Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (review)

Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. London: Routledge, 1999. xii + 299 pp. ISBN 0-415-189-76-4 paper.

Anthony Alessandrini's Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives introduces us to a few of the many names that Fanon has come to embody in cultural studies as well as the tensions that he has left us with as a legacy of his passage. For some critics, Fanon is a misogynist whose theorization of the black woman's social mobility is reminiscent of Freud's description of the little girl's acquisition of sexuality (Chow 42-43). For others, Fanon is woman for good and cannot exhibit any misogynistic tendencies, for his reading of Je suis martiniquaise, which is at the source of most feminists= outcries, should stand as a particular criticism of a particular Caribbean woman, Mayotte Capécia, rather than as a pronouncement about a so-called black woman's caucaphiliac predisposition (Sharpley-Whiting 63). Sometimes, too, Fanon's flirtatious rapport with the homoerotic is interpreted as an indication of his entrapment in a masquerade of homosexual desires, that is, Fanon inhabiting the identifying attitudes of the (homosexual) other just as he is caught in the game of impersonating the white (French) phenomenologist (Goldie 81). Perhaps all these tensions and various names of Fanon are more proofs that Frantz Fanon has become the proper name of the encounter between cultural studies as the timely return of history, agency, and politics, on the one hand, and the poststructuralist spirit informing this return, on the other hand (Mowitt 91-92). Nonetheless, some critics still think that the constant inventions and reinventions of Fanon risk leading us astray, and that although "cultural studies must engage with Fanon," this engagement should be done with less concocted Fanons, but rather with the sort of Fanon that is like Césaire--the Césaire who, unlike Senghor, is Bretonian (Gibson 107). Despite these healthy and informative exchanges that take place in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, one could be left mourning the occultation of the haeecetique subject, which might be explained by the clear refusal to obliterate the question of the subject's relation to its community (formation) through a radical coalescence between the "post" of "postcolonialism" and the "post" of "postmodernism" (Chow 34). It is true that despite the many names Fanon has come to represent in postcolonial studies, both he and Algeria are rarely taken to be free-floating signifiers. The names of Fanon have often amounted to that of prophet (Gibson 115), and Algeria has often been the name of "the place of a global revolution against colonialism" whence Fanon's theory of violence can be understood (Azar 26).

K. Martial Frindéthié

K. Martial Frindéthié is Assistant Professor of French, Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literatures at the University of Maryland (College Park).

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