Colonialism and the politics of language
Richard Pithouse
Hello everyone
We'll move on to Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks, this week. The book was published in 1952. Fanon was 27 years old. He had tried to submit the manuscript as a thesis for his doctorate in 1950 but it had been turned down. He published the book with Seuil, a radical Catholic publisher where Francis Jeanson, then 29, was the editor. Jeanson was close to Jean-Paul Sartre, an editor at Les Temps Moderns, and would later receive a ten year prison sentence for his active support for the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria.
When Jeanson asked Fanon to make one of his points more clearly Fanon famously replied “I cannot explain that phrase more clearly. I try, when I write such things, to touch the nerves of my reader...That is to say, irrationally, almost sensually. For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.” But he did allow Jeanson to replace his original title for the book which had been the altogether more medical title An Essay for the Disalienation of the Black and the White.
Black Skin, White
Masks is a phenomenological study of the lived experience of being
black in a racist world which moves from an examination of the
particularity of situations in
both Martinique and France. Along with phenomenology it draws on
Sartrean
existentialism, psychoanalysis, Aimé Césaire’s negritude and a
non-dogmatic
reading of Marx's humanism free from the strictures of the notoriously
authoritarian French
Communist Party.
The book more or less sank without even throwing up many ripples. Alice Cherki, Fanon’s former comrade and his only Algerian biographer, writes that (in France) “Insofar as questions about blackness figured at all in the discourse of the early 1950s, their discussion....was the purview of a white intelligentsia.” Moreover at the time the French Communist Party had a tight hold over the left intellectual space in France. They saw any attempt to focus on the lived experience of racism as a dangerous and subjective deviation from proletarian solidarity and were unremittingly hostile to the book. It was only in 1956 that Césaire resigned from the Communist Party on account of its inability to recognise the singularity of the black situation in a racist world. Albert Memmi’s The Coloniser and the Colonised was published the following year. By the early 1960s there was an audience for Fanon’s book, by the 70s it was a classic activist text in black struggles around the world (and in the struggles of other racialised people - Tamils, Irish and so on) and by the 1980s it was considered to be a seminal academic text.
We’ll discuss the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks on Thursday from 7 till 8 in the evening in the politics department. The chapter deals with the question of language in the colonial context. The questions it raises are, clearly, of urgent contemporary relevance to us here and now. For instance last year when one of the speakers at the annual teach-in organised by the Politics Department announced that she would give her presentation in Zulu a significant proportion of the audience burst into laughter. She quickly won her audience over but the fact remains that the idea of a talk in Zulu at a university in a country in which Zulu is the most widely spoken mother tongue was seen, variously, as comic, embarrassing and perhaps also threatening.
For some reason I couldn't get my copy of the chapter to attach to this email - perhaps the file is too large. But is it online here:
http://abahlali.org/files/fanon_on_language.pdf
Richard