Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (24 page)

If it were not for the concluding chapter of
Black Skin, White Masks
it would be easy to see how Fanon’s quite visceral response to Sartre’s interpretation could be read as an unqualified endorsement of negritude’s “plunge” into the “absolute” of black history, identity, and consciousness.
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However, as his narrative continues, at least three problems or limitations with negritude are revealed. The first has to do with the power of negritude resting on a simple inversion of colonial discourse. Insofar as the negritude movement sought to undo colonial subjection by reversing the binary terms of domination—by reinscribing what was once denigrated and demeaned with worth and value—it remained, for Fanon, pathologically fixated around a value structure ultimately predetermined by colonial society. Thus, even though it might appear as though the empowerment derived from this process reflects an
authentic
instance of
self
-affirmation/determination, in reality this expression of resistance is still, for Fanon, “overdetermined from the outside.”
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Its is an expression of the colonized’s
ressentiment
insofar as the colonizer remains the “actional” subject locked in their position of superiority as the creator of values, and the colonized remain the subject of “reaction” locked in their subordinated position whose values remain inversely bound by those of their masters.
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As Fanon explains elsewhere, in this “initial phase,” it is “the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centres of resistance around which [the] peoples’ will to survive becomes organized. . . . It is the white man who creates the Negro. But is the Negro who creates negritude.”
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Instead of disrupting the Manichean value structure of savage/civilized, colonizer/colonized itself, negritude’s attempt to restore the Native subject as an agent of history through an inversion of colonial discourse remains comfortably within the very binary logic that has played such a crucial role in justifying the colonial relation in the first place.

The second contentious issue Fanon identifies involves what we might today call negritude’s “essentialist” conception of black subjectivity. It is generally recognized among Fanon scholars that this angle of Fanon’s analysis is
directed largely at the “objectivist” strand within negritude, represented clearest in the work of Léopold Senghor.
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Fanon’s anti-essentialist critique has two elements. The first is empirical: in Fanon’s view the unified and undifferentiated “black” or “African” subject hailed by Senghor simply does not exist. “The black experience is ambiguous,” writes Fanon, “for there is not
one
Negro—there are
many
black men.”
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Seen in this light, it is clearly nonsense to speak of negritude as the “totality of values” representing black “civilization” as such; “not only [the values] of the peoples of black Africa, but also of the black minorities of America, or even Asia or the South Sea Islands.”
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There are “Blacks of Belgium, French and British nationality, and there are Black republics,” writes Fanon. “How can we claim to grasp
the essence
when such facts demand our attention?”
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Fanon’s second criticism has more to do with power. His concern here is that many of the specific characteristics and supposed cultural traits that Senghor targets for reinscription—irrationality, rhythm, animism, oneness with nature, sensuality—seem to be more the product of racist stereotyping disseminated through colonial discourse than empirically verifiable attributes of precontact African societies.
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What negritude refers to as “the black soul” is in Fanon’s view “a construction by white folk.”
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Fanon’s point here is that if the structural foundation of colonial rule is at least in part justified through the ideological propagation of racially essentialized binaries, then, in the long run, the logic of negritude’s own essentialist “revaluation of values” could undermine its emancipatory potential.

Fanon’s third criticism is directed squarely at negritude’s elitism and therefore its questionable relevance to those struggling against colonial-capitalist domination and exploitation on the ground. According to Fanon, one of negritude’s main problems was that it tended to inadvertently displace or downplay contemporary questions of colonial political economy by focusing too narrowly on revaluing the historical achievements of colonized cultures and societies. Relating this issue back to the exploited blacks of Martinique’s sugarcane plantations, Fanon writes: “It would never occur to us to ask these men to rethink their concept of history.” Indeed, the “few worker comrades that I have had the opportunity to meet in Paris have never thought to ask themselves about discovering a black past. They knew they were black, but, they told me, that didn’t change a thing. And damn right they were.” For Fanon, the required solution for this community is to “fight,” to focus their struggle against the “ossified” structure of bourgeois colonial society directly. For Fanon, it is
by taking a “stand against this living death” that we can hope to bring about decolonization in a truly substantive sense.
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Taken together, then, these three limitations inform Fanon’s conclusion in
Black Skin, White Masks
that, although the process of self-affirmative recognition at the core of projects like negritude represents a potential source of empowerment for colonized populations suffering the effects of internalized racism, this potential hinges on its ability to motivate praxis that is attentive to the structural as well as the subjective features of colonial rule. Understood this way, I suggest that Fanon’s position in
Black Skin, White Masks
is not entirely unlike that of Sartre’s in
“Black Orpheus,” although they arrive at their respective views via markedly different paths. When Fanon reprimands Sartre for characterizing the self-affirmative reconstruction of black subjectivity as a phase in the unfolding dialectic of anticolonial class struggle, he is challenging Sartre’s deterministic understanding of
the dialectic
, not his claim that this process represents “a stage” in a broader struggle for freedom and equality.
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Indeed, by the time we reach Fanon’s conclusion in
Black Skin, White Masks
it is clear that the cluster of practices associated with self-recognition are valuable only insofar as they reestablish the colonized as historical protagonists oriented toward a change in the colonial social structure.
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The moment that this process takes hold, however, the emphasis placed on revaluing precolonial culture and history proceeds to either lose its critical purchase in the fight for freedom, or becomes
an impediment to freedom as such
. This leads Fanon to assert: “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing my past to the detriment of my present and future.”
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Although Fanon concedes that articulating a positive vision of the future requires some prior effort to break the hold of colonial subjection, and that this step often involves revaluing those historical and cultural forms that colonialism sought to denigrate and destroy, in the end it is only by moving beyond these “historical and instrumental” givens that one can truly initiate the “cycle of freedom.”
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Like Sartre before him, Fanon portrays the identity politics of negritude as an important means to achieving anticolonial struggle, but not an end to the struggle itself.

In Fanon’s later writings similar themes are developed and explored. For example, in his 1955 article “West Indians and Africans” Fanon begins by reiterating his earlier concern regarding negritude’s essentialist portrayal of an undifferentiated black subject: “When one says ‘Negro people,’ one systematically
assumes that all Negroes agree on certain things, that they share a principle of communion.”
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However, “the truth,” writes Fanon, “is that there is nothing,
a priori
, to warrant the assumption that such a thing as a Negro people exists.”
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Again, here Fanon is not content with simply challenging the
empirical
validity of such a characterization; rather, the problem is fundamentally one of power: “The object of lumping Negroes together under the designation of ‘Negro people’ is to
deprive
them of any possibility of individual expression” and “to put them under the
obligation
of matching the idea one has of them.”
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Here it appears that where Fanon was initially concerned in
Black Skin, White Masks
with the ways in which self-essentialized constructions of black identity could inadvertently feed back into and justify hierarchical relations between the colonized and colonizer, now he seems to be equally attentive to how similar processes can work to constrain freedom
within
the colonized population itself. The problem with essentialism thus cuts in two directions for Fanon: it can serve to naturalize relations of dominance not only between but also within social groups.

Yet by grounding his analysis in the concrete operation of specific power relations Fanon is again able to maintain a critical stance toward negritude without denying its significance outright. This is made clear over the course of “West Indians and Africans” as Fanon begins to emphasize the social function played by negritude in mobilizing Antillean blacks against French racism in Martinique. Until this point, Fanon’s endorsement of negritude rested largely on the transformative effects he saw the practice of self-affirmation having on the psychology of individuals, using his own experience in
Black Skin, White Masks
as an example. This stance undergoes a slight revision in “West Indians and Africans” as Fanon begins to historicize the movement’s influence at the societal level. This is clearest in Fanon’s discussion of Césaire, whose work he claims served to radicalize the local black population in ways that would have been unheard of before the popularization of his poetry and political activism. Indeed, it was Césaire’s “scandalous” assertion that being black was a “good” thing, that it was not only “beautiful” but also a “source of truth” that provided the black community with a counterdiscourse to mobilize around and deploy in their efforts to collectively combat the heightened racism that came to plague Martinique as thousands of French sailors descended on the island during the Second World War.
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“Without Césaire this would have been difficult,” writes Fanon, for prior to this period “the West Indian identified
himself with the white man, adopted a white man’s attitude, was ‘a white man.’”
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This came to a grinding halt in 1939, however, for the colonized were now forced into a situation where they had to defend themselves against the derogatory images of blacks hurled at them by the stationed French troops. Césaire provided the discursive ammunition used in this defense, and as a result, “a new generation came into being.”
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Blackness was no longer considered an irrelevant category of identification (as blacks had convinced themselves it was before the influx of French sailors), nor was it seen as “a stain”;
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it was now a source of strength, an emergent consciousness, and a foundation for collective action.

Fanon also explores the social significance of negritude in “Racism and Culture.”
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Written with the Algerian context in mind, this groundbreaking essay traces the historical evolution of racism as a systematized form of oppression oriented around crude assumptions of biological inferiority to a more subtle form grounded on notions of cultural inferiority. What Fanon here calls the emergence of “cultural racism” anticipates what contemporary critical race scholars have termed the “culturalization of racism.”
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Under this new guise, the “object of racism” shifts from those genetically identifiable characteristics once thought to mark certain individuals or groups as inferior, to what Fanon calls entire “form[s] of existing” or “way[s] of life.”
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In colonial situations, this cultural variant of racism is what historically served to rationalize the host of repressive colonial practices associated with policies of forced assimilation. The underlying rationale here is that, if the perceived inferiority of non-European peoples does not appear to be attributable to innate characteristics, it then follows that these groups can, in theory, be elevated to the more “civilized” status of their European colonizers. In order to accomplish this, however, one has to first “destroy” the “primitive” “cultural values” thought to impede the so-called “development” of the colonized vis-à-vis the more “advanced” settler society. According to this scheme, colonial rule was (and for some, still is) thought to be justified insofar as it serves to facilitate the moral and cultural development of the colonized group.
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Witnessing firsthand the destructive effects of cultural racism in the Algerian context appears to have prompted a slight shift in the dismissive stance that Fanon adopts in his conclusion to
Black Skin, White Masks
toward strategies that seek to revalue precolonial history and culture as an ongoing feature of the decolonization process. This change is reflected in “Racism and Culture”
and then again in the chapter “On National Culture” from
The Wretched of the Earth
. Fanon’s argument in both texts can be stated like this: because colonialism tends to solidify its gains by normalizing the injustices it has perpetrated against the colonized population through a direct attack on the integrity of precontact history and culture, it follows that strategies that attempt to break the stranglehold of this subjection through practices of cultural self-affirmation can play an important role in anticolonial struggle as long as they remain grounded and oriented toward a change in the social structure of colonialism itself. What distinguishes Fanon’s previous position in
Black Skin, White Masks
from the position articulated in “Racism and Culture” and
The Wretched of the Earth
, however, is that the arguments developed in the two latter texts were based on observations Fanon made while in Algeria, where expressions of cultural self-affirmation appeared to emerge organically among the colonized population as a whole, as opposed to being articulated solely among the elites of negritude. This is an important distinction to recognize because I think it alleviates to some degree Fanon’s previous concern regarding the disassociation of cultural revitalization movements from questions of colonial political economy. This is why in “Racism and Culture” and
The Wretched of the Earth
we see Fanon’s most biting criticisms directed more squarely at negritude as a specific practice of cultural self-affirmation, and less toward these types of practices as such.