“Closed Place, Open Word”: Locating the Post-Manichean in Recent Black Thought

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 1, 2000 “Closed Place, Open Word”: Locating the Post-Manichean in Recent Black Thought Gamal Abdel-Shehid Recently, in social and political theory, we have become familiar with using “posts” to describe our world. As someone in favour of these developments, I see this paper as my attempt to add another post to the mix: the post-Manichean. While there are a number of reasons why this is important, I will outline some of them. First, in response to Wahneema Lubiano’s (1998) question, “What’s PoMo got to do with it?”, I recognize the need to locate black thought within the various traditions of postmodernity, post-structuralism, and so on. More specifically, I share Lubiano’s insistence that something is to be gained when “the idea of metanarratives is up for grabs” (206). Moreover, I share her claim that “the collage modality of postmodernism is one way to refuse the dangers and pleasures of coherence by instead demanding constant restructuring” (211). The second reason for the excavation of the post-Manichean is that I share Lubiano’s desire for “elbow room” for black life in contemporary social theory. The elbow room I need is a way of responding to the Eurocentrism and, dare I add, pathetic nature of the Marxism vs. post-structuralism binary, which continually buries and carnivalizes some of the most important black thinkers of the past fifty years, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and C.L.R. James. Such a binary makes it impossible to read thinkers who have been sympathetic or made contributions to both traditions, as well as those who carved out their own aesthetic and political spaces. It is clear that new positions are necessary . Thus, the following is an attempt to think about the place of the post-Manichean in contemporary black social and political thought. While I suggest in my conclusion that we might find this feature in a number of black texts of the past century, I will only outline how the post-Manichean works in a couple of places. These two places are what I sense as being paradigmatic of a post-Manichean sensibility; the texts are Ato Sekyi-Otu’s 1996 book, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience and Edouard Glissant’s essay entitled “Closed Place, Open Word” in his 1997 book, Poetics of Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30 (2000) 23 Relation. If read together, these works offer the outlines of a concept of the post-Manichean, which involves a tension between the open spaces found in and beyond coercive structures and institutions. Creolizing the Philosopher’s Body Recently, there has been a spate of work and commentary on Frantz Fanon. Within this renaissance, which includes monographs, edited collections , and films, one of the issues that has not been sufficiently addressed is Fanon’s location in the Caribbean, as well as his Caribbean identity. There may be many reasons for this, but one central reason may be that locating Fanon has been contentious work. This work is contentious largely because of the tendency to either canonize, and thereby deterritorialize , black thinkers, or have them speak for the entire coloured world. In Fanon’s case, both tendencies are evident, as I will show. Given the way that early readings of Fanon tended to locate him as a central figure within Third World revolutionary movements, he has often been internationalized, as it were, and read as a kind of universal Third World subject. In that sense, Fanon’s place becomes unimportant or vague. Moreover, given the fact that Third Worldist readings of Fanon relied heavily on his latest book, The Wretched of the Earth, which details the struggles of decolonizing Africa, with a strong emphasis on Algeria, the tendency has been to locate Fanon in the African context, especially an Algerian one. In addition to reading Fanon as a Third World, African, or Algerian subject, the recent work of Lewis (as well as many of the essays which appear in Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White) has often...