…Frantz Fanon’s final theme is the emergence of a new national culture. Using Algeria as an example, he tried to show that art forms were being changed by the war. Arab storytellers he says, replaced the formula “this all happened long ago” with “this happened somewhere else, but it could have happened here, and today.”
Fanon had a limitless faith in the power of revolution to change society. He predicted that the Algerian war would lead to the liberation of Algerian women. In the years of struggle, she had fought alongside the men and thrown off her veil. Fanon saw this as a permanent change. But once the war was over, there was a return to Islamic tradition. Something akin to women aiding America’s war effort in WWII through the assumption of factory work, but then relegated back to the previous norm once their labor was no longer required.
—Edward Said, in ‘Travelling Theory Revisited’, speculates that Fanon’s most famous book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, is in part a dialogue with George Lukacs’ 1922 analysis of Reification in ‘History and Class Consciousness’. Lukacs examines commodity-fetishism in capitalist society as the basis of the process by which human creativity is fragmented and quantified. Said claims that “Fanon seems to have read Lukacs’ book and taken from its reification chapter an understanding of how even in the most confusing and heterogenous of situations, a vigorous analysis of one central problematic could be relied on to yield the most extensive understanding of the whole.”
According to Lukacs, the alienating social reality is manifested philosophically in the split between Subject and Object. Although this is an age-old problem in western philosophy, Lukacs reformulates it in the context of capitalist commodity production—Read More:http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_DB_Fanon.htm
In Algeria, wearing the veil was again encouraged, and birth control discouraged. Women were forced back into their subordinate role. The mutation of Algerian society never really took place.
When The Wretched of the Earth was published, Sartre wrote in an introduction: “The Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice.” However, such has not been the case. Fanon’s is a moving but isolated voice, which has given birth to no Fanonist movement in the third world today. In Africa, as elsewhere, his books are not widely read. His call for peasant revolutions and a new society cleansed of the dregs of colonialism has gone unanswered. His dreams of third-world unity has turned out to be a pathetic illusion which should have been evident to Fanon at the time of his writing. ( to be continued)…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…One scholar notes that “the revolutionary struggle is, for Fanon, comprehensive: it must aim not only to restructure society, but also to reshape consciousness.” In other words, in addition to releasing tension, which can also be achieved through nonviolence, violence “had the capacity to destroy myths and gain control of the land.”
Lewis Gordon provides a perceptive analysis of why violence is often chosen over nonviolence in the colonial context:
If the oppressor or the colonizer perceives the very notion of a postcolonial society as a violent condition – violent because it displaces him – then his very call for a nonviolent solution amounts to the preservation of colonialism, or at least a transformation of colonialism into a condition that he will prefer which amounts to a form of neocolonialism. Anthony Shadid notes that for the local Islamic militant, violence was also “the answer to every humiliation…every compromise…and every hardship another day brings to a land convulsed with despair.” Fanon discusses how this violence “ruled over the ordering of the colonial world” and in the process “ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms” and destroyed everything from the “economy” to the native’s “external life.” Hence, the native’s primary reason for violence arises out of the violence he experiences under colonialism, both to his body and mind. The native and colonizer’s first encounter is “marked by violence” and their subsequent existence is constructed on the “exploitation of the native by the settler” through a “great array of bayonets and cannons.” Read More:http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553424/zulfiqarAdnanAhmad.pdf?sequence=1
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