{"id":1256,"date":"2017-01-18T06:25:49","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T11:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1256"},"modified":"2017-01-18T06:25:57","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T11:25:57","slug":"brandon-terry-on-fanon-and-nietzsche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/brandon-terry-on-fanon-and-nietzsche\/","title":{"rendered":"Brandon Terry | On Fanon and Nietzsche"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brandon Terry<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the prologue to his Conscripts of Modernity<\/em>, David Scott charges postcolonial theory broadly with a failure to pursue an \u201cadequate interrogation of the present,\u201d and a concomitant failure to identify \u201cthe difference<\/em> between the questions that animated former presents and those that animate our own.\u201d[1]<\/a> The approach he defends is one that approaches the animating hopes, projects, and concepts of the past in order to reconstruct \u201cthe way those hopes reflect a certain understanding of the problem to be overcome\u2026the way the sources of discontent or the obstacles to satisfaction are conceived and defined.\u201d[2]<\/a> In a brief invocation of Frantz Fanon\u2019s classic The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, Scott expresses a deep concern that, even as authors have critiqued and diverged from Fanon\u2019s particular answers <\/em>to the problem of colonialism, they have nonetheless taken aboard his \u201cimage\u201d of colonialism and the conceptual preoccupations it elicits.<\/p>\n

In my contribution to \u201cNietzsche 13\/13: Fanon,\u201d I want to pursue Scott\u2019s provocations through two interpretive angles. The first approach aims to underscore the problem Scott identifies by unpacking three crucial Nietzschean themes that are central to Fanonist conceptions of the \u201cproblem-space\u201d of colonialism and which pose significant problems for those who would turn to Fanon as a foundational source for Afro-Modern political philosophy in the present. These themes may be broadly characterized as, (1) The Place of Repression and Psychopathology in a Hermeneutics of Suspicion, (2) Ressentiment and the Critique of Black Political Life, and (3) the positing of a \u201cGreat Politics\u201d of struggle between Europe and the Third World.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I hope to illuminate these themes through a consideration of the legacy of Fanonism from a different site of engagement than postcolonial theory: African American politics and thought. When the first English translations of Fanon\u2019s work were released in the United States, he became arguably the most important intellectual touchstone for the emergent generation of radicals, militants, and revolutionaries coalescing under the sign of \u201cBlack Power.\u201d Prominent African American intellectuals and activists turned exuberantly to Fanon, adapting his picture of colonialism to Afro-American conditions, appropriating his emphasis on sex and psychopathology in the theorization of racial domination, and wrestling with his judgments on revolution, Third World solidarity, and nationalist politics. The controversial writer, and Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver referred to Wretched <\/em>as \u201cThe Black Bible,\u201d and figures from Stokely Carmichael to Kenneth Clark to Martin Luther King found themselves invoking and arguing with Fanon in print. In a development that would likely stun these figures, however, the profound influence that Fanon had on the Black Power generation has faded far into the background of Fanon scholarship and criticism. I want to revisit this moment, not only because its influence still surreptitiously affects theorizations of urban social problems, black cultural formations, and our understandings of the history of black political practice and thought, but also because I think it helps bring out the more concrete, and perhaps more troubling implications of an uncritical Fanonism in the present.<\/p>\n

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Suggested Readings:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth<\/em><\/p>\n

Fanon, Black Skin\/White Masks<\/em>, especially chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, and conclusion<\/p>\n

Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro!<\/em>, chapter 9<\/p>\n

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity<\/em>, prologue<\/p>\n

Eldridge Cleaver, \u201cThe Land Question and Black Liberation\u201d in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches<\/em>, pp. 80-88 and \u201cOn Lumpen Ideology,\u201d The Black Scholar<\/em>, Vol. 4, No. 3 (November-December 1972), pp. 2-10.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther King, \u201cBlack Power\u201d in Where Do We Go From Here<\/em><\/p>\n

Stokely Carmichael, \u201cDialectics of Liberation\u201d and \u201cA New World to Build\u201d in Stokely Speaks<\/em><\/p>\n

Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche\u2019s Great Politics<\/em><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity<\/em>, p. 3<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Scott 5-6<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brandon Terry In the prologue to his Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott charges postcolonial theory broadly with a failure to pursue an \u201cadequate interrogation of the present,\u201d and a concomitant failure to identify \u201cthe difference between the questions that… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38973,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-8-13","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}