Some people might describe this utopian moment as the externalization of the quest romance. But note the emergence here of the familiar historicist dialectic of subversion and containment: That power produces its own subversion is held to be a fact about the constitution of the subject itself. And some will be skeptical about the notion of a revolutionary literature that is implicit here. If Said made of Fanon an advocative of post-post-modern counter-narratives of liberation, if JanMohamed made of Fanon a Manichean theorist of colonialism as absolute negation, and if Bhabha cloned, from Fanon’s theoria, another third world post-structuralist, Parry ’s Fanon (which I generally find persuasive) turns out to confirm her own rather optimistic vision of literature and social action. “This book, it is hoped, will be a mirror,” wrote a twenty-six-year-old Fanon, and in rereading these readings, including Bhabha’s own recent revisioning of Fanon as prophet of our post–cold war post–9/11 world order, I find it hard to avoid a sort of tableau of narcissism, with Fanon himself as the other that can only reflect and consolidate the critical self.
And perhaps we can hear a warning about the too uncritical appropriations of a Fanon in Spivak’s famous rebuttal to the criticism concerning the recuperation or effacement of the native’s voice. The course we’ve been plotting leads us, then, to what is, in part, Spivak’s critique of Benita Parry’s critique of Abdul JanMohamed’s critique of Homi Bhabha’s critique of Edward Said’s critique of colonial discourse.
Now, in Spivak’s view, Parry “is in effect bringing back the ‘native informant syndrome’ and using it differently in a critique of neo-colonialism.”32 When Benita Parry takes us—and by this I mean Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed, Gayatri Spivak—to task for not being able to listen to the natives or to let the natives speak, she forgets that we are natives, too. We talk like Defoe’s Friday, only much better.33 Thus, in straining for a voice of indigenous resistance, we can succumb to another quest romance, this time for the transparent “real” voice of the native. This has so many of the properties of a somewhat displaced model in the 19th century class stratified management of the culture of imperialism, that I believe that it is my task now to be vigilant about this desire to hear the native. Also, let me tell you that the native’s not a fool and within the fact of this extraordinary search for the “true” native which has been going on for decades, perhaps even a century or more, the native himself or herself is aware of this particular value.34
So we need to reject, says Spivak, that insidious image of the native as a para-human creature “who is there to give us evidence that we must always trust (as we wouldn’t trust the speech of people to whom we ascribe the complexity of being human).”35
I think this is an elegant reminder and safeguard against the sentimental romance of alterity. On the other hand, it still leaves space for some versions of Parry’s critique. I suggest that we try to distinguish more sharply between the notions of cultural resistance, on the one hand, and of cultural alterity, on the other, even as we note the significance of their conflation. There may well be something familiar about Spivak’s insistence on the totalizing embrace of colonial discourse and Parry’s unease with the insistence.
My claim is that what Jacques Derrida calls writing, Spivak, in a brilliant reversal, has renamed colonial discourse. So it is no accident that the two terms share precisely the same functionality. The Derridian mot, that there is nothing outside the text, is reprised as the argument that there is nothing outside (the discourse of) colonialism. And it leads, as well, to the argument that this very discourse must be read as heterogeneous to itself, as laced with the aporias and disjunctures that any deconstructive reading must elicit and engage. (It’s in just these terms that Spivak joins in the critique of alterity: “I am critical of the binary opposition colonizer/colonized. I try to examine the heterogeneity of ‘colonial power’ and to disclose the complicity of the two poles of that opposition as it constitutes the disciplinary enclave of the critique of imperialism.”)36 Indeed, I think Spivak’s argument, put in its strongest form, entails the corollary that all discourse is colonial discourse.
But perhaps the psychoanalytic model of culture makes this a foregone conclusion. When Fanon asserted that “only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem” could explain “the structure of the complex,”37 he was perhaps only extending a line of Sigmund Freud’s, which Stephen Greenblatt has brought attention to: “Civilization behaves toward sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which has subjected another one to its exploitation.”38 Freud’s pessimistic vision of “analysis interminable” would then refer us to a process of decolonization interminable.
I spoke of this double session of paradigms in which the Freudian mechanisms of psychic repression are set in relation to those of colonial repression. But it’s still unclear whether we are to speak of convergence or mere parallelism. Again, the Fanonian text casts the problem in sharpest relief.
Stephan Feuchtwang has cogently argued, in an essay entitled “Fanonian Spaces,” thatthe use of psychoanalytic categories for descriptions of social situations has tremendous analogical virtues. One is their capacity to indicate a directionality of affect in the situations, of forces mobilized rather than a mere disposition of intelligible elements and their rationality. Another is their focus on the relational, truly the social facts. Fanon does not analyze the colonial situation as a contract of cultural subjects or as an interaction of interested subjects as if they were logically prior to the situation. Instead, the relations of the situation are analyzed to see how their organization forms cultural subjects.”39
Feuchtwang speaks of “tremendous analogical virtues,” but are they merely analogical? Furthermore—accepting the force of the Freudian rereading—do we really want to elide the distance between political repression and individual neurosis: the positional distance between Steve Biko and, say, Woody Allen? On the other hand, Feuchtwang does point to the problematic relation between individual case studies and analyses of the collective state in Black Skin, White Masks. We’ve heard Fanon speak of the necessity for the “psychoanalytic interpretation,” yet he subsequently juxtaposes a notion of socioanalysis to Freud’s psychoanalysis: “It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Besides [the Freudian contribution of] phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny.”40
Or as Albert Memmi simplifies the question, in the preface to his classic The Colonizer and the Colonized : “Does psychoanalysis win out over Marxism? Does all depend on the individual or on society?”41 And, of course, the tension—which we endlessly try to theorize away—persists in all political appropriations of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, doesn’t it plague our appropriation of Fanon as a collectivized individual, as alterity in revolt, as the third world of theory itself? I speak, of course, of our Fanon, of whom Sartre wrote in the preface of The Wretched of the Earth, “The Third World finds itself and speaks to itself in his voice.”42 I speak of the black Benjamin who, as Jerome McGann writes, presents “the point of view of a Third World, where the dialectic of the first two worlds is completely reimagined,” because he writes from “the perspective of an actual citizen of the actual Third World.”43
So I want to turn, finally, to yet another Fanon, the ironic figure analyzed by Tunisian novelist and philosopher Albert Memmi. Memmi’s Fanon is, emphatically, not the Fanon we have recuperated for global colonial discourse theory. He is, indeed, a far more harried subject, a central fact of whose life was his dislocation from the “actual Third World.” Of course, we know from his biographers and from his own account that Fanon, whose mother was of Alsatian descent, grew up in Martinique thinking of himself as white and French and that his painful reconstitution as a black West Indian occurred only when he arrived at the French capital. Yet at this point—again, in Memmi’s narrative—Fanon lost himself as a black Martinican: “Fanon’s private drama is that, though henceforth hating France and the French, he will never turn to Négrit
ude and to the West Indies”; indeed, he “never again set foot in Martinique.” 44 Homi Bhabha, summarizing this line of Memmi’s thinking about this curious phenomenon, argues that “Fanon’s commitment to the Algerian cause seemed to turn from a political commitment into a more inward identification, a consummate self-fashioning of himself as an Algerian,” manifesting itself in “a compensatory family romance that would disavow his Martinican origins.”45 Yet Fanon’s attempts to identify himself as an Algerian proved equally doomed. As Fanon’s biographers remind us, most Algerian revolutionaries scant his role and remain irritated by the attention paid to him in the West as a figure in Algerian decolonization. To them—and how ironic this is to his Western admirers—he remained a European interloper. In Tunisia, Bhabha reports, he was once known as “the pamphleteer from Martinique.”46
Though Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia, in neither country did he even understand the language; his psychiatric consultations were conducted through an interpreter. 47 And the image here—of the psychoanalysis of culture being conducted, quite literally, through an interpreter—does speak eloquently of the ultimately mediated nature of the most anti-colonialist analysis.
Far from championing the particularities and counter-narratives of the oppressed, Memmi’s Fanon is an interloper without the patience or interest to acquaint himself with the local specificities of culture: “He grew impatient and failed to hide his scorn of regional particularisms, the tenacity of traditions and customs that distinguish cultural and national aspirations, not to speak of contradictory interests.”48 And although Memmi’s own insertion in colonial politics is certainly complex, his version is consistent with that of the revolutionary elite of post-independent Algeria.
Memmi’s Fanon was devoted to a dream of a third world, a third world where he could look into a mirror and have no color. Yet he lived in a third world that rebuffed his most ardent desires for identification. What remained for him, Memmi writes, “ but to propose a completely novel man?”49
We’ve seen suggested, at various points, the disruptive relation between narratives of subject formation and narratives of liberation inscribed on the Fanonian text (as well as in contemporary colonial discourse theory more widely). Memmi is quite blunt on the issue: Fanon does, on the one hand, claim an absolute disjunction between colonial representations of the colonized and the subject of representation. But, Memmi writes, doesn’t colonialism inscribe itself upon the colonized? “For that matter, is Fanon’s own thinking on this point really coherent? I too could cite a great many contradictory passages of his, where he speaks of ‘mutilation,’ ‘inferiorization,’ ‘criminal impulsion,’—results, obv iously, of colonization.”50 Actually, Memmi goes on to say, Fanon must have seen that the personality of the colonized was affected in these ways. But “he found them embarrassing and repulsive. This is because, like many other defenders of the colonized, he harbored a certain amount of revolutionary romanticism. . . . As for most social romantics, so for him the victim remained proud and intact throughout oppression; he suffered but did not let himself be broken. And the day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to appear before our eyes immediately.” But, says Memmi, “this is not the way it happens.”51
I believe that the Antillean mirror that reflects no color at all haunts Fanon. Memmi is surely right to locate the utopian moment in Fanon in his depiction of decolonization as engendering “a kind of tabula rasa,” as “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species of men by another ‘species’ of men,” so that the fear that we will continue to be (as he puts it) “overdetermined from without” was never reconciled with his political vision of emancipation.52 This may be the clearest way of representing Fanon’s own self-divisions, that is, as an agon between psychology and a politics, between ontogeny and sociogeny, between—to recur to Memmi—Marx and Freud.
Fanon’s vision of the new man emerges as central tableau in identity politics, for us as for him. At the intersection of colonial and psychoanalytic discourse, Fanon wonders how to create a new identity. The problem remains, again for us as for him, that—as Memmi remarks about Fanon’s own project of personal transformation—“one doesn’t leave one’s own self behind as easily as all that.”53
Rehistoricizing Fanon, we can hear a lament concerning the limits of liberation, concerning the very intelligibility of his dream of decolonization. And even though the colonial paradigm proved valuable in foregrounding issues of power and positionality, now may be the time to question its ascendance in literary and cultural studies, especially because the “disciplinary enclave” of anti-imperialist discourse has proved a last bastion for the project, and dream, of global theory. In the context of the colonial binarism, we’ve seldom admitted fully how disruptive the psychoanalytic model can be, elaborating a productive relation between oppressed and oppressor—productive of each as speaking subjects. And yet we can chart the torsional relation of the discourses in the exceptional instability of Fanon’s own rhetoric.
But this requires of us that we no longer allow Fanon to remain a kind of icon or “screen memory,” rehearsing dimly remembered dreams of post-colonial emancipation. It means reading him, with an acknowledgment of his own historical particularity, as an actor whose own search for self-transcendence scarcely exempted him from the heterogeneous and conflictual structures that we have taken to be characteristic of colonial discourse. It means not elevating him above his localities of discourse as a trans-cultural, trans-historical global theorist, not simply to cast him into battle, but to recognize him as a battlefield in himself. Fanon wrote, with uncanny and prescient insistence: “In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time.”54
Do we still need global, imperial theory, even the whole universalizing model of capital-T theory that it presupposes? It’s no scandal that our own theoretical reflections must be as provisional, reactive, and local as the texts we reflect upon. Of course, discarding the imperial agenda of global theory also means not having to choose between or among Wright and Léopold Sédar Senghor; Césaire and Senghor; Spivak and Said; Greenblatt, Pease, and Porter; Bhabha and JanMohamed; Parry and Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad; or even Fanon and Memmi. Rather, it means not representing the choice as one of epistemic hygiene. And it requires a recognition that we, too, just as much as Fanon, may be fated to rehearse the agonisms of a culture that may never earn the title of post-colonial.55
CHAPTER FOUR
Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue
The Culture Wars: The Sequel
For literary and cultural critics, “the culture wars” were battles that raged during the late 1980s and 1990s, first and foremost, over which authors and which of their texts would be a part of the literary canon, the “classical,” “timeless,” or “universal” texts that we teach in survey courses, say, in American literature, or in “Great Books” courses, the texts that stand the test of time, the texts that—in some magical way—speak to the universal human condition. That battleground soon expanded to include heated confrontations over the rise of ethnic and gender studies programs (African American studies, women’s studies, gay studies, etc.) and their proper place in any serious Faculty of Arts and Sciences, if, indeed, they should have any place at all as freestanding or even quasi-independent, tenure-granting entities. Who should get tenure and who decides who should get tenure became just as important, if not more so, than what courses tenured professors should be allowed to teach. I don’t think that I am being too optimistic or naïve if I say, twenty years later, that these questions of pedagogy and appointments and promotion, are, in most parts of the academy, more or less resolved, with accounts of the culture wars being the stuff of undergraduate essays in English departments and Ph.D. theses in the humanities. After all, we won those wars, didn’t we? Isn’t Zora Neale Hurston taught just about everywhere these days?
Well, most certainly, in one significant sense, the oppositio
n (that would be us) won the culture wars. After all, what self-respecting English department does not teach African American or women’s literature? And ample Norton anthologies make the teaching of those traditions easy and, well, canonical, even one called The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and another called The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, best-sellers both. But I am beginning to believe that, even though we seem to have won these battles over the classroom, perhaps they were just fronts in a much larger, vaster, and more complicated campaign than most of us could possibly have grasped two decades ago.
Will the culture wars turn out to be our generation’s twenty-first-century version of the seventeenth century’s Thirty Years War? Are we to believe that the symbolic trade-off for the canonization of, say, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was the unending bitterness and enduring recalcitrance of the Red states? Could those battles in literature departments in the early 1990s possibly have contributed to the creation of “something new in our political life,” as Michael Tomasky puts it, “the summer’s apoplectic and bordering-on-violent town-hall meetings, and the large ‘9/12’ rally on Washington’s National mall that drew tens of thousands of people to protest America’s descent into ‘socialism’ (or ‘communism,’ or, occasionally, ‘Nazism’),” replete with placards depicting President Barack Obama either as a Sambolike version of Heath Ledger’s The Joker or as Adolf Hitler in blackface? Was there any relation between what we achieved in the academy in terms of diversifying the canon and the “Tea Party” movement organized two decades later by FreedomWorks and a coalition of almost thirty other conservative organizations? 1 Even though the left won those heated battles fairly easily (in retrospect) against an aging and ill-prepared opposition within the cloistered confines of a traditionally liberal and tolerant academy, is it possible, even with all that the election of a liberal black president implies, that we could still lose the larger war with the right over core values of liberal democracy within American society?
Tradition and the Black Atlantic Page 8
