Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

1. Translating Fanon: Black and Yellow Power as American Anticolonialisms

21 chapter one Translating Fanon Black and Yellow Power as American Anticolonialisms Since I was born in the Antilles, my observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles—at least concerning the black man at home. Another book could be dedicated to explaining the differences that separate the Negro of the Antilles from the Negro of Africa. Perhaps one day I will write it. Perhaps too it will no longer be necessary— a fact for which we could only congratulate ourselves.1 This sentiment, expressed in the closing lines of the introduction to Frantz Fanon’s 1952 treatise on the psyche of the colonized, seems eerily prescient in light of Fanon’s early death from complications of leukemia at the age of thirty-six, a mere nine years after the publication of his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). Intended as the doctoral thesis for his psychiatry degree, Fanon published the work, which grew out of his own eye-opening and gut-wrenching experiences as a black French colonial subject, elsewhere instead. Between the publication of Black Skin, White Masks and his death in 1961, Fanon married, became a father, served in the medical service in Algeria and Tunisia, joined the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front), published articles on his innovative mental health management approaches, served as Algeria’s diplomatic attaché to Ghana, and travelled extensively, giving speeches and presentations on his psychiatric work, the Algerian resistance , and the future of the Third World. During this frenzied period, he also published two more volumes–L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (in English, Studies in a Dying Colonialism) (1959) and Les Damnés de la terre (in English, The Wretched of the Earth) (1961)—which, along with Black Skin, White Masks, had and continues to have a lasting impact on academic studies of the formation of postcolonialism, racial and ethnic identity and subjectivity, and revolutionary movements and forms of protest. 22 Black and Yellow Power as American Anticolonialisms Though Fanon did refer to the Civil Rights Movement in America, he did not write at length about the condition of the “Negro” in America. Instead, he situated his work as a template that others could adapt in order to narrate their colonial experience and plan their own anticolonial struggles. His death meant that other theorists and activists would have to do the work of translating Fanon’s insights into the American context themselves. In this chapter, I will read Black and Yellow Power as distinct though related efforts to “Americanize” Frantz Fanon’s meditations on the psychosocial effects of colonialism, subsequently adapting his work into an ideology that supported an array of social, cultural, and even militant efforts against American-style colonialism. This chapter considers how the early publication history of Fanon’s works in America shaped his reception by American activists and academics . The order of publication, as well as the glosses provided by the introductory and prefatory materials included in each volume have contributed to later readings of Fanon as an insightful commentator on the psychic toll of racism, an incisive critic of colonialism, and an advocate of violent revolutionary resistance. This range of readings has contributed to a Fanon myth that obscures his specific influence on the evolution of Power ideology. Initially, Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his advocacy of anticolonial resistance bolstered the argument for armed self-defense and he was read as endorsing militant struggle as an antidote to the damage inflicted by American-style colonialism. Later, his work drew fire from post-structuralist academics for the binaristic constructions of colonized identity and colonial society, which drove his political theory. Still it is important to understand Power as a uniquely ethnic American adaptation of Fanon’s critique that attends to the particularities of American-style colonization and provides the basis for a plan to foster revolutionary social and political change in American society. Key to translating colonialism into the American context (in addition to the examples of other anticolonialist and Marxist revolutions occurring contemporaneouslyaroundtheworld)wasthegrowingawarenessofthe works of Fanon, a French-educated, Martinique-born, Freudian-trained psychiatrist who worked in French-occupied Algeria and ultimately championed the Algerian nationalist liberation movement. Fanon’s analyses, which explored the “question of a socio-diagnostic,” or the articulation and quantification of the effects of oppression and coloni- Black and Yellow...