Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Frantz Fanon - Christopher J. Lee страница 3
Название: Frantz Fanon
Автор: Christopher J. Lee
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
Серия: Ohio Short Histories of Africa
isbn: 9780821445358
isbn:
Second, unlike many existing studies, several chapters perform a basic walkthrough of his books to provide readers with a clear, if abbreviated, sense of their structure, language, argumentation, strengths, and weaknesses. This book seeks to balance Fanon’s life and the voice found within his texts. This expository approach may seem prosaic, but it stands in contrast with many critical assessments that focus on particular ideas, specific essays, and even individual aphorisms, while neglecting the cul-de-sacs, the repetition, as well as the broader narrative structures that frame his analyses—in addition to the historical contexts that chronologically shaped his insights.
Third, this book draws attention to a distinct ethic found in Fanon’s politics and writing—what I call radical empathy—that is touched upon in the epigraph by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian activist-intellectual deeply influenced by Fanon. Despite Fanon’s privileged middleclass upbringing and elite education, his arguments are ultimately marked by persistent consideration for oppressed people and communities: identifying with their experiences, learning from their example, and using such knowledge to pursue political change. This principle of humane recognition is Fanon’s most enduring lesson—one still resonant that deserves renewed notice in our politically fraught era.
A number of people helped with this project. I thank Gillian Berchowitz for her initial invitation and for her persistent editorial reassurance. Jerry Buttrey, Jeffrey Byrne, Sharad Chari, Judith Coffin, John Comaroff, Fred Cooper, Yoav Di-Capua, John Drabinski, Sarah Duff, John Gibler, Nigel Gibson, Barbara Harlow, Neville Hoad, Isabel Hofmeyr, Priya Lal, James Le Sueur, Dan Maga-ziner, Minkah Makalani, Kris Manjapra, Marc Matera, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, Sarah Nuttall, Philippe Peycam, David Scott, Todd Shepard, Jon Soske, Cirila Toplak, and Françoise Vergès provided answers, conversation, and comments on portions of the manuscript. I am immensely grateful. I started this project while a visiting fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I thank its then director, Julie Hardwick, as well as Jeremi Suri for their warm support. A grant from the government of India provided financial support at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. I completed this book while a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. I extend unqualified gratitude to Bradley Craig, Krishna Lewis, Abby Wolf, and, not least, Henry Louis Gates Jr. for time, assistance, and encouragement that proved indispensable toward the end.
Finally, a word about the dedication. This book is not a typical work of scholarship. It has been motivated by a set of political and moral convictions. While I was completing penultimate revisions, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, and the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson, was exonerated of wrongdoing several months later, on November 24. This case is a world apart from Frantz Fanon’s, and police should not be universally construed as hostile. Yet, to my mind, this tragedy speaks to the continued dehumanization of black and other racial minority communities in some quarters, and the recurrence of violence toward such communities as a result—matters that Fanon grappled with during his lifetime. I remain troubled by this situation. This book is dedicated, in this spirit, to the memory of Brown, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice—a few among many.
A Note on Translations and Editions
Frantz Fanon has been widely translated since the 1960s. Given that this text is primarily pedagogical in scope and meant to be read alongside his books, I have relied on the editions of his work most readily available in the United States and South Africa, where this book is being published jointly by two presses. Though translations by Richard Philcox are the most recent, I have also relied on earlier editions by Haakon Chevalier, Constance Farrington, and Charles Lam Markmann, due to their relative strengths and still wide availability in university and public libraries, as well as in bookstores. I have cited which editions I use in the endnotes.
Introduction
Unthinking Fanon
Worlds, Legacies, Politics
Reality, for once, requires a total understanding. On the objective level as on the subjective level, a solution has to be supplied.
—Black Skin, White Masks 1
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on Martinique in the French Antilles, an archipelago of islands scattered across the southeastern edge of the Caribbean between Haiti and South America. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a political theorist of anticolonial liberation struggle. During his brief thirty-six-year life, he published two seminal books: Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the latter appearing in print just days before his death. These two books addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–62), respectively. He also wrote a less-appreciated third book titled Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), in addition to numerous medical journal articles and political essays both under his name and anonymously, a selection of which appeared in the posthumous collection Toward the African Revolution (1964). Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s observations and analysis of colonialism and decolonization in these books have remained vital, due to their firsthand immediacy as well as the incisiveness of his ideas.
Indeed, Fanon’s prescient insights have influenced a range of academic fields, such that the term Fanonism has been invented as shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. The secondary literature on his work continues to grow apace. Above all, Fanon remains a political martyr, who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.
But who is Frantz Fanon? His diverse career, personal geography, and complex ideas defy any simplistic rendition of his life. Indeed, the wide-ranging influence of his work over the past fifty years has often prompted a rudimentary sense of his biography, with his books and essays being a substitute for the man himself. Like other writers and intellectuals, Fanon is regularly appreciated in textual terms, rather than through the facets and challenges of his own personal experience. Explaining the political orientation of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton (1942–1989), one of its leaders, once declared, “We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare.”2 Such is the approach that emerged shortly after Fanon’s death and has since extended to the present day, with his insights still providing vital methods of political interpretation.
However, this critical application has had, at times, a seemingly incongruous effect. Edward Said (1935–2003), the esteemed Palestinian scholar, once insisted, for example, that Fanon be read alongside Jane Austen as a means of rethinking the Western canon.3 Others СКАЧАТЬ