Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema

7. Transnational Gazes in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

As noted in previous chapters, definitions of the black diaspora and diasporic identities are fraught with contradictions and pitfalls that make easy generalizations difficult to establish or defend. In part, this is due to the tremendous vitality of black diasporic communities where “localizing strategies”—such as community, organic culture, region , center or periphery—are more likely to complicate rather than explicate descriptions of diasporic experience because they “obscure as much as they reveal” (Clifford 1994, 303). This chapter illustrates just how complex the interplay of intersections and difference can be through a discussion of Isaac Julien’s documentary, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), which interrogates the influential works of Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon. What makes this film most compelling and useful for discussion is how it examines Fanon’s theories from a transnational black diasporic perspective and, by doing so, creates an interactive debate with the film’s spectators over the strengths and shortcomings of Fanon’s work. From the moment of publishing his thesis in psychiatry, Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952, Fanon generated world-wide debate concerning the nature of the colonizer/colonized relationship, the significance of his life and works within the context of revolution, the black diaspora, seven Transnational Gazes in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask Transnational Gazes in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask 177 and his own identity as a black subject. A complex and challenging individual , a major black intellectual whose thinking was instrumental to Third World independence movements, he is considered by many to be one of the most important black theorists of the twentieth century (Julien and Nash 2000, 103). According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the rise of postcolonial theory over the past decade has once again brought Fanon’s work to contemporary notice and broadened its appeal to encompass new contexts of globalization (1991, 457). Fanon’s writings—particularly the books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1965), The Wretched of the Earth (1963), and Toward the African Revolution (1964)—are considered groundbreaking because they Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Courtesy of California Newsreel) chapter 7 178 were among the first to successfully evoke the need for decolonization. Over time, his writings have set important benchmarks in configuring the legacies of colonization, the processes of decolonization, and how racism exists in, and is perpetuated by, both. Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925 into a family “who belonged to the island’s emerging black bourgeoisie” (Alessandrini 1999, 2). Belonging to this economic status brought with it certain expectations and standards of behavior that were modeled on the precepts of French culture. As Fanon would later write, “The middle class in the Antilles never [spoke] Creole except to their servants,” a comment that dryly demonstrates the depth of his estrangement from black culture and the pressure exerted on black Martinicans to achieve an illusory whiteness by renouncing their African racial heritage (1982, 20, 18). It is therefore significant that Fanon received a privileged French-based education —one that numbered Aimé Césaire among his teachers—and thus initially developed a strong identification with France (McCulloch 1983, 2). This led to his decision to fight for the Free French forces in Europe during the Second World War, receiving “the Croix de Guerre for bravery” (Alessandrini 1999, 2). The racism Fanon encountered in France during this time, however, altered his sense of identity and place in the world, setting the stage for the revolutionary works that would challenge conceptions of colonialism worldwide (2). Black Skin, White Masks was written during Fanon’s training in psychiatry at the University of Lyons in France (Alessandrini 1999, 2). Upon graduating from “one of the most radical psychiatric teaching programmes then available,” Fanon started his practice at a hospital in Blida-Joinville, near Algiers (McCulloch 1983, 1). At the time, Algeria was under colonial rule by France, and the struggle for Algerian independence was reaching its peak. Fanon found himself treating “both Algerians fighting for independence and French police officers, the tortured and the torturers,” and the act of practicing psychiatry against such a violent political backdrop profoundly shaped Fanon’s future writings (Alessandrini 1999, 3). Becoming increasingly caught up in the struggles of Algeria to violently overthrow the French colonial powers , Fanon resigned from his position at Blida-Joinville in the late 1950s and began working with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; Alessandrini 1999, 3...