![]() ![]() This, too, the editors rightly signal: “By seeing him as the thinker of contemporary identity issues, his essential aim is forgotten: namely, to think and construct freedom as disalienation within a necessarily historical and political process.”įar too much commentary on Fanon ignores the highly unstable historical and political situation under which his work was written, looking instead to extract a portable theory of colonialism or race from his pages. Fanon takes aim at the “African leaders” who recognized the treachery of Dia’s efforts but were content to scour the continent “in search of shekels and sweetmeats of corruption.” Fanon minces no words about the fate of the new bourgeoisie: Dia and his colleagues, as “traitors,” will be ushered into a “Chamber of Horrors,” where they await “liquidation” by the revolutionaries.Īccording to Fanon, it would be wrong to think that Algeria was simply seeking “political independence,” because it “does not intend to rid itself of political oppression and then to resign itself to forces of economic oppression.” One of the consequences of the contemporary refusal to engage Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoisie is an instrumentalization of his work for the purposes of neoliberal identity politics. ![]() Fanon takes up the issue in The Political Writings with a blistering attack on “The Stooges of Imperialism,” a statement directed at Mamadou Dia, head of the Senegalese mission to the UN, a “miserable puppet” who argued to “prolong western rule” in Africa through the establishment of a “French Community” within the colonies. “For the bourgeoisie,” he goes on to say, “nationalization signifies very precisely the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period.” Fanon’s relentless attack on elites offers a prescient counter to the scores of corporations today affirming their commitment to Black liberation, a vision that has reached its apotheosis with Goldman Sachs’s $10 billion “investment” in redressing the exclusion of Black women from capital accumulation.īut as Fanon insists, the “motivations” of the bourgeoisie are “essentially different from” those of the worker serving the former does not trickle down to the latter. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him,” Fanon wrote at the start of Wretched of the Earth. “We have seen how the colonized always dream of taking the colonist’s place. Any reader of the vast literature on Fanon might be struck, for example, by the relative neglect of chapter three of The Wretched of the Earth, “The Misadventures of National Consciousness,” in which Fanon raises alarms about the rise of a postcolonial national bourgeoisie. In their brief but bold introduction, Khalfa and Young, both superb Fanon scholars, sound a welcome note of warning: by “turning into a political icon, his well-argued and very lucid critiques of the possible despotic future of postcolonial societies get buried.” Fanon has become an almost mythical figure in antiracist and anticolonial discourse, and in the process, many of his specific political commitments have been watered down or edited out. ![]() ![]() There are lingering questions and controversies surrounding the authorship of these essays - all of them unsigned and anonymized - and Khalfa and Young freely acknowledge that some of them were likely “only partly authored by Fanon himself.” It is also the case, as the editors note, that Fanon’s “thinking at least strongly influences them.” Undoubtedly Fanon is their guiding presence. Each was written in direct response to events in an ongoing anticolonial revolution, at the center of which was May 13, 1958, and its aftermath.įeaturing 21 essays from El Moudjahid, The Political Writings functions as a long-lost companion to Toward the African Revolution, first published in 1964, three years after Fanon’s death. Young and translated by Steven Corcoran, The Political Writings largely draws from Fanon’s contributions to the radical Algerian independence newspaper El Moudjahid, and they date from August 1957 to February 1961. THE 23 ESSAYS that appear in The Political Writings were extracted from the collection of recently discovered writings by Frantz Fanon called Alienation and Freedom, first published in French in 2015. ![]()
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