Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  Nor has the resurgence of interest in him been confined to those engaged in third world or subaltern studies. In a collection of essays centered on British Romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the New Historicism. And Fanon—and published interpretations of Fanon—has even become regularly cited in the rereadings of the Renaissance that have emerged from places such as Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.2

  My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited; what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.3

  Fanon’s current fascination for us has something to do with a convergence of the problematic of colonialism with that of subject formation. As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth, he is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and post-modern.

  And yet there’s something Rashomon-like about his contemporary guises. It may be a matter of judgment whether his writings are riven with contradiction or richly dialectical, polyvocal, and multivalent. They are in any event highly porous to interpretation, and the readings they elicit are, as a result, of unfailing symptomatic interest: Frantz Fanon, not to put too fine a point on it, is a Rorschach inkblot with legs.

  We might begin with an essay by Edward Said entitled “Representing the Colonized.” To Jean-François Lyotard’s vision of the decline of grand narrative, Said counterposes the counter-narratives of liberation that Fanon (as he says) “forces on a Europe playing ‘le jeu irresponsible de la belle au bois dormant.’”4 And Said goes on to argue:Despite its bitterness and violence, the whole point of Fanon’s work is to force the European metropolis to think its history together with the history of colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abused immobility of imperial domination. . . . Alone, and without due recognition allowed for the colonial experience, Fanon says, the Western narratives of enlightenment and emancipation are revealed as so much windy hypocrisy. . . .

  I do not think that the anti-imperialist challenge represented by Fanon and Cesaire or others like them has by any means been met; neither have we taken them seriously as models or representations of human effort in the contemporary world. In fact, Fanon and Cesaire—of course I speak of them as types—jab directly at the question of identity and of identitarian thought, that secret sharer of present anthropological reflection on “otherness” and “difference.” What Fanon and Cesaire required of their own partisans, even during the heat of struggle, was to abandon fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition. Become different, they said, in order that your fate as colonized peoples can be different.5

  I’ve given some space to these remarks because it is, preeminently, in passages such as this one that Fanon as global theorist has been produced.

  And yet some have found cause for objection here. Reading the passage from Said, they say that given the grand narrative in which Fanon is himself inserted, it seems beside the point to ask about the extent to which the historical Fanon really did abandon all fixity of identity; beside the point to raise questions about his perhaps ambivalent relation to counter-narratives of identity; beside the point to address his growing political and philosophical estrangement from Césaire. Fanon’s individual specificity seems beside the point because what we have here is explicitly a composite figure, indeed, an ethnographic construct. It’s made clear by the formulaic reference to Fanon, Césaire, and “others like them.” It’s made clear when Said writes, “Of course I speak of them as types”—to which some readers will pose the question, “ Why ‘of course’?” And they will answer, “Because the ethnographer always speaks of his subjects as types.” Or they find the answer in Albert Memmi, who explains that a usual “sign of the colonized’s depersonalization is what we might call the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity.”6

  Thus, while calling for a recognition of the situatedness of all discourses, the critic delivers a Fanon as a global theorist in vacuo. In the course of an appeal for the specificity of the other, we discover that this global theorist of alterity is emptied of his own specificity. In the course of a critique of identitarian thought, Fanon is conflated with someone who proved in important respects an ideological antagonist. And so on.

  These moves are, I think, all too predictable and, yes, even beside the point. Said has delivered a brief for a usable culture; it is not to be held against him that his interest is in mobilizing a usable Fanon. Indeed, this is his own counter-narrative, in the terrain of post-colonial criticism. But Said’s use of Fanon to allegorize the site of counter-hegemonic agency must also be read as an implicit rejoinder to those who have charged him with ignoring the colonized’s own self-representations; Homi Bhabha’s objection that Said’s vision of Orientalism suggests that “power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer” is typical in this regard.7

  Certainly, Bhabha’s own readings of Fanon during the last twenty-five years are the most elaborated that have been produced in the field of post-structuralism. And his readings are designed to breach the disjunction Said’s essay may appear to preserve: between the discourse of the colonized and that of the colonizer. And among Bhabha’s several essays on Fanon, I want to take some time to consider his seminal essay, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” because of its exemplary insights into the complexities of Fanon’s thinking about culture, discourse, and colonialism—insights that, in turn, rightfully generated a huge amount of interest in Fanon among all sorts of cultural critics after the essay’s publication in 1986—and because this work is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that I am attempting to trace in this chapter.8

  For Bhabha, colonial ambivalence “makes the boundaries of colonial positionality—the division of self-other—and the question of colonial power—the differentiation of colonizer/colonized—different from both the master-slave dialectic or the phenomenological projection of ‘otherness.’”9 Accordingly, he has directed attention to (what he sees as) the disruptive articulations of the colonized as inscribed in colonial discourse, that is, the discourse of the colonized.

  Bhabha’s reading requires a model of self-division, of “alienation within identity,” and he has enlisted Lacanian psychoanalysis to this end. “[Minority discourse] is not simply the attempt to invert the balance of power within an unchanged order of discourse, but to redefine the symbolic process through which the social Imaginary—Nation, Culture, or Community—become ‘subjects’ of discourse and ‘objects’ of psychic identification.”10 From Fanon, Bhabha educes the question, How can a human being live otherwise? And Bhabha juxtaposes to his reflections on Black Skin, White Masks the following remarks of Jacques Lacan’s: “In the case of display, . . . the play of combat in the form of intimidation, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death.”11

  Bhabha may be Fanon’s closest reader, and it is an oddly touching performance of a coaxing devotion. He regrets aloud those moments in Fanon that cannot be reconciled to the post-structuralist critique of identity, because he wants Fanon to be even better than he is. Benita Parry has described Bhabha as proffering Fanon as “a premature poststructuralist,” and I don’t think Bhabha would disagree.12

  In this same vein, Bhab
ha redescribes Fanon’s “Manichean delirium” as a condition internalized within colonial discourse, as a form of self-misrecognition. “In articulating the problem of colonial cultural alienation in the psychoanalytic language of demand and desire, Fanon radically questions the formation of both individual and social authority as they come to be developed in the discourse of social sovereignty.”13 Fanon’s representation “turns on the idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the ‘Otherness’ of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.”14 It’s interesting to note, however, that Bhabha’s mobilization of Lacan stands as an explicit correction of Fanon’s own citation of Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks.

  Here, then, is the moment that might be seen as the originary irruption of Lacan into colonial discourse theory. With reference to the mirror stage, Fanon writes: “When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man, the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely the not-self, that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man, historical and economic realities come into the picture.” 15 (Hence for the delirious Antillean, Fanon tells us, “the mirror hallucination is always neutral. When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced it, I always ask the same question: ‘What color were you?’ Invariably they reply: ‘I had no color.’”)16

  Bhabha cautions, however, that “the place of the Other must not be imaged as Fanon sometimes suggests as a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the Self, that represents a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of a primordial identity—cultural and psychic—that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the ‘cultural’ to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historical reality.”17 In other words, Bhabha wants Fanon to mean Lacan rather than, say, Sartre, but acknowledges that Fanon does tend to slip. “At times Fanon . . . turns too hastily from the ambivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cultural discrimination; he is too quick to name the Other, to personalize its presence in the language of colonial racism. . . . These attempts . . . can at time, blunt the edge of Fanon’s brilliant illustrations of the complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relation.”18

  Bhabha is charmingly up front about the pulling and pushing involved in turning Fanon into le Lacan noir. He regrets the moments when Fanon turns to “an existential humanism that is as banal as it is beatific.” 19 Indeed, Bhabha’s rather passionate essay, entitled “Remembering Fanon,” can as easily be read as an index to all that Bhabha wants us to forget.

  For some oppositional critics, however, the hazards of Bhabha’s approach may go beyond interpretive etiquette. Thus, in a prelude to his own Lacanian reading of colonial discourse, Abdul JanMohamed takes Bhabha to task for downplaying the negativity of the colonial encounter, and not surprisingly, his critique pivots on his own positioning of Fanon. JanMohamed writes, “Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha completely ignores Fanon’s definition of the conqueror/ native relation as a ‘Manichean” struggle—a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict.” “What does it mean, in practice, to imply as Bhabha does that the native, whose entire economy and culture are destroyed, is somehow in ‘possession’ of colonial power?” he asks. JanMohamed charges that Bhabha asserts “the unity of the ‘colonial subject’” and so “represses the political history of colonialism.”20

  The critical double bind these charges raise is clear enough. You can discursively empower the native and open yourself to charges of downplaying the epistemic (and literal) violence of colonialism, or you can play up the absolute nature of colonial domination and be open to charges of negating the subjectivity and agency of the colonized, thus textually replicating the repressive operations of colonialism. In agency, so it seems, begins responsibility.

  But, of course, JanMohamed does not argue that colonialism completely destroyed the native’s culture. Conversely, it can’t be the case that Bhabha ignores Fanon’s discussion of colonialism’s self-representation as a Manichean world, because he explicitly reflects on what Fanon calls the “Manichean delirium.” But Bhabha certainly does offer a different account of it—an account that makes it unlikely that he is positing a unity of the colonial subject in the way JanMohamed construes it, for Bhabha’s account denies the unity of either subject in the first place. Properly reframed, JanMohamed’s argument might be seen as another version of a critique of Lacan advanced by (among others) Stephen Heath, who argues that “the importance of this idea of the Other [as the “locus” of the symbolic, which produces the subject as constitutively divided] and the symbolic is crucial in Lacan exactly because it allows him to abstract from problems of social-historical determinations.”21 As against Fredric Jameson’s famous injunction, then, Lacan’s motto would turn out to be “Never historicize; never explain.”

  But far from turning against the psychoanalytic model of colonial discourse, JanMohamed’s concern is, of course, to advance an explicitly Lacanian account of these discourses. To be sure, the allure of Lacan for both Bhabha and JanMohamed is only tangentially related to its appearance in Fanon. As I’ve suggested, Lacan’s is exemplarily a discourse that maps a problematic of subject formation onto a self-other model that seems to lend itself to the colonial encounter. On the other hand, it’s unclear whether JanMohamed really wants to make space for all the distinctively Lacanian ramifications that we heard Bhabha spell out.

  For his part, JanMohamed reinstates the notions of alterity that Bhabha has rejected. “Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alterity,” he writes, “the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity or difference.”22 Here, the other exists as such, prior to and independent of the encounter. But a little further on we find the limits of the Lacanian register in JanMohamed’s analysis: “Genuine and thorough comprehension of Otherness,” he writes, requires “the virtually impossible task of negating one’s very being.”23 This “virtually impossible” encounter is neither a provisional, negotiated difference, nor is it the Lacanian other in whose field the self must constitute itself. Rather, it is a close encounter of the third kind, involving the disputed notion of radical alterity.24

  And the binarity supports his division of colonialist literature into the two categories of the imaginary and the symbolic. In the imaginary text, the native functions as mirror, though in fact negative, image. The symbolic text uses the native as mediator of European desires, introducing a realm of “inter-subjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity” as opposed to the infantile specularity of otherness that the imaginary text enacts.

  Although this use of Lacan to demarcate literary categories (an application that has been criticized as crudely empiricist) has uncertain value as a means of classifying colonial literature, it has appeal in classifying post-colonial theorists. Here we might station JanMohamed’s penchant for Manichean allegories in the imaginary register, Bhabha’s negotiations in the symbolic. I suppose (to continue the conceit) we might cast Fanon as the other that mediates between them and the historical real.

  But what has proven most problematic in JanMohamed’s theorizing is what critics describe as an overly mimeticist conception of oppositional literature. Here we should turn to an overview of colonial discourse theory by radical South African expatriate Benita Parry. In the course of an explicitly Fanonian critique, Parry tasks JanMohamed’s study for lacking “Fanon’s grasp of the paradoxes and pitfalls of ‘rediscovering tradition’ and representing it within a western system of meanings. What for Fanon is a transitional process of liberating the consciousness of the oppressed into a new reality, JanMohamed treats as the arrival of the definitive oppositional discourse.”25

  In fact, the critique of alterity as pursued in Ga
yatri Spivak and Bhabha concerns her even more. Parry asks, “What are the politics of projects which dissolve the binary opposition colonial self/colonized other, encoded in colonialist language as a dichotomy necessary to domination, but also differently inscribed in the discourse of liberation as a dialectic of conflict and a call to arms?”26 Thus, Parry says of Bhabha’s reading that it “obscures Fanon’s paradigm of the colonial condition as one of implacable enmity between native and invader, making armed opposition both a cathartic and pragmatic necessity.”27 (To be sure, Fanon also spoke of the metaphysics of the dualism as “often quite fluid.”)28

  Of both Spivak and Bhabha, Parry asserts, “Because their theses admit of no point outside of discourse from which opposition can be engendered their project is concerned to place incendiary devices within the dominant structures of representation and not to confront these with knowledge.”29 Considering the subaltern voice to be irretrievable, they devalue the actual counter-narratives of anti-colonialist struggle as mere reverse discourse. But what Fanon shows us, according to Parry, and what “colonial discourse theory has not taken on board,” is that “a cartography of imperialist ideology more extensive than its address in the colonialist space, as well as a conception of the native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse is needed.”30

  To such positions in contemporary theory, Parry contrasts what she implies is a more properly Fanonian critical mode, one that wouldalso reject totalizing abstractions of power as falsifying situations of domination and subordination, [and in which] the notion of hegemony is inseparable from that of a counter-hegemony. In this theory of power and context, the process of procuring the consent of the oppressed and the marginalized to the existing structure of relationships through ideological inducements, necessarily generates dissent and resistance, since the subject is conceived as being constituted by means of incommensurable solicitations and heterogeneous social practices. The outcome of this agonistic exchange, in which those addressed challenge their interlocutors, is that the hegemonic discourse is ultimately abandoned as scorched earth when a different discourse, forged in the process of disobedience and combat, occupying new, never colonized and “utopian” territory, and prefiguring other relationships, values, and aspirations, is enunciated.31