Readings for this week

[Richard Pithouse]

Hello everyone

We decided, last week, that we should read the (very short) last chapter from Black Skin, White Masks, 'The Negro & Recognition', as Len has a particular interest in this and the reading group was initially his idea. But we wanted to move on into Fanon’s Algerian work and so we’ve also decided to read 'Algeria Unveiled' from A Dying Colonialism.

Fanon arrived in Algeria in 1953 to work at a psychiatric hospital. Alice Cherki recalls that in Algeria at the time “adherence to one’s identity by birth was held to be a self-evidence truth, as natural as breathing...The partition was implacable, its barriers unspeakable, beyond formulation....The racism was habitual; it was unperturbed, understood, and viewed as entirely natural.” The approach to mental illness had its own particular brutality - some patients in the hospital were left naked and chained to the wall. Fanon immediately moved to turn it into a therapeutic environment.

In November the following year the rebellion that began the war against colonialism broke out and by 1955 Fanon was doing serious political work in the hospital along side his medical work and the hospital was split between staff that supported the November 1954 Movement and those that remained loyal to the French colonial state.

The next year, 1956, was the year of the battle of Algiers, depicted in the famous film by Gillo Pontecorvo. It was also the year that Fanon resigned from the hospital and went into exile with the Algerian national liberation movement in Tunis. He worked as a journalist and as a psychiatrist and, in 1959, wrote Toward the African Revolution.

Each of the five chapters in the book deals with one case study of how people in struggle undergo a genuine mutation, as opposed to the false mutations that he diagnosis in his first book. The chapter on the changing role and meaning of the veil in the battle of Algiers is probably the best known of the five cases studies. The debate around this chapter is dealt with very well by T. Deanean Sharpley-Whiting in her Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Of course given recent events in France it retains an urgent contemporary relevance.

We'll meet, as usual, on Thursday at 7 in the evening in the Politics Department. The readings are attached.

Richard