The Frantz Fanon Foundation and a large array of organizations across the globe are celebrating the centennial of Frantz Fanon this year. Born in 1925, Fanon became one of the most influential and well-known thinkers from the so-called Third World in the 20th century. While he died young at the age of 36, Fanon lived during a major historical conjuncture that included the most devastating internal crisis that Europe has ever faced—the fight against fascist imperialism in the Second World War—and the increasing defiance of European imperial power by peoples whose lands had been taken as colonies by Europe. Fanon not only witnessed but was himself directly involved in both contexts: he joined the French resistance against the Nazis and he later joined the Algerian fight for independence from France.
Fanon was a Black Caribbean subject from the French colony of Martinique and, while in Algeria, served as a representative of the provisional Algerian independent government in Africa. He was a deeply committed Pan-Africanist who believed that decolonization in Africa meant much more than independence: it meant the creation of a family of nations that was able to work together to chart a path toward the creation of a society based on decolonial principles and a properly decolonized view of humanity and human freedom. For this, Fanon advanced a view of philosophy and the human sciences that is worth considering today as we continue the struggle for a still vastly unfinished decolonization.
Any reader of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks would probably agree with the idea that Fanon’s conception of the human sciences, including psychology, is eminently social. That is, his work is freed from Cartesian solipsism and seems to join an approach that, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, is first found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: an “anthropological doubt” according to which the study of the human being requires a questioning of one’s “most cherished ideas and habits” in light of the differences one finds with other human beings, particularly with those most distanced from oneself. However, in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon reflects on the dynamics between subjects who are close to each other (e.g., Black colonial subjects) or who have been in close contact with each other (e.g., whites and Black subjects), meaning that his position should not be confused with anthropology. Also crucial to understand the particularity of Fanon’s departure from Cartesianism and its difference from anthropology is that Fanon finds that to the extent that white and Black subjects are distant from each other (e.g., when one group, French whites, is primarily concentrated in France, and the other, Black Francophone subjects, in colonial territories in Africa and the Caribbean), the distance in question is not natural, as if the distance existed prior to a different kind of relation. The relation in question is a violent colonial and racial one that has involved domination, enslavement, genocide, naturalized torture, forced movement, and the creation of borders and other mechanisms that limit movement.
In short, for Fanon, the distance between white and Black is itself a colonial construction based on a peculiar view of the human being according to which humanity is spread disproportionately through the planet. In this view, whiteness represents full humanity, and blackness is typically conceived as evidence of lack of humanity. While Rousseau may have introduced an anthropological turn in response to Cartesian rationalism, Fanon deployed a decolonial turn against modernity/coloniality. Thus, instead of adopting ethnology or anthropology as his preferred approach, Fanon sought to study in detail the impact what the U.S. American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois had called the “color-line.”
For Du Bois, the creation of the “color-line” is at the heart of the constitution of modern societies. In his more immediate Francophone context, however, Fanon found a sociology that was not particularly interested in identifying or in understanding the dehumanizing effects of the “color-line.” Fanon was aware that sociology promised a better approach to the colonial reality than traditional anthropology, but, like Du Bois, he believed that for the most part sociologists failed to reflect critically about colonialism. Consider that in Les damnés de la terre, Fanon refers to “experts and sociologists” who, breaking with a traditional anthropological approach, looked at colonial societies as complex mechanisms. Because of the recognition of this complexity, this sociological approach seemed to grant a larger degree of humanity to the colonized. As a result, Fanon reports that colonized subjects initially responded favorably to these approaches. However, Fanon makes clear that the shift from anthropology to sociology does not necessarily imply a break with anti-Black racism, coloniality, or the “color-line,” as sociology can easily be used to seek to demonstrate the existence of complexes among the colonized that make them responsible for their own colonization or supposed lack of self-governance.
In an essay on Fanon’s encounter with sociology, George Steinmetz identifies “one remarkable exception” to Fanon’s “critical comments on sociology.” It is found in an essay written by Fanon and Jacques Azoulay, one of his interns while he was a Director of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. In the essay, Fanon and Azoulay refer to Marcel Mauss’s concept of “totality” and note that “Mauss saw [it] as the guarantee of an authentic sociological study.” According to Steinmetz,
In his 1934 “Plan for a General Descriptive Sociology,” Mauss recognized that “colonialism gives birth to new societies,” and recommended that researchers focus on such “composite societies” and on the “immense field of changes in which they were engulfed,” adding that “here, as in the case of métissage, this opens up an immense field of observations.” This was a green light to move beyond the conventional Durkheimian use of colonial ethnographic material as “data” in generating models of primitivism. Sociologists often referred to Mauss’s notion of totality when they argued for conceptualizing colonialism as a complex, overdetermined phenomenon in which every element influences every other elements. Fanon had a copy of Mauss’s Sociologieet anthropologie in his personal library.
While it would be important to consider further the extent to which Mauss’s view of ethnology and sociology inform Fanon’s and Azoulay’s analysis, it is essential to keep in view that Fanon had already engaged in a multi-dimensional analysis of the lived experience of the colonized in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon complements his psychological approach with what he refers to as sociogeny: the extent to which individual human beings and society are fundamentally entangled. How he arrived to this idea was clear: he could not possibly explain the pathologies of affect that he found in Black subjects merely in reference to their individual stories and experiences. The maladies that Fanon found among most of the Black subjects that he studied had a social root, but not just any social root. What he found was that so-called modern society was based on a division akin to that between masters and slaves, with the terrifying additions that modern masters believed themselves to be naturally endowed to be masters and that slaves represented emanations of evil. Facing evil, the masterscould not but develop the most sinister practices of containment, elimination, violent exploitation, and torture. Fanon thus discovered the relevance of what today we would call global anti-blackness and coloniality, and not only “society,” for understanding not only colonial territories, but globalized western modernity. In that sense, his work is best characterized as an example of decolonial thinking, even if some of his work engaged and could be characterized as contributions to sociology, anthropology, or other human sciences.
Interestingly, like Mauss, one can also find in Fanon’s work an interest in the dynamics of gift-giving. As I have discussed elsewhere, Fanon understood colonization as a form of expropriation and dehumanization that violently takes away from the colonized the possibilities of giving. This view of colonization is implicit in Fanon’s characterization of the colonized as damnés, since the damnés are those who cannot give because what they have has been taken away from them. In the case of the colonized, their lands are expropriated, their cultures interrupted, and their dignity severely eroded. In the process, a full person is meant to become something worse than a “thing” or an animal: a veritable source of evil in face of which there cannot be generosity, exchange, or hospitality.
This understanding of colonization is key to understanding the Fanonian view of decolonization. For Fanon, decolonization means rehumanization and rehumanization is understood as the restoration of the circle of giving and receiving. Decolonization is therefore not a mere self-centered act interested in coming to possess what has been lost. It is rather a movement toward the creation of what Fanon refers to as “the world of you.” Fanon therefore considers decolonization to be about the emergence of the conditions of possibility for society to emerge beyond the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. His approach to human reality is thusdecolonial rather than strictly sociological or anthropological.
There is something else that characterizes Fanon’s decolonial thinking: its combative dimension. In Fanon’s work, the combatant and the knowledge producer are not separate entities. He does not approach groups as societies, and societies as an array of data to be observed. Rather, what he finds is a terrain of colonial forces and decolonial struggle: the former militates against the emergence of community and the social, while the latter seeks to bring about the conditions of possibility for sociality and community to emerge. The decolonial thinker does not primarily find an “object” to study, but a struggle in which to participate. In that sense, the decolonial thinker is not merely a scholar or an intellectual. From a Fanonian point of view, it is only as a co-combatant in the struggle for the emergence of a social and communal world that the combative decolonial thinker is found. The most consistent expressions of decoloniality likewise appear in the midst of collective combat.
The struggle against colonialism did not end with “national liberation fronts.” It continues in the grassroots efforts of Pan-African and decolonial organizations in Africa and across the globe. Combative decoloniality involves the collective mobilization of myriad forms of civil, aesthetic, and epistemic disobedience against the naturalization of coloniality and war. These acts go beyond academic decoloniality and all other forms of decoloniality lite. For decolonial thinking in Africa and everywhere to be combative, it needs to be rooted in the work of decolonial collectives that are confronting coloniality and creating the basis for an-otherworld.