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org/site Frantz Fanon Critical Perspectives

Ash Sharma | Journal: General Issue [0] | Issues | Reviews | Mar 2007
Review of Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed) (1998) Franz Fanon Critical Perspectives, Routledge.[1]
Since his untimely death at the age of 36 in 1961, the Martinician-born psychiatrist, writer and
revolutionary Frantz Fanon has become something of a looming spectre in radical Black politics. From
Stokely Carmichaels Black Power militancy to Homi Bhabas postcolonial poetics, Fanons name has
been constantly invoked in charged debates or to animate wider political and intellectual concerns.
Unsurprisingly, his writings still stir antagonisms but with a recent collection of essays on Fanon, the
metropolitan academia in the US and to a lesser extent, Britain, exhume a contentious legacy.
Significant but uneven, many disparate essays on Fanon are packed into one volume. In his perceptive
introduction, Alessandrini highlights the importance of Fanons work to contemporary cultural politics
but frustratingly, he focuses on the fraught relationship between Fanons work and the academic
discipline of cultural studies instead. If the essays themselves address the cultural studies issue, they
seem to offer only crude or simplistic positions either for or against. For example, Nigel Gibson
strongly states that versions of Fanon doing the university rounds are politically problematic and his
version entails the authentic radical Fanon. Yet avoiding detailed analysis, Gibson makes many
isolated assertions. Alessandrini himself suggests that writers critical of cultural studies tend to ignore
its disciplinary intricacies. So it might have been better for the volume to have addressed broader
questions of the institutional production of knowledge and its relation to global politics, rather than
exclusively focusing on the cultural studies field. John Mowitt does raise the crisis of the humanities
of American universities, making several points about Fanons place in American cultural studies.
Unfortunately, an informative reading of Fanons essay on Algerian Radio against contemporary
university and media discourses lacks depth, failing to offer a sustained argument.
In contrast, F. San Juan Jr. and Neil Lazarus essays are substantial and authoritative. Lazarus
engagingly defends Fanons nationalism and its continuing relevance to collective political struggles.
San Juan provocatively reads Fanons conceptualizing of revolutionary practice through the
philosophic prism of Benedict Spinoza. By working with Spinozas dynamic materialism, San Juan
challenges language-based theories of representation and agency. Occasionally, his powerful
arguments do become fragmented and difficult to follow, Fanons distinctive voice merging with
Spinozas dense prose in a conceptualising of political struggle not so far removed from the Gramsciinfluenced cultural studies approach of which San Juan is so critical. While productive, both essays
tend to privilege the Algerian revolutionary The Wretched of the Earth Fanon against the earlier
existential Black Skin, White Masks, thereby limiting both Fanons own writings and potential areas
of inquiry.
Kobena Mercer readjusts the Fanon focus to cultural representation and the problems of wedding
nationalism to race, gender and sexuality in the West. Initially a part of the Mirage catalogue from the
Fanon-inspired exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Mercers essay applies
Fanons work to the diasporic visual arts. Unlike those theorists who claim Fanon solely as a
revolutionary and restrict him to orthodox Marxist or third world contexts, Mercer locates Fanon in a
lineage of contemporary Black media and cultural production which resonate with Fanons insights
into racism and ontology. Mercers exemplary musings on race, diaspora and subjectivity are wellrepresented further afield in Alan Reads edited collection The Fact of Blackness and by Isaac Juliens
film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask. Similarly, Rey Chow and T. Deanen Sharpley-Whitings
essays examine complexities of gender and sexuality throughout the Fanon corpus. Sharpley-Whiting
offers an analysis of author Capcia from Fanons critique in Black Skin, White Masks, both defending
Fanon against some of his critics as well as highlighting the limitations of his gender politics.
Arguably the strongest essay in the collection is Samira Kawashs concise and inspired reading of
Fanons articulations of violence in processes of decolonisation. Incorporating contemporary theory
and the haunting figure of the vampire, Kawash relates Fanons thought to present media discourses of
terrorism in the New World Order. Kawash argues that Fanons demand for absolute violence should
be understood beyond the dialectical conflict of coloniser and colonised, for the total destruction of the
(post) colonial world. Gwen Bergner and E. Ann Kaplans essays might provide some suggestive

observations about race and psychoanalysis but Kawash foregrounds the spectral and rupturing nature
of absolute violence with a useful critique of Slavoj Zizeks reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis. She
argues that Zizeks theorising of the subject in symbolic reality cannot be universally applied to every
social context. This relatively small point nevertheless raises the question that the collection does not
address directly the relationship of knowledge and Fanons writings to eurocentrism. The closest the
volume gets are references in many of the essays, especially Kawashs, to the potential difference
between Fanons humanism and the humanism of European enlightenment.
The collection offers a stimulating, if partial, snapshot of the critical spectrum on Fanons writings.
What we need now are more focused and in-depth studies of Fanons writings within a changing
transnational present. Where are the African and Asian based writers? Why limit Fanon to a purely
academic agenda? The final essay by Franoise Verges on the politics of reparation in the French postslavery context exemplifies one way of developing Fanons thought by locating his writings in a
larger anti-colonialism narrative. Like the impressive collection edited by Lewis Gordon et al. Fanon:
A Critical Reader, Verges attempts to see Fanon as a significant philosopher beyond specifics of time
and place. A complex thinker, writer and committed activist, Fanons writings demand multiple forms
of address and engagement. At the end of her essay, Kawash evocatively suggests that Fanon shows us
that decolonisation is not an event that happens in history; it is rather the shattering of that history and
the opening to an otherwise that cannot be given in advance, but that is always, like justice, to come.
Can we do justice to the spectre of Fanon?

Notes
1. Book review originally published in Black Media Journal, 1999, No. 1, pp. 82 []
Article printed from darkmatter Journal: http://www.darkmatter101.org/site
URL to article: http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/03/01/franz-fanon-critical-perspectives/