{"tema_id":"1036","string":"Fanonism","created":"2018-10-11 01:45:44","code":null,"notes":[{"@type":"Scope note","@lang":"en-US","@value":"A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925\u20131961). Fanon\u2019s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism and colonialism. These include Black Skin, White Masks (1952, translated 1968), a study of the psychology of racism and colonial domination. Just before his death he published The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a broader study of how anti-colonial sentiment might address the task of decolonization. In these texts Fanon brought together the insights he derived from his clinical study of the effects of colonial domination on the psyche of the colonized and his Marxist derived analysis of social and economic control. From this conjuction he developed his idea of a comprador class, or \u00e9lite, who exchanged roles with the white colonial dominating class without engaging in any radical restructuring of society. The black skin of these compradors was \u2018masked\u2019 by their complicity with the values of the white colonial powers. Fanon argued that the native intelligentsia must radically restructure the society on the firm foundation of the people and their values.\nHowever, Fanon, like other early National Liberationist figures\u00a0such as the Trinidadian C.L.R. James and the Cape Verdean Amilcar\u00a0Cabral, did not advocate a naive view of the pre-colonial. Fanon\u2019s\u00a0nationalism was always what Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism has defined as \u2018critical nationalism\u2019, that is, formed in an awareness that\u00a0pre-colonial societies were never simple or homogeneous and that they\u00a0contained socially prejudicial class and gender formations that stood in need of reform by a radical force. As Said has noted \u2018[Fanon\u2019s] notion\u00a0was that unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into social consciousness,the future would not hold\u00a0liberation but an extension of imperialism\u2019 (1993: 323). For Fanon, the\u00a0task of the national liberator, often drawn as he himself was from\u00a0a colonially educated \u00e9lite, was to \u2018join the people in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to . . . which will be the\nsignal for everything to be called into question\u2019(1952:168) (see cultural\ndiversity\/cultural difference).\nAlthough Fanon is sometimes recruited to the banner of a naive form\nof nativism,he took a more complicated view of tradition and the precolonial as well as of its role in the construction of the modern postcolonial state.Fanon,of course,recognized and gave a powerful voice to the fact that for the new national leaders \u2018the passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate\u00a0reason in the anxiety shared by many indigenous intellectuals to shrink\u00a0away from that western culture in which they all risk being swamped\u2019\u00a0and to \u2018renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial\u00a0springs of their people\u2019(1961:153\u20134).But he also recognized the danger\u00a0that such pasts could be easily mythologized and used to create the new\u00a0\u00e9lite power groups, masquerading as the liberators of whom he had\u00a0warned.\nA national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people\u2019s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say\u00a0actions which are less and less attached to the ever present\u00a0reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of\nefforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe,\u00a0justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.\u00a0(1961: 154\u20135)\nThroughout his historical analysis, Fanon never lost sight of the\u00a0importance of the subjective consciousness and its role in creating\u00a0the possibilities for the hegemonic control of the colonized subject, and of the neo-colonial society that followed political independence.\nIn studies such as \u2018The Fact of Blackness\u2019 (1952) he addressed the\u00a0importance of the visible signs of racial difference in constructing\u00a0a discourse of prejudice, and the powerful and defining psychological\u00a0effects of this on the self-construction of black peoples. Much of\u00a0Fanon\u2019s work gives definition to the radical attempt to oppose this in\u00a0the discourses of the black consciousness movement that emerged\u00a0in America and Britain in the 1960s and which drew much of its\u00a0inspiration from Fanon\u2019s work. Although it might be argued that later\u00a0theorists such as Amilcar Cabral presented a more effective political\nprogramme for implementing the radical transformation of the native\u00a0colonial intelligentsia in what Cabral called, in a memorable phrase,\u00a0\u2018a veritable forced march along the road to cultural progress\u2019 (Cabral\u00a01973), it was in the interweaving of the specific and personal with the\u00a0general and social that Fanon\u2019s distinctive and profoundly influential\u00a0contribution was made. "}]}