Frantz Fanon · Politics
The most controversial argument in Fanon’s <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em>: that colonialism is founded and held in place by violence, and that its undoing therefore involves violence - which, at the level of the individual, Fanon describes as a force that can free the colonized from the paralysis of the inferiority complex. Presented in context, with its serious critics.
To understand Fanon’s notorious argument about violence, you have to start where he starts: with the violence that is already there. The colonial world, he writes, is ‘a world cut in two’ - the settler’s town, clean and lit and full, set hard against the native’s town, crowded and hungry and kept in its place. And what keeps the line between them is not persuasion but force: the soldier and the policeman, Fanon says, are the colonizer’s official spokesmen, ruling by the rifle and the whip. Colonialism did not arrive by invitation and does not remain by consent; it was imposed by conquest and is maintained by daily coercion. This is the fact Fanon insists we hold in view before we recoil at his conclusions. The question is never whether violence will enter the colonial situation - it built and sustains that situation. The question is what happens when the violence that has only flowed one way, downward, begins to be returned.
The step that makes Fanon’s argument distinctive - and most disputed - is psychological. Colonialism, he has already shown, does not only exploit the colonized; it convinces them of their own inferiority, teaches them to lower their eyes, to obey, to believe that resistance is both wrong and hopeless. The colonized person is trained into passivity, into a ‘despair and inaction’ that is the inner face of subjection. Fanon, the psychiatrist, saw this paralysis up close in his patients: the muscular tension, the nightmares, the turned-inward aggression of people forbidden to strike at what oppressed them. His question is how a people so thoroughly taught their own powerlessness could ever recover the sense of themselves as agents who can act on the world. It is against this background - the manufactured helplessness of the colonized - that his claims about the effect of struggle must be read. He is asking what breaks the spell of learned inferiority.
Fanon is probably more often quoted than read, and the quotations are usually the most incendiary lines torn from their setting. He is frequently presented as a simple apostle of bloodshed, a man who loved violence and urged the colonized to kill. This is a caricature, and it matters to correct it. Fanon was a doctor who spent his working life treating the wounded minds that violence produces - and the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth is a series of clinical case studies of the psychiatric devastation the Algerian war inflicted on both sides: the tortured and the torturers, the survivors and the perpetrators, undone by what they had suffered and done. A man compiling that evidence is not naive about what violence costs. Fanon’s argument is conditional, analytical, and tragic: given a colonial order that is itself violence, he tries to describe honestly how it comes apart and what that does to human beings. Reading him well means neither sanitizing the hard claims nor flattening them into a slogan.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Fanon argued colonialism is a regime of violence, so decolonization is ‘always a violent phenomenon,’ and that at the level of the individual he described violence as a ‘cleansing force’ against the colonial inferiority complex - while critics (Arendt, the Gandhian tradition, and Fanon’s own clinical…
Leads to Mahatma Gandhi.
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