Frantz Fanon: An Indispensable Theoretical Misfit Today

Frantz Fanon’s continued relevance today is easy to document: the writings of the Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and social revolutionary continue to be widely anthologized; he is repeatedly referred to as one of the “founding fathers” of postcolonial theory (Edgar and Sedgwick 2002, 69; Gibson 2007, 36; Young 1995, 161); he continues to be cited as an indispensable interlocutor in fields as varied as postcolonial theory, anticolonialism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis. Fanon is also said to have inspired civil rights and anti-colonial liberation movements across the world, that is, movements whose legacies continue to impact our lives. And what is particularly remarkable about this writer, who passed away as long ago as 1961, is that he appears in contemporary anthologies ranging from Postmodernism (2002) to the Masculinities Studies Reader (2002) as an author alongside both emerging and established scholars rather than just as their sole object of discussion. All this, as I noted elsewhere, is certainly testimony to his continued significance and relevance as a thinker of race, nationalism, and psychoanalysis (Mardorossian 2009).

I would like now to stress another perhaps more unexpected and paradoxical way in which Fanon may matter or maybe should matter today. I would like to highlight the surprising ways in which he does not wholly, comfortably, or authentically belong to or fit in any of the movements with which he is associated. For instance, Fanon was a black man who did not believe in “the fact of blackness,” which was the surprising and remarkable translation of Fanon’s chapter title “L’Experience vécue du noir,” that is, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in Peau noire, masques blancs. We have to remember that Fanon had been brought up in a family that identified with the dominant “white” culture in Martinique and was jolted into “blackness” by racist interpellations when he arrived in France. This realization of the contingent nature of race was epitomized by the primal scene he described in which a white child pointed at him and cried out: “Tiens, un nègre! . . . Maman, regarde le nègre, j’ai peur!”¹ What is more, although Fanon is considered a founding father of postcolonial studies, he is from a country, Martinique, that never achieved post-colonial status. Martinique became an overseas department of France in 1946 and never actually underwent decolonization. Last but not least, despite having been a spokesperson for Algerian nationalism during the war of independence (and one of its unsung heroes), Fanon has been remarkably absent from the Algerian historiography of the war. As his biographer David Macey put it, attempts to turn Fanon into “a key figure in the Algerian National Liberation Front” or into “one of the chief theoreticians of the Algerian struggle” (2002, 9) are simply not consonant with either contemporary or historical accounts of the Algerian revolution. Since his death, his role in the Algerian War of Independence has been downplayed and his name has been altogether omitted from standard history books about the heroes of the National Liberation Front, no doubt at least partly because Fanon never fit in the “Arab-Islamic” mold of modern Algerian nationalism. He was neither Arab, nor Moslem, let alone religious. In the early 1990s, university students who had read Fanon in their courses did not even know that he was black. Ironically, Fanon was also a francophone author who wrote in French and who became an icon of postcolonial studies and Third Worldism, that is, fields and movements that are resolutely Anglophone.²

What I am highlighting here is the absence of alignment between the identities through which we discuss and often make sense of Fanon and his political allegiances. I see a mismatch between accounts of who he was and accounts of how he acted, between how he was perceived and what he did. And this lack of alignment, these incongruities may be, at our historical juncture, one of the most important legacies of Fanon, since we live, after all, at a time when disturbing incongruities between how people are identified and how they vote defined the 2016 elections. We may...