ECO300 - International Global Politics

Decolonization

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the
earth, losing my id in the heart of cosmos – and the white man, however
intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs
from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has
been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the
earth.”
Frantz Fanon-
Black Skin, White Masks.

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Question (1): Frantz Fanon. Explain about his life and work. Feel free to give your own opinion.

Frantz Fanon Life:

Frantz fanon, (20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), a psychiatrist and
revolutionary activist, born in Martinique, in the French Caribbean, and studied
at a lycée in Fort-de-France, where one of his teachers was Amie Césaire.
During the second world war he served with the French army in north Africa.

After the war he returned briefly to Martinique. Where he worked on the

Parliamentary campaign of his former teacher, Césaire. While they remained
close friends.

Fanon trained in France and subsequently worked as a psychiatrist in

colonial Algeria, where he became actively involved in the front de liberation
National’s armed struggle for independence which finally became victorious in
1962.

In 1952, Fanon began practicing psychiatry in Algeria at Blida-Joinville

hospital, where he was the director of the psychiatric ward. The war between
the French colonial forces and the national liberation front began in 1954.

By 1956 Fanon had resigned and begun his work with the liberation
movement. He traveled all over North Africa visiting guerrilla camps and
training medical personnel. He also had his insurgents in his home.

Expelled from Algeria in the 1957, Fanon worked in Tunisia as a journalist

and continued to practice as a psychiatrist.

Fanon went to France where he studied psychiatry in Paris and Lyons. At

this time, he composed his first book, Black Skin White Masks 1952.

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Frantz Fanon Work:

1. Black Skin, White Masks -1952

Fanon first book titled Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952 is an
important study of the psychological and cultural alienation induced by
colonialism and the psychology of racism. an investigation of colonialism from
the perspective of race consciousness and race relations.

An eclectic study which draws on a wide range of authorities from Adler to

Sartre and Lacan, it is deeply rooted in personal experience and dominated by
the realization that, while he had always been taught -and he believed- that
he was French, the average French citizen regarded Fanon as a racial inferior.

It also reflects the experience of the North African and black soldiers who,
like Fanon, fought with the French army in the Second World War. Having
liberated their colonizers, they were then recolonized by them.

Fanon's analysis of white racism draws the model provided by Sartre’s study
of antisemitism in 1946, and he also analyses the Negrophobia of his fellow
Martiniquans, who had internalized white stereotypes to such an extent as to
deny their own blackness and to despise black Africans.

Although there is no evidence to suggest that Fanon had ever read De Bois,
there is a distinct similarity between his image of a black man wearing a white
mask, and the letter's theory of double consciousness.

The basic thesis of Black Skins, White Masks is that while black must be
liberated from their inferiority complex, whites must be liberated from an
equally alienating superiority complex.

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 2. The wretched of the earth- 1951

His most important work, the Wretched of the earth 1951 was also his last.
He was a critical of the nationalist bourgeoisie that inherited the privileges of
the European colonizers as he was of the colonizers themselves.

The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest classics of

decolonization and of the world's struggle for independence and liberation.
Notorious for the apologia for the use of violence when all the alternatives
have failed, it challenges Marxism's traditional emphasis on the historical role
of the industrial working class and argues that the landless peasantry and the
dispossessed of the shanty towns surrounding the cities of the Third World are
the only true agents of revolutionary change.

Fanon's critical writings on psychiatry are often overlooked, or obscured by

his fleeting references to psychoanalysis, and have never been collected.
Mainly concerned with the practicalities of constructing a truly transcultural
psychiatry, they offer a virulent critique of the colonial psychiatry that
regarded Algeria as primitives with an innate propensity for impulse and
homicidal violence.

o The Wretched of the Earth was a key figure in the third Worldism of
the 1960's and an inspiration of the American militants of the black
power movement.

o while Black Skin White Masks is now regarded as a key text in

postcolonial theory.

Fanon's work is largely concerned with African colonialism and the Algerian
independence movement. Toward an African Revolution, published
posthumously, brought together his shorter works published in FNL newspaper
and argue the case for a pan-Africa revolution in which Algeria would play a
leading role.

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Frantz Fanon Transformation:

Fanon started treating the victims of the French torture while he was
working in the French hospitals, hearing the stories, and examining the psyche
of the torturer and the tortured transformed him as an individual, because
what he discovered in that relationship were three things one was how
injurious relationship of domination is to the dominator and the dominated.
The second thing he understood that race plays a very important role in
separating people artificially, and thirdly he realized that when the victim
stands on his feet and fights back, he is not a victim anymore.
He understood that anti-colonial resistance could only succeed if people
were given the tools to recreate themselves as human beings. And if necessary,
they must do this through violence. The recognition and theorization of his
hard necessity earned Fanon some criticism, but by his large work and life he
has proven a positive inspiration for liberation groups worldwide and a
valuable theoretical resource for post-colonial studies.

In the last few years of his life, in addition to writing several books, he
worked as an ambassador of the provisional Algerian government to Ghana,
edited a journal in Tunisia, and set up the first African psychiatric clinic.

He died of leukemia in Washington DC but was buried in Algeria.

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References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW6G3F7REXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL-LEm0coOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Ay8PYOiFo