Humanism's Secret Shadow: The Construction of Black Gender/Sexuality in Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers

Sylvia wynter begins her 1979 essay "Sambos and Minstrels" by stating, "The incredible inventiveness of black culture is not to be understood outside the imperative task of transformation, of counterresistance to the resistance of the Real world, to the quest of the marked excluded blacks to affirm themselves" (149). What does it mean to be excluded from the "Real world"? And how is this exclusion effected? In this article I bring together the seemingly disparate threads of Balibar's and Derrida's critiques of European humanism as an epistemological project and Fanon's and Spillers's attempts to reinvent that project from the position of black gender and sexuality. I argue that while European humanism has constructed the black body as an object of knowledge rather than a subject, Balibar, Derrida, Fanon, and Spillers show that humanism has been a dynamic rather than static project. Thus, it is possible to ask whether an alternate dynamism can be found in the shadow of humanism.

The first half of the article concerns the interpretation of humanism in Europe through Balibar and Derrida in order to demonstrate why antihumanism or posthumanism fails to radically change the field of knowledge generated by humanism. The second half of the article moves explicitly to the question of how gender and sexuality have been mobilized to exclude black bodies from being human subjects of knowledge. The crucial step I take with Fanon's reversals of European humanism and Spillers's elaboration of "ungendering" in chattel slavery is to show how these two thinkers introduce invention into the continued abstraction of European humanism. Black gender and sexuality, as abjected, constitute a radical site of questioning human reality and, thus, are a necessary component for enacting a humanism that is no longer solely the property of the West and Europe. Taken together, these four thinkers allow us to comprehend the difficult work of inventing a humanism "made to the measure of the world" (Césaire 1972, 56).

The Epistemological Project of Humanism

Humanism is no stranger to critique. We need not go to Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers to find critiques of humanism as Janus-faced, provincial, and, when mobilized politically, violent.¹ Yet humanism remains the background assumption in philosophical thought and political practices in the West. It seems that every move away from "humanism" toward a posthumanism or antihumanism remains shadowed by what was meant to be surpassed. But this should not be surprising. The epistemological endeavor of Renaissance humanitas was already a transvaluative pursuit of human knowledge supposedly freed from the presupposition of a divine, transcendent God (Osamu 2006, 264). "Man" was no longer imago Dei. The effect of this separation was to make the "humanism" of Man a search for his essence that did not presuppose what that essence would be. Critiquing humanism for presupposing that Man was white, European, and male misunderstands its genealogy. Humanism endeavored to make Man free by freeing the knowing subject from the essentialism of theology and the determination of any stable substance. Thus, to say that humanism is no stranger to critique is to remind us that humanism is critique, is transvaluation, it is not a stable epistemological object, but a dynamic. Therefore, attempts to go beyond humanism often repeat its originating aims.

The split from the transcendent authority of God was made possible by instituting another split in the field of knowledge between humanitas and anthropos. What is now known as anthropology was constructed as an institution upon the encounter with the soon-to-be colonized "New World" and the customs of people presumed to be in the shadow of European civilization. If before there was God and His subjects, now there were the knowers and the known. Étienne Balibar confirms this epistemological dynamic of humanism with the added insight that the production of knowledge is coextensive with the production of political reality (2005, 15). Humanism, for Balibar, is traversed by an "epistemological cut" (2005, 18) that produces the "we" who investigates and produces knowledge. This "we" is cut because humanitas...