Frantz fanon biography pdf

FANON, FRANTZ Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale (trans. L. Scott). Austin: University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1928.) Shklovsky, V. B. (1965). Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic commentary (trans. L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis). In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 25–57. (Original work published 1921.) Shklovsky, V. B. (1990). On the relationship between devices of plot construction and the general devices of style. In Theory of Prose (trans. B. Sher) Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, pp. 15–51. (Original work published 1919.) Tomashevsky, B. (1965) Thematics (trans. L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis) In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds.) Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 62–95. (Original work published 1925.) Tynianov, I. N. (1978). Plot and story-line in cinema. Poetics in Translation, 5, 20–21. (Original work published 1926.) Fanon, Frantz CHOUKI EL HAMEL Frantz Fanon (1925–61) was one of the most influential theorists in postcolonial studies. In his short life, he combined political activism, an interest in race and race relations, and training as a psychiatrist to produce foundational works that described the psychology of colonialism as well as the politics of anti-colonial resistance. His influence is hard to overestimate: his writings were central to the political struggle that sparked the Algerian war in the early 1950s, when French colonial power was challenged decisively by native Algerians, but they were also vitally important to the Black Power movement in the US in the 1960s. Fanon’s message – when all else fails, violent revolution against oppression is the only option left open to colonized people – resonated at a time when European empires were, quite literally, falling apart as colonial territories fought for and achieved postcolonial independence. It is for this reason that 179 Henry Louis Gates regards him as “a global theorist” (1991: 457) and Edward Said calls him a “true prophetic genius” (1994: 272). However, when his work was first published, its “worldly” aspect was underscored by European intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, who insisted that Fanon’s work and the message it conveys was crucial for Europeans to read and acknowledge. Of Fanon’s most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre wrote, “Europeans, open this book, look inside. . . . Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling” (2004 [1963]: xlviii–xlix). Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 to a middle-class family in Fort-de-France, on the island of Martinique, which was then a French colony. His father worked in the customs service, a social ranking that allowed his son to attend the prestigious Lyc!ee Schoelcher, where he was a student of Aim!e C!esaire, the Martiniquais intellectual, poet, and playwright. Fanon was greatly influenced by C!esaire who, along with the Senegalese poet and cultural theorist, L!eopold Senghor, pioneered the concept of N!egritude, which had its embodiment in a movement that championed the civil and human rights of black people and the validity of black culture in all of its manifestations and that was sensitive both to local conditions and to opportunities for international and transnational solidarity. Having left Martinique, which was, during World War II, dominated by the pro-Nazi Vichy government in occupied France, Fanon found himself in a colonial territory seething with resentment over French colonial rule. He served in Algeria in 1943 and experienced first hand the racism of French colonialists and military toward blacks and North African troops who fought for France; however, because of the nature of French imperialism, which 180 FANON, FRANTZ regarded colonial territories as part of the national whole, they were also fighting for freedom and equality in Algeria (see Cherki 2006). The stark reality of the difference between freedom for France and oppression for Algerians – a reality found throughout the European empires – led Fanon to conclude that the “civilizing mission” promised by French colonialism was based on racism and prejudice rather than on a policy of assimilation whereby a dominated colonized group adopts the values of the dominant culture for the purpose of achieving equality and equal rights. Unique among literary and cultural theorists, Fanon was trained as a psychiatrist, and it was this experience more than any other that lent authority to his conceptions of colonial racism and the complex conditions of colonial experience. When Fanon returned to Martinique after the war, he was determined to get involved in politics and campaigned for Aim!e C!esaire, who ran as a Communist candidate for a seat in the French General Assembly. In 1947, however, after the death of his father, Fanon left Martinique for France to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon with the aid of a scholarship. While in France, he forged alliances with the philosopher and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported emigrant students from colonized countries studying in France. He also had close contact with prominent African and West Indian intellectuals, some of whom were published in Pr!esence Africaine founded in Paris in 1947 by Alioune Diop. Pr!esence Africaine was dedicated to the promotion of N!egritude and the achievements of diasporic Africans throughout the world, including Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In postwar France, Marxism and leftist revolutionary thinking had a strong influence on the French and !emigr!e intelligent- sia. In this environment, Fanon found a conceptual framework that reflected his own experiences and political commitments, a framework defined by the intersection of existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Existentialism, rooted in Heidegger’s phenomenology and developed with a political orientation by Sartre, stressed personal experience, freedom of choice, responsibility, and a belief that individuals must be held accountable for the creation of a meaningful life. For Fanon, it constituted a call to action, for he believed that individuals must lay claim to their fate and engage in the creation of an egalitarian society without racism and economic inequality. Marxism offered him a way to analyze and critique the oppressive structure of colonial capitalism, while psychoanalysis, together with his training in psychiatry, enabled him to recognize how this oppression affected the psychological health of colonized peoples. Though educated in France, and though he identified with French culture, Fanon later became ambivalent about his French identity. Though he had succeeded in achieving some social status, it did not translate into full integration into French society, in large part because he never felt accepted or appreciated as a black man. Ultimately, his experience led him to the belief that the racism deeply embedded in French society created an inferiority complex that blinded blacks to their own subordination. These experiences inspired his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks], published in 1952, when he was just 27 years old. In this book, Fanon insisted on race as a primary factor for understanding the binary world of the colonizer–colonized relationship. Unlike Albert Memmi, who understood the experience of colonized peoples from a classical humanistic perspective, Fanon preferred a Marxian analytical FANON, FRANTZ framework that saw the relation between the colonized and the colonizers as a psychosocial construct along the lines of the Hegelian master–slave relation. In the eyes of white culture, he argued, black culture is inferior and thus colonization becomes both necessary and desirable – an act of civilizing charity to rectify the unfortunate condition of being black. Racism, as Fanon experienced it, was a betrayal of the assimilationist ideology of French colonization. Despite his education in the metropolitan capital, he realized that he was nothing more than a black colonial subject constructed to serve the ends of the white colonizers: “I resolved,” he wrote, “to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known” (1994a[1952]: 115). For Fanon, to make oneself known was to remove the white mask of the so-called European norm and show one’s true face – a black face, the face of a man who would, like any other man, white or black, reject oppression, pain, and suffering. Race and the oppression associated with it intersected with a number of other important themes in Fanon’s work, including gender. Indeed, Fanon was unique in focusing on the interrelationship of race, gender, and nationalism. Unlike many writers of his time, Fanon paid special attention to women’s oppression under the traditional Algerian patriarchal structure, which was exacerbated by repressive colonial policies. In A Dying Colonialism, a collection of essays on the Algerian revolution published in 1959, at the height of the Algerian war, Fanon devoted two chapters to women’s issues in the colonial situation. However, despite his progressive position with respect to women’s issues, his vision was, like that of most intellectuals of his time, limited by the assumption that patriarchal social organization and heterosexuality were normative. 181 For example, his explanation of the use of the veil by Muslim women is guided by his awareness of multiple meanings: on the one hand, the veil signals women’s exclusion from political life; on the other hand, it served as a symbol of resistance in the struggle against colonial domination. Fanon was able to note the radical implication of women taking up “the haı̈k [outer gown covering the entire body], thus affirming that it was not true that woman liberated herself at the invitation of France and of General de Gaulle” (1994b[1959]: 62). And he was eloquent in his awareness of how women suffered in the war for independence: “In Algerian society stories were told of women who in ever greater number suffered death and imprisonment in order that an independent Algeria might be born” (107–8). In the end, Fanon’s defense of women’s agency was hamstrung by his residual belief in the constraining customs and norms of patriarchy. This ambivalence is neither confronted nor analyzed critically in his work. In 1952, after his marriage (to a white French woman, Jos!e Dubl!e), Fanon left France for Algeria to work as the director of Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, a city just outside Algiers), where he treated French soldiers as well as Algerian rebels. Fanon was soon outraged at the alienation and brutality suffered by Algerians under the French colonial regime. In protest, he resigned his position as director and asserted, in his letter of resignation, his commitment to exposing the oppression of the Algerian people: “If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization” (1994c[1964]: 53). He then joined the National Liberation Front (FLN), the Algerian nationalist movement 182 FANON, FRANTZ that in 1954 declared a war of independence against French colonial rule. Ostracized and blacklisted by the French authorities, Fanon was forced to leave Algeria for Tunisia, where he became a prominent spokesperson for the FLN. His writings for FLN’s official organ El Moudjahid (“resistance fighter”) portrayed the struggle in Algeria as a model for anti-colonial movements throughout Africa. Fanon stressed, in A Dying Colonialism, that independence could only be attained through violent revolution against the French colonial regime. Despite experiences elsewhere in North Africa – Morocco, for example, achieved independence through diplomatic negotiations – the Algerian war taught Fanon that violent revolution was more often than not the only effective means to achieve liberation from foreign colonial occupation. And while this aspect of Fanon’s work met with criticism, his eloquence in stating the case for violence – that it was both legitimate and necessary – had a tremendous impact on anti-colonial movements in the decades that followed events in Algeria. Fanon’s experiences in France and Algeria led him to see the world in a Manichean way, that is, in terms of a bitter struggle between irreconcilable opposites. His last book, Les Damn!es de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth], offers a penetrating analysis of this kind of struggle: “This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species” (2004[1963]: 5). Fanon analyzes the phenomenon of colonial violence and asserts that the period of “decolonization,” in which anti-colonial struggle moves toward the assertion of independence, “implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation” (2). This challenge, in most cases, must be addressed by violence. Fanon believed that violent struggle against foreign occupation and oppression was a legitimate form of selfdefense and thus morally justified: “violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence” (51). Despite this justification, however, his thought gained notoriety in European circles in part through the work of Hannah Arendt, who portrayed Fanon as an apologist of violence (1970). In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is careful to emphasize that the “spontaneity” of violent revolution must be leavened by the political education of the people at the hands of intellectuals who have rejected the “national bourgeoisie” that installs itself as the heir of the colonial bourgeoisie that is on its way out. As a Marxian political analyst, he believed that newly independent African nations would duplicate the colonial style if they were governed by the comprador bourgeoisie (i.e., a non-capitalist clique acting in their own rather than in the national interest), arguing that such a state of political affairs would merely preserve the geopolitical status quo that paves the way for neocolonial domination by economic, political, and cultural means. The nature of capitalism and the class system in Africa were different from that of industrialized Europe. The African model did not fit the classical Marxian paradigm which is why Fanon argued that the peasantry who had traditional communal claims to land should lead the social revolution rather than the Marxist model of the revolution of the landless proletariat. Fanon resented the national bourgeoisie who were simply a class of native agents educated and employed by the European colonial bourgeoisie to serve as collaborators for their mutual self-interest. For them, “nationalization signifies very precisely the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period” (2004 [1963]): 100). Violence may be the necessary tool for achieving liberation, but it will remain inert FANON, FRANTZ and self-defeating if a strong national culture has not been developed to harness the energies it unleashes. Thus Fanon posited a threefold process through which the nation must pass – from a period of imitation, in which the colonizer serves as norm, the colonized are tempted by projects of cultural revival and then finally there comes the decisive period of true revolution and national selfrecognition, a “combat” stage, in which the colonized writer “turns into a galvanizer of the people” through a “revolutionary literature, national literature” (159). Fanon’s Marxian orientation led him away from a narrow-gauge nationalism that could lead to isolation and social regression, toward the formulation that made his work so vital to contemporary theorists of postcolonialism, transnationalism and globalization: “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives” (180). For Edward Said, one of Fanon’s heirs in postcolonial studies, there is another important stake in the struggle, for “unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into social consciousness, the future would hold not liberation but an extension of imperialism” (Said 1994: 267). The Wretched of the Earth has been widely influential among anti-colonial activists around the world, especially among African nationalists and writers like Steve Biko of South Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, and among intellectuals and activists in the United States, including Malcolm X. Fanon was a strong intellectual presence in the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His experience with racism, specifically with the colonialist ideology of racial difference, provided the foundation for a good deal of postcolonial theory in the 1970s and ’80s. He was a foundational influence on Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, early theorists of postcolonial studies, and 183 continues to play a strong role in the work of younger theorists whose interests lie in analyzing the intersection of race, colonialism, violence, and anti-colonial struggle. Fanon died, after a battle against leukemia, in Washington, DC, on December 6, 1961, about seven months before Algeria proclaimed its independence. He is buried in the cemetery of Chouhadas (“war martyrs”) in Algeria. Although the issues and problems that Fanon analyzed belonged to a particular historical moment, they remain with us in new forms of neo-colonial domination, including the policies of international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the economic interests of multinational corporations, and the hegemony of Western entertainment media. Moreover, the pressing problems faced by immigrants of former colonies residing in Europe suffer through the same experiences of alienation and oppression that Fanon diagnosed in the colonial situation. One of the most enduring lessons that Fanon has taught is that the struggle for equality and economic justice are grounded in racial oppression and colonial violence, and that the postcolonial era is no more free of them than it is of the fundamental architecture of power that led to colonization in the first place. SEE ALSO: African American Literary Theory; Bhabha, Homi; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Globalization; Heidegger, Martin; Marxism; Memmi, Albert; Phenomenology; Postcolonial Studies; Psychoanalysis (to 1966); Said, Edward; Sartre, Jean-Paul REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alessandrini, A. (ed.) (1999). Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harvest Books. 184 FORM Bulhan, H. A. (1985). Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum Press. Caute, D. (1970). Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking Press. Cherki, A. (2006). Frantz Fanon: Portrait (trans. N. Benabid). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fanon, F. (1994a). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. C. Farrington). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952.) Fanon, F. (1994b). A Dying Colonialism (trans. A. Gilly). New York: Grove. (Original work published 1959.) Fanon, F. (1994c). Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (trans. H. Chevalier). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1964.) Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (trans. R. Philcox). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1963.) Gates, H. L. (1991). Critical Fanonism. Critical Inquiry, 17, 457–470. Gendzier, I. L. (1973). Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon Books. Gibson, N. C. (2003). Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Cambridge: Polity. Gordon, L. (ed.) (1996). Fanon: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Hansen, E. (1977). Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Jinadu, A. (1986). Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution. London: KPI. Macey, D. (2000). Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta Books. Onwuanibe, R. C. (1983). A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon. St Louis: W. H. Green. Said, E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Sartre, J.-P. (2004). Preface. In F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press, pp. 7–31. (Original work published 1963.) Sekyi-Otu, A. (1996). Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharpley-Whiting, T. D. (1998). Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Siebert, R. (1974). Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation; Concerning Frantz Fanon’s Political Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press. Toumson, R. (1984). M!emorial international Frantz Fanon. Pr!esence Africaine. Form PETRE PETROV The concept of literary or artistic form has been evoked in a bewildering number of contexts, prominently in the works of Russian Formalists. The name of this critical movement is a sufficient indication that “form” occupies a central place on its agenda. Yet this centrality is not tantamount to a single or unambiguous understanding on the part of the Russian Formalists as to the nature of literary form. In fact, they often avoided providing any definitive meaning of the term, preferring terminology less burdened with prior significations and thus less susceptible to ambiguity. The formalist notion of form developed not so much as the result of explicit definitions, but as the corollary of concrete attempts to grasp and analyze the elusive artistic nature of texts. This, more than anything else, was the pursuit that shaped and distinguished the formalist movement. One of its members, Boris Eikhenbaum (1965 [1925]), noted that the question of form eventually became synonymous with the question of literature, of what constitutes a “literary fact.” As the movement evolved, the Formalists’ understanding of what makes literature a distinct and special realm of human practice developed new levels of complexity, as did the conception of literary form. At the inception of the movement, 1916–20, “form” was, first and foremost, the banner under which the Formalists set out to liberate literature from everything they considered extraneous to it: authorial self-expression, didactic suggestion, ideological or social commentary, psychological analysis – essentially all of the text’s possible referents and contexts. The separation of sign from referent had been theoretically established in the philosophical writings of Edmund Husserl; it was also a pivotal