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Fanon’s
Project: On Alienation Notes from Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996) ed. Harris and Johnson; Blackwell
Publishers, Oxford Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a
psychiatrist, philosopher and social revolutionary who was trained in France
during the early 1950’s and opened one of the first psychiatric clinics in
the post-colonial world at the hospital Charles-Nicolle in Tunisia. He
believed that the psychiatrist, like the missionary and the doctor, had become
an agent of the colonizing mission. He argued that human attitudes in a
society act as powerfully as social class in the shaping of the psyche.
Colonialists practiced racism as their fundamental tool to instill
subservience in the colonized who are depicted as
credulous, suggestible, degenerate, morally weak, and incapable of
introspection. Even those natives who mimic European mores and adopted their beliefs
remained essentially different and alien in the minds of the colonizers. What
results is a mythical, degrading portrait of the colonized as dependent. The
struggle in the native against this degrading self-image combines with his
loss of freedom and agency to produce an alienation from the true self which
can lead to madness. Fanon said, “There is therefore in
this calm period of successful colonization, a regular and important mental
pathology directly produced by oppression…. Only the complete liquidation of
colonialism permits the colonized to be free.” (The Wretched of the Earth) Fanon believed that this alienation
was entirely the result of social, cultural, and political conditions, so the
cure to the psychiatric disorders he observed could only be achieved ultimately
through cultural emancipation. His own practice sought to return the patient
to a sense of his own social potency.
In Freudian terms, the ego needs to be taught to reawaken an activity
in the mind which has been withdrawn from knowledge and control. Fanon’s goal
in treatment was to help the patient to act in the direction of a change in
the social structure by making the hospital into a social place with craft
workshops, theatre groups, a newspaper in addition to group therapy. Fanon
learned that to overcome language and social barriers the doctor had to be
trained in local culture, language and customs. He made his urban clinic into
a Daycare Center in which the patients and the neighborhood could mix. Fanon:
Sociogenetic Alienation of the Subaltern: From
“The
Sociogenetic Alienation of the Subaltern in
Dostoevsky and Fanon” by Dr. Olga Stuchebrukhov The black man's neurotic state of
mind, which Fanon attributes to colonization, is strikingly similar to the
split consciousness of the nineteenth-century Russian man, which Dostoevsky
associates with Russia's cultural "colonization" by the West and
which he so vividly describes in his novels and journalism. Both Dostoevsky
and Fanon are interested in the group inferiority complex that forces the
subaltern consciousness to deny the undeniable, its bio-social reality. Fanon
calls this state of denial sociogenetic alienation
or an existential deviation. If Fanon's black man denies his sociogeny by wearing a white mask, Dostoevsky's educated
man pretends to be a European by denying his Russianness (Dostoevsky calls
this type a Russian European). My presentation will focus on Dostoevsky's and
Fanon's understandings of the nature and consequences of this
psycho-existential pathology produced by the Manichean division into
"inferior" and "superior" cultures and genetics. It will
also investigate Dostoevsky's and Fanon's ideas on whether the subaltern
consciousness can be "disalienated" and
thus rid of its inferiority complex and on whether it is possible for the
subaltern to remain free of sociogenetic alienation
in the first place. Fanon
on "The
Pitfalls of National Consciousness" Benjamin Graves '98,
Brown University As Neil
Lazarus suggests in his Resistance in African Literature, one of
Fanon's most telling theoretical contributions is his insistence on what he
terms the "pitfalls of national consciousness." Nationalism, as
Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, often fails at achieving
liberation across class boundaries because its aspirations are primarily
those of the colonized bourgeoisie--a privileged middle class who perhaps
seeks to defeat the prevailing colonial rule only to usurp its place of
dominance and surveillance over the working-class "lumpenproletariat."
Fanon's work -- which predates postructuralist
understandings of deconstruction
that emerged in the last 1960's -- nonetheless resembles Derrida's work in
that it points out that the problems with characterizing colonialism as a
binary opposition of colonizer and colonized. Instead, as Fanon would
suggest, colonialism may only be understood as a complicated network of
complicities and internal power imbalances between factions within the broader
categories of colonizer and colonized--not least, of course, the way in which
nationalist leaders often replicate the systems of coercion and domination
that shape colonial rule. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon blames
the failings of nationalism on the "intellectual laziness of the middle
class" (149). The native bourgeoisie rises to power only insofar as it
seeks to replicate the bourgeoisie of the "mother country" that
sustains colonial rule. In the following passage, Fanon suggests that the
opportunist native bourgeoisie mistakenly attempts to survey and control the
colonized masses to the same extent as the colonial bourgeoisie it attempts
to displace: The national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime
is an underdeveloped middle class. It has practically no economic power, and
in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother
country which it hopes to replace. In its narcissism, the national middle
class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class
of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it
into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and
will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother
country. (149) One consequence of the native
bourgeoisie's economic dependence upon the colonial bourgeoisie is the
problem of representation--specifically the relationship between leader and led that so often serves ironically as a synechdoche for the relationship between colonizer and
colonized. Notice, in other words, how the power struggle ostensibly between
colonized subjects and empire gets displaced upon power relationships within
the colonized body politic itself! An important point of comparison here is
C.L.R James, the Trinidadian Marxist whose The
Black Jacobins documents the San Domingo revolution--an entirely
proletarian uprising--that followed closely upon the French revolution at the
end of the eighteenth century. Toussaint L'ouveture,
the heroic leader of that pathbreaking model for
Third World revolution, nonetheless encountered a post-independence
questioning of his seemingly self-serving political ambitions and his
inadequate consideration of the interests of the newly independent proletariat.
In accordance with James, then, Fanon suggests in The Wretched of the
Earth the ways in which intellectual leaders often betray the national
working-class: Before independence, the leader
generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political
liberty, and national dignity. but as soon as independence is declared, far
from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches
bread, land, and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the
people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general
president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which
constitutes the national bourgeoisie. (166) |