Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in France. Founded during the French Revolution in 1794, it graduated such esteemed intellectual figures as Sartre, philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), and philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), among many others. After completing a master’s thesis, Césaire returned to Martinique to teach. During his brief four-year tenure at the Lycée Schoelcher, Césaire taught not only Fanon but also Glissant, who credited Césaire as being a teacher of influence by assigning texts by the poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) and the novelist André Malraux (1901–1976), whose work introduced interrelated questions of aesthetics and politics.¹⁸

      Nevertheless, these personal connections were delicate. Although Césaire and Fanon would always share a special affinity—Césaire would later write a eulogy for Fanon in the journal Présence africaine—generational and political differences emerged, as seen in Black Skin, White Masks, perhaps an unsurprising development given the hierarchy between teacher and student and their contrasting career ambitions.¹⁹ This point is nevertheless important, to avoid an oversimplification of Martinican politics or intellectual life. Still, Césaire provided a vital role model for Fanon—a black intellectual who took advantage of the opportunities of French education and culture, but who was unafraid of confronting latent undercurrents of racism and political chauvinism.²⁰

       Négritude

      Négritude is essential for understanding the political culture of Martinique prior to and just after the Second World War. For Fanon, this black Francophone movement was his first formative intellectual influence. Often associated with the then-popular aesthetic of surrealism, Négritude had more complex origins than this common view can convey. As the literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards has detailed, it drew upon multiple sources and venues across the Atlantic world, comprising a black internationalism, to use an expression by one of its vital predecessors, Jane Nardal (1902–1993).²¹ Established in Paris during the 1930s by Césaire, Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), and Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978), it encompassed a range of literary figures. Senghor was from Senegal in French West Africa, which he would later lead to independence, becoming its first president in 1960. Damas came from French Guiana in South America, though he also studied at the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique, where he and Césaire first met as students. But equally important were the sisters Jane and Paulette Nardal (1896–1985) as well as Césaire’s wife, Suzanne (1915–1966), all of whom were from Martinique and helped shape Négritude’s meanings.²²

      Given its transatlantic geography, this intellectual movement must be understood as cosmopolitan in formation, but defined by perspectives from the margins of the French Empire. Like New York and London, Paris attracted writers, artists, and intellectuals from around the world, with gifted students from France’s colonies attending its universities. But such cosmopolitanism was not circumscribed by imperial boundaries. Through the Nardal sisters, Césaire and his collaborators engaged the Harlem Renaissance and the efflorescence of African American cultural life during the same period, which marked the appearance of such figures as Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), and Claude McKay (1889–1948). The Black Atlantic and the alternative modernity it posed against European culture, as argued by sociologist Paul Gilroy, fully emerged during the first half of the twentieth century through the concurrent rise of Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, and Négritude.²³

      Like the former two movements, Négritude confronted the effects of racial discrimination and political inequality. But it adopted this mantle of political aspiration through cultural expression, primarily poetry. As the Nigerian literary critic Abiola Irele later commented, Négritude was at once a literary and ideological movement that signaled a “collective consciousness” that resisted the strictures of French colonialism.²⁴ It represented an act of counter-acculturation against the French policy of assimilation maintained during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which promised equal citizenship and dignity provided that French language and moral values were adopted. Colonial subjects had to demonstrate their aptitude on French terms.²⁵ Négritude, in contrast, asserted a black identity that was not only positive—thus fighting against racist stereotypes of cultural primitivism and intellectual inferiority—but construed as civilizational, rather than merely local, in scope. Négritude argued for the innate unity of black culture, a common heritage that preceded Western colonialism. Yet, it implicitly worked within the French notion of “association” that stressed distinct cultures and pathways toward civilization.²⁶ Négritude therefore paralleled, but also retained specificity from, the Pan-Africanism espoused by Anglophone intellectuals like Henry Sylvester Williams (1869–1911) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) during the same period, a movement which cited a shared experience of racism and political disenfranchisement across the Atlantic world from colonial Africa, to Europe, to the Americas.

      It is important to stress, then, that Négritude as defined during the 1930s was not anticolonial. Though it condemned racial exclusion, it desired accommodation within French cultural life, not the end of French imperial rule as such—a key contrast with Fanon’s vehement anticolonialism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Reflecting on the expression in 1968, Damas remarked that Négritude “had a very precise meaning in the years 1934–35, namely the fact that the black man was seeking to know himself, that he wanted to become a historical actor and a cultural actor, and not just an object of domination or a consumer of culture. . . . The word ‘negritude’ was coined in the most racist moment of history, and we accepted the word nègre as a challenge.”²⁷ Négritude thus presented an internal critical position both cultural and political in scope—a self-defined black humanism counterposed against a French colonial humanism that diminished African civilization.²⁸ Expressing its resistant stance in aesthetic fashion, Césaire demonstrated Négritude to powerful effect in his epic poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939), by conjuring in one section the spirit of Toussaint L’Ouverture and those who rebelled during the Haitian Revolution.²⁹

      The ambitions of Négritude therefore centered on sparring with the tacit limitations of long-standing colonial policies of assimilation, but without wholly rejecting French cultural and political ideals. Indeed, Césaire, Senghor, and Damas all wrote in French. They were all French citizens. Each eventually served in the French National Assembly at different points, representing their respective territories, and thus fulfilling what the policy of assimilation had promised—through the embrace of French civilization, a colonial subject could attain cultural citizenship and a measure of equality. Though Négritude did create a vital space for black culture, it retained a conservative quality, as Fanon would note, by primarily looking toward the past, not the future. Césaire and Senghor did turn toward a sharper rhetoric after the Second World War, as seen in Césaire’s fierce polemic Discourse on Colonialism (1955) and Senghor’s ascension to the presidency of Senegal.³⁰ But these shifts occurred in the wake of Négritude, which attained a peak in 1948 with the publication of an anthology of Négritude poetry edited by Senghor that included an influential preface by Sartre titled “Orphée noir” (“Black Orpheus”), Orpheus referring to the mythological Greek poet.

      Sartre depicted Négritude as a form of antiracist racism—a race-based cultural movement intended to counter Eurocentrism. But, as such, it served as a temporary measure, part of a cultural dialectic that would lead to “the abolition of racial differences.” “The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples together in the same struggle,” Sartre argued, “must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity,” an instance of strategic essentialization that Négritude represented.³¹ Though Sartre’s preface introduced the work of Césaire, Senghor, and Damas to a wider audience, it also oversimplified Négritude’s complex dimensions and foreclosed the possibility of an enduring black cultural autonomy, in a manner criticized as paternalistic.³² Yet other black writers would sharply critique the movement. Echoing views articulated by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, the Nigerian playwright СКАЧАТЬ