Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon's Modification of Marxism and Decolonization of Democratic Socialism

Abstract

The riddles of revolutionary Fanonism -much more than Marxism in Blackface: Fanon's critical modification of Marxism in the anti-imperialist interests of Africa and Africans, among the other wretched of the earth It is important, at the outset, for us not to confuse what I am calling "revolutionary Fanonism" with Henry Louis Gates Jr's conception of "critical Fanonism." For Gates "critical Fanonism" entails not reading Frantz Fanon to ascertain what his lifework and legacy offers to the ongoing struggle against imperialism, but an intertextual exercise that critiques others' interpretations of Fanon, especially if the interpreters attempt to connect Fanon's critical thought to radical political practice. Gates (1999), sternly states "My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon" (252). Ultimately what Gates provides is a part post-structuralist, part postmodernist, and part post-colonialist read of Fanon that surreptitiously serves as a theoretical substitute for the Frantz Fanon who decidedly committed himself to: revolutionary decolonization; the Algerian revolution; revolutionary Pan-Africanism; revolutionary humanism; and a distinct African-centered brand of democratic socialism with serious implications for revolutionary re-Africanization. That Fanon, which is to say, the Fanon who revealingly wrote A Dying Colonialism (1965), Toward the African Revolution (1969) and, of course, The Wretched of the Earth (1968), is tellingly absent from Gates' Black Skin, White Masks-based read (or, rather, misread) of Fanon. In Gates' own words:Fanon's current fascination for us has something to do with the convergence of the problematic of colonialism with that of subject-formation. As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth, he is an almost

Fanon’s other children: psychopolitical and pedagogical implications

“…This complex description ruptures the narrative frame of the fairy tale, with its classed, gendered and heterosexual privilege, and its cultural presumptions, and perhaps also suggests that the rousing might involve more than a kiss. Unsurprisingly, given Fanon's position as a secular modernist (Rabaka 2011), at times he mobilises a traditional progressivist model where the narrative of individual development is transposed to that of the new postcolonial state. The category 'youth' is presented as a synonym of newness, or of something insecurely established.…”

“…In short the Algerians are men of property" (WE,155). It has been claimed that Fanon's mixture of critical socialist analysis and economic development discourse provides a better Marxist reading of processes of decolonisation and redevelopment (Rabaka 2011). Yet on first reading the recourse to traditional chronological age (and, as we shall see, gender) categories and status seems surprisingly conservative.…”

“…He mobilises a discourse of misplaced "adoption" not merely to privilege naturalised biological kinship (aligned to national belonging), but rather to foreground the dynamics set in play by insecure roots or foundations: "Like adopted children who only stop investigating the new family framework at the moment when a minimum nucleus of security crystallizes in their psyche, the native intellectual will try to make European culture his own"(WE, 176). Unsurprisingly, given Fanon's commitment to a socialist vision of emancipation (Rabaka 2011;Gilroy 2010), any instrumentalisation of children and childhood that subordinates the child to the adult (worker, slave labourer) he will become is aligned with the coloniser. This occurs in the long quotation from Aimé Césaire's Les Armes miraculeuses, where "The Rebel" reports to the "The Mother" how the master said: "And all that man saw of my son's cradle was that it was a cradle of a chain-gang captain.…”

Escaping the Nation in the Middle East: A Doomed Project? Fanonian Decolonisation and the Muslim Brotherhood

“…Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, is commonly recognised as a powerful critique of the capitalist legacy of colonialism in the postcolonial world (Forsythe, 1973;Nursey-Bray 1972;Rabaka, 2011;Salem 2018). The role of the "native bourgeoisie" in upholding colonality even after decolonisation tends to be the focal point of analyses of Fanon's work.…”

Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation

“…Rather, he drew on a range of resources to inform his psychopolitical account of subjectivity. Overall, Fanon was a socialist as well as theorist of decolonization (with the title of his last book Wretched of the Earth alluding to the Internationale), and indeed some have argued that his analyses contribute significantly to Marxist theory (Rabaka, 2011). …”