Notes

FOREWORD

1. I thank one of them, Philippe Gautier, who took an important part in the campaign against this exhibition and who gave me all the details about this case.

2. In the winter of 2013, political opponents of Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice, a native of Guyana, have compared her to a chimpanzee.

3. “If I cannot deflect the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.”

4. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 18.

5. See Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

INTRODUCTION: ON WHAT A GREAT THINKER SAID

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

2. See Peter Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” Socialist Register 9 (1972): 193. See also Alejandro J. De Oto’s Fanon: Política del sujeto poscolonial (Mexico City, Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2003).

3. This development is due to the work of French and Francophone scholars who have devoted attention to research on Fanon, and the catalyzing efforts of Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, his daughter, who directs the Fondation Frantz Fanon. Scholars also include Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, who organized a United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on Fanon in 2007, and Achille Mbembe, who has worked in a variety of Francophone institutes and think tanks, such as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). There are also articles in journals such as African Development (Senegal), Tumultes (France), Mouvement (France), Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (United States and France), and a growing number of studies, such as Matthieu Renault’s Frantz Fanon: De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2011), and Imudia Norman Ajari, “Race et Violence: Frantz Fanon à l’épreuve du postcolonial” (Toulouse: PhD diss. in philosophy, L’Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2014). There is also continued interest in the Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds as new translations of Fanon’s writings, with commentaries by some of the most influential scholars in the humanities and social sciences, come to print. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are De Oto’s Fanon and Frantz Fanon, Piel negra, máscaras blancas, trans. Ana Useros Martín (Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Akal, 2009), which features in Spanish an introduction by Samir Amin, a preface by Immanuel Wallerstein, and an appendix of essays by Judith Butler, Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter. And then there are the various institutes and working groups across the African continent, such as the Thinking Africa group in Grahamstown, South Africa, and the meetings at the Bibliothèque Nationale du Hamma, in Algeria.

4. These include, for example, Nigel Gibson, ed., Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999), Anthony C. Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White, eds., Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

5. The issue of a long period of near silence in the study of Fanon in France is handled well by Achille Mbembe, who argues that much of this could be attributed to the French defeat in the Algerian War and the loss of its empire. The growth in Fanon studies in France, marked by publication of his complete Works, is also discussed in that article. See Mbembe, “Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon,” African Studies 71, no. 1 (2012): 19–28. This tendency to erase the memory of revolutionary struggles and Fanon’s importance in their regard also emerges in Anglophone scholarship. For critical discussion, see P. Mabogo More, “Locating Frantz Fanon in (Post)Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of African Asian Studies (forthcoming).

6. For a sense of the debates and issues at stake, see Nigel Gibson, “Thinking Fanon, 50 Years Later: Fanonian Translations in and beyond ‘Fanon Studies,’” Pambazuka, no. 576 (March 14, 2012): http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80744.

7. Thus, the following short references will be used in the parallel citations and notes: Pn, for Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952); Pra, for Pour la revolution africaine: Écrits politiques (Paris: François Maspero, 1964), edited by Josie Fanon; references here will be to the 1969 edition; L’v, for L’an V de la révolution algerienne (Paris: Maspero, 1959), although my references will be to the 1979 edition, published as Sociologie d’une révolution; and Dt, for Les damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, presentation de Gérard Chaliand (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), with my references being to the 1991 edition published in Paris by Éditions Gallimard. These books are known respectively in English as Black Skin, White Masks; Toward the African Revolution; A Dying Colonialism; and The Wretched of the Earth. The title of the last is one with which I have much disagreement, so in this book it will be referred to in its proper translation as The Damned of the Earth. I will refer to the English titles in the main text, but citations will be to the French, and, as mentioned, the translations are my own. Finally, for a collection of Fanon’s psychiatric writings not included in Pra, see Frantz Fanon, Decolonizing Madness: The Psychiatric Writings of Frantz Fanon, trans. Lisa Damon, ed. Nigel Gibson, with preface by Alice Cherki and afterword by Roberto Beneduce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

8. Worsley does a splendid job of articulating the interconnectedness of these many aspects of the man in his “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat.’”

1. “I AM FROM MARTINIQUE”

1. See, for example, Albert Memmi, “Review of Peter Geismar, Fanon, and David Caute, Frantz Fanon,” New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1971, 5. Vergès, Hall, and Julien’s positions appear in Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Normal Films, 1995), in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (1991): 457–78. See also F. M. Gottheil, “Fanon and the Economics of Colonialism: A Review Article,” Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 1 (Autumn 1967): 78.

2. Joby Fanon, “Pour Frantz, pour notre mère,” Sans Frontiere 5–11 (February 1982): 10. See also Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), 19.

3. The essay “Antilleans and Africans” is included in Pour la revolution africaine: Écrits politiques, ed. Josie Fanon (Paris: François Maspero, 1964).

4. See Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Volontés, 1939), available in many editions in English, but see, e.g., Notebook of a Return to My Native Land—Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Aimé Césaire, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, intro. by Mireille Rosello (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1995). Césaire’s story is rich with irony: a plaque in his name was installed in the Panthéon in Paris on 6 April 2011.

5. Joby Fanon, “Pour Frantz, pour notre mère,” 6.

6. For recent elaboration, see Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 10. Hereafter cited as Portrait.

7. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 27.

8. See Cherki, Portrait, 13. The situation was not different in the former British colonies, where black veterans returned, as in South Africa, only to the gift of a bicycle, and, in the United States, to lynch mobs. See Vincent Moloi’s documentary A Pair of Boots and a Bicycle (South Africa: Rare Earth Films, 2007), and Walter C. Rucker Jr. and James N. Upton, eds., The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, vol. 2, N–Z (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007).

9. For a moving discussion of Fanon’s plays, see Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, trans. Daniel Nethery (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), chapter 12, “The Playwright,” 57–62. For a scholarly discussion, see Keithley Philmore Woolward, “Towards a Performative Theory of Liberation: Theatre, Theatricality and ‘Play’ in the Work of Frantz Fanon” (PhD diss. in French, New York University, 2008). See also Clément Mbom, “Frantz Fanon,” in Multicultural Writers since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Alba della Fazia Amoia and Bettina Liebowitz Knapp (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 211–15.

10. I don’t include Mireille’s mother’s name to maintain her privacy at her daughter’s request.

11. See the foundation’s website: http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/.

12. David Macey offers more than most; see his Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2002). Hereafter cited as Biography.

13. See Macey and Cherki for more discussion of Fanon’s dictating his books and Josie’s role in their production.

14. Frantz Fanon, “La plainte de Noir: L’expérience vécu du Noir,” Esprit 179 (May 1951): 657–79, and “Le syndrome nord-Africain,” Esprit 187 (February 1952): 237–84.

15. Léopold Sénghor, L’anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

16. A copy of Fanon’s doctoral thesis is available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

17. Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 97–98.

18. Cherki, Portrait, 24. Jeanson confirms this account in Cheikh Djemai’s documentary film, Frantz Fanon: His Life, His Struggle, His Work (Algeria: ArtMattan Productions, 2001).

19. Cedric Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” Race & Class 35, no. 1 (1993): 79–91.

20. On this matter, see, e.g., Drucilla Cornell, Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (New York: Routledge, 2004).

21. For discussion of recent work in Fanon studies, see Elizabeth A. Hope and Tracey Nichols, eds., Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy, foreword by Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010); Nigel Gibson, ed., Living Fanon (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Matthieu Renault, Frantz Fanon: De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2011); Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism: Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011); and Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

2. WRITING THROUGH THE ZONE OF NONBEING

1. See Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophy: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 126–28.

2. For elaboration of this aspect of theory and thought, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18, no. 2 (2010): 193–214.

3. For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 4. For dynamics of not being seen by virtue of being seen, see also Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities International Press, 1995), part 3.

4. “This book should have been written three years ago. . . . But these truths were fire in me then” (Pn, 6).

5. “Que veut l’homme noir?” This passage is usually translated: “What does a black man want?” Notice, however, that Fanon doesn’t write “un homme” (“a man”) but instead “l’homme.” The question that preceded it was: “Que veut l’homme?,” that is, “What does man want?” Fanon here doesn’t mean male. He means the generic term as in human being or human beings. To convey Fanon’s meaning, I took the liberty of translating “l’homme noir” as “blacks” to convey “black human beings” or “black people.”

6. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (1898): 1–23; reprinted in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (2000): 13–27; and The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). For contemporary discussion and interpretation, see Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

7. Du Bois’s classic formulation is in The Souls of Black Folk. For elaboration of potentiated double consciousness, see Paget Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” The C. L. R. James Journal 11, no. 1 (2005): 79–112. See also Gordon, Existentia Africana, chap. 4, and Jane Anna Gordon, “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007), 143–61.

8. I write “women” to maintain consistency with the plural formulation of Fanon’s question. Translators of Freud often formulate the question as, “What does a woman want?” As the indefinite pronoun in effect means any woman, then “women” works here.

9. See Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Gordon et al., 60–61.

10. “The Black” and “the White” in English has nationalist connotations, whereas Fanon was referring to a semiological racial marker, which is how the lowercase formulations of “the black” and “the white” are used in English.

11. See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). Fanon had actually begun writing down poetic meditations on life and death with racial motifs as early as his unfinished play Les mains parallèles, in which struggles with Christological imagery and racism were apparent, as his brother Joby Fanon reflects in his discussion of the play in Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, trans. Daniel Nethery (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), chap. 12. That play and Black Skin, White Masks are not Fanon’s only updating of Dante’s classic meditation on hell. He returns to it, as we will see, in his final work, The Damned of the Earth, where the connections are even stronger. In that work, each chapter presents a hellish world of violence, betrayal, and revenge, at the end of which Fanon issues a plea for humanity to shed its skin and inaugurate a new humanity.

12. For a detailed discussion of this concept, especially in terms of assessing one’s father, see Jean-Paul Rocchi, “James Baldwin: Écriture et identité” (Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne [Paris IV], doctoral diss., 2001), especially 44. Interestingly enough, the concept also relates to the Jewish concept of sin. The Hebrew word chet, often translated as sin, literally means “missing the mark.” I thank Jane Anna Gordon for this reminder.

13. For commentary on Nietzsche’s approach, see Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. C. F. Wallraff and F. J. Schmitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

14. Quoted in Pn, 14/Black Skin, White Masks, 18; it refers to Valery’s Charmés (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).

15. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. with an introduction by Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press; New York: Routledge, 1962).

16. These quotations are on pages 15 and 16 of Pn. See Black Skin, White Masks, 20–21.

17. Fela Kuti (Ibo) makes good fun of this phenomenon in the Nigerian context in his song, “Mr. Grammarticalogylisationalism Is the Boss” (1975), and for a powerful critique of linguistic colonization, see Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kikuyu), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: East African Publishing Company, 1986).

18. This theme is in the thought of many existentialists, but see especially Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion in The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 2000).

19. I was once queried by a copy editor of another book about the correlation of blacks with Caliban. That character, she insisted, was despicable, and it is degrading to associate blacks with him. What she failed to realize is that for an antiblack racist, all blacks are ultimately despicable and hence “niggers.” And what are “niggers” if not Caliban?

20. For recent discussion of this aspect of colonialism, where the colonial administrator is at war with the teacher and the priest, see Olúfmi Táíwò’s, How Colonialism Preempted Development in Africa (Bloomington: nIndiana University Press, 2010).

21. Chester Fontenot Jr., “Frantz Fanon: The Revolutionary,” First World 2, no. 3 (1979): 27.

22. Mayotte Capécia, Je suis martiniquaise (Paris: Corrêa, 1948) and La négresse blanche (Paris: Corrêa, 1950). For a review in the Anglophone world early after its publication, see Mercer Cook, “Review of Je suis martiniquaise,” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 3 (July 1949): 369–71.

23. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

24. Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal (Paris: Présence Africaine 1–3, 1954). See also his article “Littérature et colonisation,” Présence Africaine 6 (April 1949).

25. Quoted in Joby Fanon, “Pour Frantz, pour notre mère,” Sans Frontiere 5–11 (February 1982):10; Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), 19, trans. Bulhan’s.

26. See Matthieu Renault, “Le genre de la race: Fanon, lecteur de Beauvoir,” Actuel Marx, no. 55 (2014): 36–37.

27. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 51. The passage in the English edition, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 2000). is on page 35. The actual title is “For Moral Ambiguity,” but the English translator opted for “Ethics of Ambiguity,” perhaps because of Beauvoir’s preference for responsibilities emerging from ambiguity of meaning instead of the mere act of following moral rules.

28. Ibid., 58; in the English edition, 40.

29. See Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, I and II (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); available in English as The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011). For discussion of Beauvoir’s influence on Sartre, see, for example, Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), esp. chap. 3.

30. On the significance of masculine demotion, see, e.g., Amy Alexander and Alvin Poussaint, “Suicide in Black and White: Theories and Statistics,” in A Companion to African-American Studies. ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 265–78. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998), and Deborah Belle and Heather E. Bullock, “SPSSI Policy Statement: The Psychological Consequences of Unemployment,” Society for the Psychological Study of Societal Issues (June 27–29, 2014): http://www.spssi.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=1457.

31. For recent discussion of the racial damage waged by these portraits from popular culture, see Miraj Desai, “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis: A Phenomenologist Reads Frantz Fanon,” Theory and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2014): 62–63.

32. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 784.

33. See the catalogue of the Fonds Frantz Fanon, Centre National de Recherches Préhistoriques, Anthropologiques et Historiques (CNRPAH, Ministère de la Culture, Algiers, Algeria, 2013).

34. See Beauvoir’s concluding chapter of The Second Sex, “The Independent Woman,” in which she discusses Wright’s Black Boy and her personal account of her relationship with Wright in America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For elaboration of her relationship with Wright and his influence, see Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex, chap. 11: “Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and The Second Sex,” 167–84. Cf. also Renault, “Le genre de la race,” 6–7, and George Yancy’s Fanon-inspired Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 142–43.

35. Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987), 220–21.

36. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).

37. Willy Apollon, “Four Seasons in Femininity, or Four Men in a Woman’s Life,” Topoi 12, no. 2 (1993): 103.

38. For more on this concept, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Irreplaceability: An Existential Phenomenological Reflection,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 38, no. 2 (2003): 190–202.

39. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 22.

40. I earlier wrote “imaginative resources” because the text itself was part of a genre that dated to the nineteenth century in Latin America, and there is much evidence that Capécia had not written much of it. See A. James Arnold, “Frantz Fanon, Lafcadio Hearn et la supercherie de ‘Mayotte Capécia,’” Revue de littérature compare, no. 302 (2002): 148–66. This offers credence to Fanon’s remark of its being “cut-rate merchandise.” As our focus is on what Fanon thought and said, not Capécia, I will leave it to the reader to consult this recommended article and also Capécia’s volume for the latter concern.

41. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. See also Arnold, “Frantz Fanon, Lafcadio Hearn et la supercherie.”

42. Anna Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists: L’attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la revolution, ed. and trans. Frances Richardson Keller (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 114. This work was Cooper’s doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Paris in 1925.

43. The consequences of these policies in the Dominican Republic continued to the point of legislation and a high court ruling to eliminate retroactively the citizenship of Dominicans of Haitian (that is, admittedly black, although not all Haitians are black) identity in the Dominican Republic. See the Dominican Constitutional Court ruling 0168-13 (September 23, 2013), and for critical discussion, Amnesty International Report (November 14, 2013): http://www.amnesty.org/fr/library/asset/AMR27/017/2013/fr/74d4ee1b-103c-487b-b4c6-ab32175e0a43/amr270172013en.html. For an excellent short Fanonian critical analysis of the historical situation on the island and the complicated effort to establish in effect nonrelations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, see Julissa Reynoso and Neil Roberts, “On Reversals: Blackness and Political Freedom on Hispaniola,” Clamor 35, no. 5 (2006): http://clamormagazine.org/issues/35-5/content/people_1.php.

44. Anténor Firmin, in his analysis of Broca, showed that the term originally referred to offspring from unions of white women and black men, which were forbidden in a system that encouraged white male access to all women. See his Equality of the Races, trans. Asselin Charles and introduction by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (New York: Routledge, 2000).

45. See, e.g., Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

46. Capécia, Je suis martiniquaise, 150.

47. Ibid., 65.

48. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983). For a genetics study supporting this observation about white males in Latin America and the Caribbean, see K. Bryc, C. Velez, T. Karafet, A. Moreno-Estrada, A. Reynolds, A. Auton, M. Hammer, C. D. Bustamante, and H. Ostrer, “In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition Sackler Colloquium: Genome-wide Patterns of Population Structure and Admixture among Hispanic/Latino Populations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, Suppl. 2 (May 11, 2010): 8954–61; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024022/. For a summary, see http://communications.med.nyu.edu/media-relations/news/genetic-makeup-hispaniclatino-americans-influenced-native-american-european-and.

49. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 69.

50. Heinz Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” in Self-Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. C. B. Strozier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 124–60.

51. For example, the antagonist in the first edition was the biological mother, not the stepmother. The change was made to make the story more bearable for children. See Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 24.

52. René Maran’s text is Un homme pareil aux autres (Paris: Éditions Arc-en-Ciel, 1947).

53. Ibid., 19.

54. Ibid., 46.

55. Ibid., 152–54.

56. For more on Fanon’s “heuristic” approach here, see Desai, “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis,” 58–75, esp. 61.

57. Dominique-Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, 1964).

58. For more discussion of Mannoni, including Fanon’s impact on his thought, see Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 28–36. For Mannoni’s revised views, including his anticolonial sentiments, see his “The Decolonization of Myself,” Race 7 (April 1966): 327–35, which Cherki also discussed.

3. LIVING EXPERIENCE, EMBODYING POSSIBILITY

1. Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Malden, Mass; Blackwell, 1996), 53–54.

2. This concept is discussed much throughout the literature on Fanon. For two excellent recent treatments, see Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), and Hourya Bentouhami, “L’emprise du corps: Une réévaluation du corps propre chez Fanon à l’aune de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty,” Les Cahiers Philosophiques 3, no. 138 (2014): 34–46. Both, interestingly enough, focus on the phenomenological significance of the concept, which I will discuss below.

3. See the discussions in Robert Gooding-Williams’s anthology Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993), his collection of essays, Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005), and my Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997).

4. This word usually means “creeping,” but the English word “crawling” is closer to what Fanon has in mind.

5. I took some liberty with the translation here. This phrase could be translated as “and my eardrums were fucked over by cannibalism.”

6. I originally took the expression for African creole French, but I thank Nathalie Etoke for pointing out that it was petit-nègre, a form of simplified French developed by the French military overseeing Senegalese soldiers (see the manual, Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais [Paris: Imprimerie Militaire Universelle L. Fournier, 1916]), that was subsequently expanded and imposed on the indigenous populations of what became Francophone Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century.

7. For more discussion of the Banania product, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 162–63.

8. The French: “Le beau nègre vous emmerde, madame!” Literally: “The handsome nègre fucks you, madame!” Or, simply, “Fuck you!”

9. Fanon was not alone in his observations on scientific racism from even humanistic exemplars. See Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003).

10. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, with prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree, and a new introduction by C. J. Friedrich (New York: Dover, 1956), and for elaboration and critique see, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 2, and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Teshale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011); and Babacar Camara, Reason in History: Hegel and Social Change in Africa (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011), among many others in the African Diasporic and critical theory traditions.

11. Histories of and debates on Négritude are many. For two excellent studies, see F. Abiola Irele, The Négritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2011), and Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See also T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), whose title speaks for itself, and for a study of the often misinterpreted Senghorian line, see Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude, trans. Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011). And for extraordinarily concise and insightful essays, especially Aimé Césaire’s role in this movement, see Robin D. G. Kelly’s “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” his introduction to Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 7–28, and P. Mabogo More, “The Intellectual Foundations of the Black Consciousness Movement,” in Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas Individuals and Institutions, ed. Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton, and Estelle Prinsloo (Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of KwaZuluNatall Press, 2014). 173–96.

12. Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, with the foreword “Orphée noir,” by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

13. See Irele, Negritude Moment, 13–20.

14. D. A. Masolo, African Philosophy in Search of Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 25. See also Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women.

15. Irele, Negritude Moment, 27.

16. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. See also More’s discussion in “The Intellectual Foundations of the Black Consciousness Movement,” 174–75.

17. Irele, Negritude Movement., 28.

18. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté: I (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1964), 24. For Gobineau’s classic, influential, and infamous formulation of racist tropes, see Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, preface by George L. Mosse (New York: H. Fertig, 1999), originally published in Paris in 1885. For the now classic critique of this unfortunately influential work, see Joseph-Anténor Firmin, The Equality of Human Races: A Nineteenth-Century Haitian Scholar’s Response to European Racialism, trans. Asselin Charles, with an introduction by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (New York: Garland, 2000), originally published in Paris in 1885. This understudied classic (ignored in its time) has many affinities with Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. See Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, 56–63.

19. This essay is reprinted in Senghor, Liberté: I, 22–38.

20. Why ancient Greece? Subsequent Greeks seem incapable of having such an impact on thought. As Olúfmi Táíwò is fond of reminding audiences in his public lectures: If the Greek soil was so fertile for philosophical reflection, why haven’t there been great Greek philosophers in nearly two millennia? Perhaps subsequent Greeks are not only incapable but also simply don’t care. I encourage those who doubt the latter to visit the archaeological site of what is most likely Plato’s Academy. Unlike the Parthenon, celebrated with tickets of entry and robust investment in archaeological digs and research, the site of the Academy simply has a posted document and some marked-off area covered with olive pits and dog feces. For those unable to visit, see the web page Gate to Greece’s page on the Academy: http://www.mesogeia.net/athens/places/platonacademy/platonacademy_en.html.

21. See Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, 45–96.

22. Circular arguments, though fallacious, are logically valid because it’s impossible to have a true premise and a false conclusion since the latter is parasitic of the former. It’s like arguing, to use a famous example from David Hume, that a gold mountain is gold. The fascinating thing is that it works also when each premise is false. Thus, the round-square is a round-square has the same result. Gobineau’s is of the latter kind, where his premise and conclusion are false, but because it is circular, it makes his argument valid even though not true.

23. Sartre’s text appears on ix–xliv of Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française.

24. Reiland Rabaka correctly calls this hybrid “Sartrean négritude” in his Forms of Fanonism (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 72–88.

25. See Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, trans. Daniel Nethery (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), chap. 12, which includes these verses on page 61.

26. I added “as understood in the West” because of the debates about the formation of life science, with particular attention to biology as one of those and the order of knowledge that accompanies it. For an example of a critical discussion in this regard, see Oyerèrónké. Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

27. Michel Cournot, Martinique (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 13–14.

28. This dynamic is documented in nearly every eyewitness account of enslaved peoples. See, e.g., Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years as a Slave (1853), recently reprinted as Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave (New York: Praeger, 2013). See also the film version, directed by Steve McQueen (2013). I here have in mind the enslaved woman Patsy, for whom the white master’s desire occasioned more than sexual violence.

29. See, e.g., Gwen Bergner’s “The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 110, no. 1 (1995): 141–51.

30. Some of these issues emerged while he was a medical student, and others come to the fore during his final return to Martinique, which I discuss in the next chapter.

31. For the demographics of the patients in the facilities where Fanon worked, see Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), and David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2002). For contemporary research on the mental health of women of color, see, e.g., N. K. Grote, A. Zuckoff, H. Swartz, S. E. Bledsoe, and S. Geibel, “Engaging Women Who Are Depressed and Economically Disadvantaged in Mental Health Treatment,” Social Work 52, no. 4 (2007): 295–308. Also available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3025777/. Interestingly enough, although race is not mentioned, the economically disadvantaged women studied in this article are from racial minorities, and the history the authors offered substantiates my point about past dangers of such women seeking treatment.

32. In fact, on the island of Jamaica, those women are called “Stellas.” See, e.g., Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor, “Dollars Are a Girl’s Best Friend? Female Tourists’ Sexual Behaviour in the Caribbean,” Sociology 35, no. 3 (2001): 749–64, where the author discusses “fantasy” as a commodity of exchange in sex tourism.

33. As long as fear could stimulate sexual excitement, it is overdetermined that the most feared men would become objects of such ambivalence. Given the criminalization of black men, especially with regard to rape, this is an easily substantiated thesis; for research, see, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2012).

34. For discussion of the existentially serious, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities International Press, 1995), chap. 6.

35. Fanon’s nausea dates back to the age of fourteen, when he had snuck in on an autopsy. See David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 65. What, however, is “meaning” here? It is, as Miraj Desai explains, a phenomenological psychology of lived experience: “Fanon was influenced by Karl Jaspers and the phenomenological psychological tradition that placed emphasis on meaning, not on mere abstract facts or behaviors. . . . This intention involved understanding the meaning of the world, self, others, objects, media, race/ethnicity, political and economic structures, and collective traditions, as they are given in lived experience and the lived world.” “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis: A Phenomenologist Reads Frantz Fanon,” Theory and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2014):. 63.

36. Even contemporary demographics reveal that marriage between blacks and whites is the most rare. Although data are compiled the most in the United States, other countries, such as Brazil, are monitoring trends with much alarm being made particularly about marriages of black and white, even though they constitute in the United States, for example, fewer than 5 percent of all recent marriages, which means when added to the overall sum of marriages, most black married people in the United States are married to black people. See the 2011 US Population Study: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/11statab/pop.pdf.

37. See The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1965). Manning Marable pays special attention to this phenomenon in his Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2011), which stimulated critical responses from scholars that include bell hooks, who is far from homophobic; see her Writing beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013), especially 71–80. The response hooks offers to Marable’s portrait of Malcolm X’s sexual experiences with men is similar to Fanon’s about his Martinican countrymen in Paris: Sex with men is not necessarily a case of sexual preference, especially where interracial power relations limit the options available to some men versus others. This debate will no doubt continue.

38. Michel Salomon, “D’un Juif à des Nègres,” Présence Africaine, no. 5 (October 1949): 774–76. Fanon cites this text in Pn, 163.

39. See Brian Locke, “The Impact of the Black–White Binary on Asian-American Identity,” Radical Philosophy Review 1, no. 2 (1998): 98–125. See also his Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

40. See, for example, Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (New York: Basic Books, 2006) and Edmund White’s award-winning Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1994).

41. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, vol. 2, chaps. 3, 4, and 9. Cf. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 28.

42. Matthieu Renault, “‘Corps à corps’: Frantz Fanon’s Erotics of National Liberation,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy—Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française 19, no 1 (2011): 52.

43. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (1807; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). The importance of this work for modern studies of enslavement and freedom cannot be overestimated. Among the genealogy of thinkers of which Fanon is a part, engagement with it is a necessary ritual. See, e.g., Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, in addition to Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, especially chap. 2; and Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

44. The female role of Lord is a complicated matter here, since she often assumes the role in a hierarchy with a male Lord who is part of a system of lordship, which Fanon does not consider but is explored by Frederick Douglass in his discussion of the abuse he received from his master’s wife. See Frederick Douglass, My Bondage, My Freedom, and Abdul JanMohamed’s discussion, especially in relation to Hegel, in The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

45. G. W. F Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). For discussion, see Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism; Nigel Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003); Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Lou Turner, “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 134–51.

46. For discussions of the demand for bodies without points of view, see Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, chaps. 14–16.

47. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s Sons, Collier Book, 1958).

48. These themes of suffering and redemption in the possibility the future offers are themes to which he will return in The Damned of the Earth.

49. See, e.g., Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and trans. with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

50. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. with an intro. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 113, and for elaboration, see Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, part 1, and Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2006), introduction.

51. Chester Fontenot Jr., “Frantz Fanon: The Revolutionary,” First World 2, no. 3 (1979): 25 and 27.

52. The more familiar phenomenological language is the parenthesizing or bracketing of the natural attitude or naturalism, as Desai formulates it: “Fanon indeed relied on principles consistent with approaches that free themselves of naturalistic biases and instead respond to the human demands of the subject matter through an exploration of experience, meaning, embodiment, temporality, and so forth. This non-naturalistic methodological turn places Fanon in consonance with the traditions springing from both Dilthey and Husserl who criticized naturalism vis-à-vis psychological life.” “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis,” 65.

53. See Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, with a foreword by Judith Butler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

54. For elaboration, see, for e.g., Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Bentouhami, “L’emprise du corps”; and Desai, “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis.”

55. I cannot develop this claim here because of the limits of space. Interested readers may wish to consult the many discussions in The C. L. R. James Journal of how Caribbean thinkers write. See especially the set of issues since 2001, for discussions of Wilson Harris, Eduoard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Fanon, and many others.

56. Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 16; see also 5–7, where Gordon shows that creolization is a distinct form of mixture not identical with multiculturalism, hybridity, and interdisciplinarity. See also Michael Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), which offers, through resources from Caribbean thought, a critique of the politics of purity. Some readers may, however, wonder if W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), which integrates spirituals, along with bars of musical notation, and draws on resources from different disciplines and genres discounts this thesis of the uniqueness of Fanon’s text. Du Bois’s use of spirituals, musical notation, lyrical form, essays, and integration of ideas from many disciplines and communities certainly meets criteria of creolization, and The Souls of Black Folk is also the birth of a special text that created a whole genre of writing on race, of which Fanon’s appears at first to be a descendant; however, Du Bois’s existential tone, while poetic, is gentle and serious. Fanon’s is, however, at many times brutal and intentionally so. He is fighting. Du Bois also fought, and even more stridently as he aged, and both authors wrote in what could be called a blues form (see my discussion of the blues in the next chapter), but the use of humor and the scale of metatextual critique—of the unusual relationship of the author to his own text—is what differentiates Fanon’s work as something unseen before. Here one could even think of European existentialists such as Søren Kierkegaard, who used techniques of what he called “indirection,” and Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed to have been breaking idols, whose ideas and approaches also appear in Black Skin, White Masks, but that ironic relationship of failure, that tension between the author of versus the one in the work and what they manifest politically and even intellectually places Fanon’s work in a class of its own.

57. See Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence.

4. REVOLUTIONARY THERAPY

1. For an account of this unfortunately brutal history, see Jean-Michel Bégué, “French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962): From Colonial to Transcultural,” History of Psychiatry 7, no. 28 (1996): 533–48.

2. E. Stern, “Médecine psychosomatique,” Psyché (January–February 1949): 129. This article is based on the ideas of the famed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Heinrich Meng. For a summary of Meng’s life and thought, see Adolph Friedmann, “Heinrich Meng: Psychoanalysis and Mental Hygiene,” in Psychoanalytical Pioneers, ed. Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transactions, 1995), 333–41. See also Mazi Allen, “A Statement of Conscience: Frantz Fanon’s Le Syndrôme Nord-Africain,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, nos. 3 and 4 (2007): 83–88.

3. Fanon is here using the familiar and diminutive tu and toi instead of vous to stress, through belittling, the object of his condemnation.

4. Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), 208.

5. Clément Mbom, “Frantz Fanon,” in Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Alba della Fazia Amoia, Bettina Liebowitz Knapp (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), 212.

6. Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 19–20. Hereafter cited as Portrait.

7. Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroads, 2000), 104–5. Hereafter cited as Spiritual Biography.

8. Cherki, Portrait, 93. For Tosquelles’s thoughts on those years with Fanon in his own words, see “Frantz Fanon à Saint-Alban,” in Frantz Fanon: Par les textes de l’époque, ed. La Fondation Frantz-Fanon, preface by Achille Mbembe, introduction by Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France (Paris: Les Petit Matins, 2012), 75–89; original in L’Information Psychiatrique 51, no. 10 (1975).

9. Fanon wasn’t alone with this observation. For a study of its history among other black psychiatrists and psychologists, see Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003).

10. Freud’s 1930 classic in its original German is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (“Discomfort in Culture”). The well-known English title erases the radicality of the book as “civilization” (city-dwelling), which is not as foundational as culture. Fanon’s subject—the human being—makes no sense outside of the framework of culture, as his preference for sociogenic analysis suggests.

11. Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Normal Films, 1996).

12. Cherki, Portrait, 59.

13. Miraj Desai, “Psychology, the Psychological, and Critical Praxis,” Theory and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2014): 63.

14. Many of these articles are now available in English in Frantz Fanon, Decolonizing Madness: The Psychiatric Writings of Frantz Fanon, trans. Lisa Damon, ed. Nigel Gibson, with preface by Alice Cherki and afterword by Roberto Beneduce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Cherki also offers concise summaries of these papers in her Portrait; see especially her endnotes. She also summarizes prevailing, colonial models of psychiatry in the country at that time (61–62). See also Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 227–28.

15. Necrometrics.com compiled the various estimates, cross-referenced them, and checked with other authorities, and concluded that the lack of consensus makes these numbers rough approximations. See http://necrometrics.com/20c300k.htm#Algeria. For a historical study, see, for example, Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 44. And for discussions of talking about such terrible historical events, including the history of French colonization of Algeria, see Patricia M. E. Lorcin, ed., Algeria and France (1800–2000): Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

16. I’m referring, of course, to Karl Jaspers’s classic The Question of German Guilt, with a new introduction by Joseph W. Koerski, S.J., trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

17. Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography, 137.

18. This hatred is ironic since there is not only a fairly large Afro-Arab presence in the Arab world but also, depending on how “race” is interpreted, Arab people could properly be conceived of as simply mixed Afro-Asiatic people. Much of this depends on how one understands the history of Arab peoples and also their prehistory (that is, the people from whom the ethnic designation “Arab” emerged). See, for example, Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, 1991); John McHugo, A Concise History of the Arabs (New York: Free Press, 2013); and Charles Finch III, Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden (Decatur, Ga.: Khenti, 1991), chaps. 1 and 5. See also W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia’s short paper, “Who Is an Arab?” University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/K-12/Who_16629.html.

19. For an annotated list of the participants, see CMS Magazine (5 November 2007): http://csmsmagazine.org/?p=870. I learned of George Lamming’s closeness to Fanon from conversations with the former, but additional sources include Cherki, Portrait, 88.

20. See Cherki, Portrait, and Mbom, “Frantz Fanon,” 212.

21. Fanon is not, however, a cultural relativist, as Ato Sekyi-Otu shows in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 198.

22. For more on Boas, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Franz Boas in Africana Philosophy,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Isaiah Lorado Wilner and Ned Blackhawk (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), and Vernon Williams, Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996).

23. For more on racist culture, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and cf. Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Existence in Philosophy of Culture,” Diogenes (October 2014): http://dio.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/14/0392192113505409.extract (originally “L’existence noire dans la philosophie de la culture,” Diogène, no. 235–36 (July 2011): 133–47).

24. I kept the original spelling from the French text, but there is no Tomynbee to be found anywhere, so it is presumed that Fanon is really referring to Arnold J. Toynbee. For the same conclusion, see Jeremy F. Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, “Race,” and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 207.

25. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, with revisions and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), 19.

26. For classic treatments, see Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William and Morrow, 1963); Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1987) and Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964); and for more recent discussions, see Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism; Lewis R. Gordon, “Of Tragedy and the Blues in an Age of Decadence: Thoughts on Nietzsche and African America,” in Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and the African American Experience, ed. Jacqueline Renee Scott and Todd Franklin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 75–97; and Jesse R. Steinberg and Abrol Fairweather, eds., Blues—Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking Deep about Feeling Low (Malden, Mass.: Willey Blackwell, 2012).

27. In Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 78–79.

28. An observation also made by Peter Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” esp. 195–96, and F. Abiola Irele, The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought.

29. See, e.g., Cherki, Portrait, 125.

30. See Les damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, presentation de Gérard Chaliand (Paris: François Maspero éditeur S.A.R.L, 1961), 291 (hereafter Dt), and for discussion, see also Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism, 190.

31. Cherki, Portrait, 90.

32. Quoted in Ehlen, Spiritual Biography, 140.

33. The details of this period are addressed well by Cherki, Portrait, who was also, as Fanon’s student and subsequent colleague, a participant, an eyewitness to the struggles, innovations, success, triumphs, setbacks, and failures during this period. See her Fanon, 100–139.

34. For recent concerns at the ground level, see, for example, Tom Little, “Beyond Mercenaries: Racism in North Africa,” Think Africa Press (27 May 2011): http://thinkafricapress.com/libya/north-africa-sub-saharan-africas-racist-neighbour.

35. Sources are many, but see, e.g., Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Golden Age of the Moor (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992), and Nehemia Levtzion and Jay Spaulding, eds., Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wieder, 2003).

36. I place Semitic in quotation marks because of the problematic nature of the term, which emerged from the efforts in eighteenth-century French and German scholarship to organize Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew under a single linguistic nomenclature eventually crystallized in the nineteenth century in the work of the French scholar Ernest Renan. That today it is used in an almost exclusively racialized way to refer to white Jews speaks volumes about its abuse. For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants, “Global Anti-Semitism in World-Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” Journal of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7, no. 2 (2009): 1–14, and Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26–28.

37. See Mbom, “Frantz Fanon,” 213.

38. See Cherki, Portrait, 146.

39. Frantz Fanon, “Fondement réciproque de la culture nationale et des luttes de liberation,” Présence Africaine 24–25 (February–May 1959): 82–89.

40. For a history of this group, see Antoine Méléro, La main rouge: L’armée secrète de la République (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 1997).

41. This quotation is from Cherki, Portrait, 131. Memmi subsequently wrote a polemic against Fanon: “La vie impossible de Frantz Fanon,” L’Esprit (September 1971): 248–47, translated into English by Thomas Cassirer and G. Michael Twomey as “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” Massachusetts Review 14, no. 1 (1973): 9–39. Césaire, however, left us with a moving, succinct account, “La révolte de Frantz Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon: Par les textes de l’époque, ed. La Fondation Frantz-Fanon, 109–13.

42. “Investments” in this sense has psychoanalytical implications, as Abdul JanMohamed points out in the introduction to his anthology Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class and Caste (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011).

43. Even the eyewitnesses don’t seem to agree on the facts, as the variously interviewed people in the biographies, including some of the authors, who were also witnesses, attest. This is evident in the various informants’ statements in Julien’s film and Djemas’s, as well as in Bulhan’s, Caute’s, Cherki’s, Ehlen’s, Geismar’s, and Gendzier’s biographies, to name some.

44. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. with introduction and notes by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

45. For a review of many of these debates, see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

46. Cf. Drucilla Cornell, “The Secret behind the Veil: A Reinterpretation of ‘Algeria Unveiled,’” Philosophia Africana 4, no. 2 (2001): 27–35.

47. See, for example, Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in WWII (New York: Crown Books, 1995).

48. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), and Assia Djebar, A Sister to Scheherazade (London: Quartet, 1988) and So Vast the Prison, trans. Betsy Wing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). See also Nada Elia, Trances, Dances and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives (New York: Garland, 2001).

49. For elaboration, see Nigel Gibson, “Jammin’ the Airways and Tuning into the Revolution: The Dialectics of the Radio in L’An V de la révolution algeriénne,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White, eds., Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 273–82.

50. Jacques Postel, “Frantz Fanon—Looking Back,” History of Psychiatry 7, no. 28 (1996): 487.

51. For discussion of the general will in Rousseau’s and Fanon’s thought, see Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 95–161.

52. Frantz Fanon and Charles Géromini, “L’hospitalisation de jour en psychiatrie, valeur et limtes, II: Considérations doctrinales,” La Tunisie Medicale 38, no. 10 (1959).

53. Sartre later faced a similar situation during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. See Yoav Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 1088.

5. COUNSELING THE DAMNED

1. This article is available in Pour la revolution africaine: Écrits politiques, ed. Josèphe Fanon (Paris: François Maspero, 1964); in English as Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

2. So concerned was he about his appearance that he often changed suits while on duty as the chief psychiatric officer so as not to appear overcome by the North African heat. See Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). For a wonderful array of photographs of Fanon from his adolescent years through to those in his last, see the special edition of Sans Frontière (February 1982), which was a memorial issue at the twentieth anniversary of his death.

3. Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum, 1985), 34.

4. Ibid.

5. The history of racism is such that not all whites are white enough, which often led to curious anomalies in countries with antimiscegenation laws. See, e.g., Ruth Frankenberg’s The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

6. See Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism (Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2006). See also Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983).

7. Although the climate is much improved because of the casting away or overturning of antimiscegenation laws in many countries, the level of tolerance at the level of civil society varies across countries, and the fact remains that the lowest number of mixed racial marriages are, as we have seen, those between black and white.

8. See Patrick Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 156–57. Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Péju were intellectuals who had fought for the French Resistance in World War II and who were dedicated to the Algerian struggle for national liberation. Lanzmann is today most known for his work as a documentary filmmaker, which included the Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985).

9. Jacques Roumain, Bois-d’ébène (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Imp. H. Deschamps, 1945), reprinted in 2003 in Montreal by Mèmoire d’encrier. Page references are to the 2003 reprint. See also Peter Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” Socialist Register 9 (1972): 197.

10. Roumain, Bois-d’ébène, 33–34.

11. Fanon uses this term to signify immobilization, a collapse of time, in various places of The Damned of the Earth, see, e.g., 110. For an analysis of Fanon’s theory of petrification, that is, stagnated existence, see Douglas Ficek, “Reflections on Fanon and Petrification,” in Living Fanon, ed. Nigel Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 75–84.

12. This evocation of drama is not accidental in Fanon’s writings, as shown in Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, trans. Daniel Nethery (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), chap. 12, “The Playwright,” 57–62, and in Keithley Philmore Woolward, “Toward a Performative Theory of Liberation: Theatre, Theatricality and ‘Play’ in the Work of Frantz Fanon” (PhD diss. in French, New York University, 2008). See also Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 4–5; Alejandro J. De Oto’s Fanon: Política del sujeto pos-colonial, chap. 2; and Worsley’s “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat.’”

13. I offer a developed discussion of this thesis in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 4.

14. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 55.

15. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Tristram Hunt (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), and Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science (New York: International Publishers, 1966), part 2, chap. 3. Cf. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, presentation de Gérard Chaliand (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), with my references being to the 1991 edition published in Paris by Éditions Gallimard, 95–98, 254 (hereafter Dt).

16. The importance of theorizing and developing this challenge continues, as Olúfmi Táíwò’s recent interventions attest: How Colonialism Preempted Modernity nin Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) and Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

17. Nigel C. Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali base Mjondolo (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 207.

18. This argument is analyzed in detail in Jane Anna Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

19. Aimé Césaire, “La révolte de Frantz Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon: Par les textes de l’époque, ed. La Fondation Frantz-Fanon, 110. Originally published in Jeune Afrique (December 13–19, 1961).

20. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 482.

21. See, especially, Jack Woddis’s New Theories of Revolution: A Commentary on the Views of Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, and Herbert Marcuse (New York: International Publishers, 1972).

22. Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 208–9. This surplus of labor has led to the return and increase of brutal practices of exploitation, including enslavement, across the globe; see, for example, Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, eds., Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2013), Jane Anna Gordon, “Degrees of Statelessness: Vulnerability and Political Capital,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 32 (Winter 2010): 17–39, and “Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Slavery: A Portrait of the Old in the New,” Scrbd (November 21, 2013): http://www.scribd.com/doc/185968288/Theorizing-Contemporary-Practices-of-Slavery-Gordon

23. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

24. For detailed discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the general will and Fanon’s innovations in terms of national consciousness see Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory, chaps. 3 and 4, pp. 95–162.

25. E. Franklin Frazier, Bourgeoisie Noir (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955), and available in English as Black Bourgeoisie: The Book That Brought the Shock of Self-Revelation to Black America (New York: Free Press, 1997).

26. See also Amílcar Cabral’s Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, with an introduction by Basil Risbridger Davidson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), and Olúfmi Taíwó, “Cabral,” in A Companion to the Philosophers, ed. Robert L. Arrington (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 5–12.

27. Patrticia M. E. Lorcin, Introduction to Algeria and France, 1800–2000, xxii. Colonization of the so-called New World offers many instances, as shown in C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), chap. 1, “The Property”; see also, more recently, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War!: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), and George Ciccariello-Maher, “Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chávez,” Theory & Event 13, no. 1 (2010): https://www.academia.edu/733141/Jumpstarting_the_Decolonial_Engine_Symbolic_Violence_from_Fanon_to_Chavez?login=&email_was_taken=true.

28. This concern of the difficulty of overcoming a world premised on violence is subsequently taken up by a variety of writers on life in postcolonies. For some examples, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Leonhard Praeg, The Geometry of Violence (Stellenbosch, S.A.: SUN PreSS, 2007), and Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2009).

29. For more on this point, see Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning, chaps. 2 and 4.

30. Representative works of all three are W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989); and Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000).

31. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12. For more discussion, see Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory, 136–37, and Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 85–86.

32. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 5–15. For discussion of affinities between Fanon and Gramsci, see, for example, Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 148–49, and Hourya Bentouhami, “De Gramsci à Fanon, un marxisme décentré,” Actuel Marx, no. 55 (2014): 99–118.

33. For more on the distinction between nationalism and national consciousness, see Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory. See also Vivaldi Jean-Marie, Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 145–59, the chapter titled “Emergence of National Culture as the Ultimate Form of Humanism.”

34. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, “Inferno,” trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), bk. 33, line 139.

35. For more on this line of reasoning, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu,” in Ubuntu: Curating the Archive, ed. Leonhard Praeg (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2014), 10–26; and for examples of such imaginative normative pursuits in specific global challenges, see, for example, Drucilla Cornell, Law and Revolution in South Africa: Ubuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, What If Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North through the 21st Century (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2010); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Race, Rights and Rebels: Alternatives beyond Human Rights and Development (London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015). See also Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (London: Verso, 2005), and Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London: Verso, 2007).

36. Sartre’s thought and activism against anti-Arabism had an enormous influence among Arab intellectuals at the time. See Yoav Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 1061–91.

37. For a critical discussion of Sartrean Négritude and Fanon’s response, see Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 72–82.

38. See his appendix to the notebooks and my discussion in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities International Press, 1995).

39. Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987), 384–85. See also Ehlen, Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography, 159–61.

40. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969).

CONCLUSION: REQUIEM FOR THE MESSENGER

1. Peter Geismar, Fanon (New York: Dial Press, 1971), 182.

2. Patrick Ehlen recounts the complicated cat-and-mouse relationship between Fanon and Iselin throughout this ordeal; see his Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 158–64.

3. See ibid., 165–66; Ehlen’s translation is “Last night they put me through the washing machine again.”

4. See, e.g., Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco, Tesoro de lengua (1611).

5. For discussion of this double bind on black existence, see Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2009), 84.

6. Richard Cavendish, A History of Magic (London: Arkana, 1990), 2.

7. Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 165.

8. Quoted in Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, trans. Daniel Nethery (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), 61.

9. See Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother, 100–1. The address?

Dr. Ibrahim Fanon

13 East-Room 217

National Institute of Health

Bethesda, Maryland