
body of un- and under-developed work. This mixed legacy in the written
work has not limited Fanon's enormous influence. He was, in his
time and certainly in the decades following his death, a hero to and
intellectual inspiration for anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle,
informing the work of thinkers from all over the global South. Latin
American militants drew on Fanon's insights, as did so many on
the continent of Africa and across South Asia. His impact on cultural
studies is also sizable. Fanonian concepts inform countless
discussions of race, nation, migration, language, representation,
visuality, and so on. This is largely due to Fanon's unique
ability to engage across theoretical approaches and, in those
approaches, infuse analysis with rich phenomenological descriptions of
the body and psyche under colonial domination. Reiland Rabaka's
*Forms of Fanonism* (2011) is especially interesting here for
its careful work to reinscribe these kinds of analysis into the Black
radical tradition more broadly.



The recent publication and translation into English of Fanon's
unpublished works, which range from letters to a draft of a play, will
surely open up new dimensions of commentary. One of the signature
features of Fanon-commentary is the creativity of the interlocutors
who, if not doing lineage of influence textual study, have worked to
interpret and extend Fanon's ideas. Indeed, this is one of the
more interesting features of Fanon scholarship, something Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. famously described as Fanon's function as a sort of
Rorschach test--we see more in Fanon than is in the text. This is
the fecundity of Fanon's thinking, really. Books like Glen
Coulthard's *Red Skin, White Masks* (2014) and Hamid
Dabashi's *Brown Skin, White Masks* (2011) rewrite
Fanon's first work with an eye toward the similar-yet-different
forms of colonial experience in indigenous North America (Coulthard)
and the Middle East (Dabashi). Other writers such as Homi Bhabha,
Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon, Richard Pithouse, and others have extended
Fanonian categories and concepts to treat the experience of exile,
migration, diaspora, African-American and Caribbean experiences,
contemporary post-Apartheid South African struggles for justice, and
so on. This kind of work underscores the fecundity of Fanon's
ideas, their elasticity and capacity for extending across historically
and culturally diverse geographies. Such elasticity and capacity
largely derives from Fanon's attention to the colonized as a
lumpen and revolutionary force, something to which he gives great
descriptive and existential depth, rather than merely making an
abstract ideological centerpiece. This attentiveness to the presence
of deep resistance amongst the masses, even in the midst of profound
and powerful forms of colonial oppression, is one of Fanon's
greatest contributions to revolutionary theorizing of the black
Atlantic, global south, and racially marginalized populations. It is
why Fanon's work so exceeds page count and number of books. To
have located and described the colonized subject under colonial
domination with such precision and texture--this is Fanon's
gift to scholars, for sure, but more than that it is his gift to all
who are engaged in radical struggle against racialized oppression.