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32 1 Fanon’s Muscles (Black) Power Revisited I WA N T TO begin my exploration of blackness in its relation to abjection and sexuality where this relation is at once seen to be foundational, and strenuously denied, by following the flow of two currents I identified earlier, Fanon and Black Power/Black Arts. In doing so I want to explore as thoroughly as I can the key theoretical questions and terms of this project that I flagged in the introduction—mainly, abjection and power. This exploration will merge into a close consideration of one of the figures for black abjection that the book examines, the recurring metaphor in Fanon of “tensed muscles.” Not Your Daddy’s Fanon Frantz Fanon, a son of the French Caribbean island of Martinique, psychiatrist of Lyons, France, and Blida, Algeria, activist, propagandist, and politician in the war for Algerian independence, theorist of decolonization in Africa, was also, of course, a kind of Abrahamic father for intellectuals and artists associated with the Black Power Movement in the United States. The “of course” here flows smoothly on the tongue in the context of a project of African American literary and cultural analysis because the notion of a “Black Atlantic,” in which the forced expatriation of millions of Africans to European colonies in the Americas gave rise to a cross-oceanic transferal not only of bodies, goods, and capital but also of discourses, ideas, memes, and cultural practices, is now well established as an almost required foundation for African Americanist inquiry.1 That the activists of the Black Power Movement were enthusiastic participants in this theater of exchange long before the term Black Atlantic came into use in the various fields of cultural studies is evident in the almost insouciant facility with which they invoked Fanon’s name and work. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Fanon’s Muscles 33 Earth was published in English in 1965, having been translated from the original French Les damnes de la terre (1961). In the preface of the 1967 call to action Black Power, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton evoked Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, but directly quoted only two figures, Frederick Douglass and Frantz Fanon; Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth claims precedence, a lengthy quotation from it given the last word of the preface and positioned as the summation of Ture and Hamilton’s project, which is the elucidation of a Black Power analysis and politics.2 The Black Panther Party, the official dogma of which often departed from the more cultural nationalist stance of many Black Power thinkers, but the appeal and image of which was solidly associated in public representations with the Movement, anointed Fanon as one of the leading theorists of its revolutionary struggle: Huey P. Newton cited Fanon first and foremost along with Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara as the most influential figures he and Bobby Seale read when they conceived the party. In Newton’s 1967 party newspaper column, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” the Algerian Revolution as depicted in Wretched provides a primary example of how to pitch battle against the powersthat -be by embodying the wisdom of the masses rather than relying on the elite secrecy of a self-styled vanguard. Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed Wretched the “Bible” of black liberation, as did Newton.3 LeRoi Jones, on the cusp of his transformation into Amiri Baraka, in an essay signaling his abandonment of Greenwich Village Beat bohemianism for Harlem Black Arts Movement nationalism, called on Fanon without first name, as if to a body of work with so solidly established a presence that its syllables alone are its credentials: “If we take the teachings of Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X (as well as Frazier, DuBois and Fanon), we know for certain that the solution of the Black Man’s problems will come only through Black National Consciousness.”4 This last invocation is most interesting to me, not only because of the bent of my academic training but because it seems to me to encapsulate the way Fanon in the minds of Black Power thinkers became a name with which one conjured broadly vague but puissant political effects. Fanon is in Baraka’s mention a rhetorical device: a metaphor that moves beyond the simple metonymy of “Fanon” for “the works of Fanon” to “Fanon” for the revolutionary struggle in Algeria in which he participated, for the engaged intellectual analysis of that struggle, for engaged...

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