Theory of violent revolution. Theory of an outsider? Fifty years after his death, Frantz Fanon still has an audience but he had a peculiar role as the scorned prophet….
… The government reply was not long in coming- in the form of a letter of expulsion giving him forty-eight hours to leave Algeria or face arrest. Fanon, with his wife and son, left for Lyon. Then, consistent with his new commitment, he moved to Tunis, headquarters of the Algerian nationalist government in exile, where he was put to work writing for its newspaper, El Moudjahid ( The Combatant). Through his articles and speeches, collected in book form in 1959 under the title Studies in a Dying Colonialism, Fanon became the outstanding theorist of the Algerian war.
—As the political measures toward the liberation of Algeria went apace on both sides of the Mediterranean, many European Algerians angrily reacted to what they considered a betrayal of their cause by the French government. While a ceasefire and terms of Algeria’s independence were negotiated in Evian, France, in March 1962, terrorists belonging to the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS) — a well-armed outifit of European Algerians opposed to Algeria’s independence — embarked on a vicious campaign, carrying out over a hundred bombings and attacks that month. In the picture, French soldiers watch over the Bab-el-Oued neighborhood in Algiers, warding against European paramilitaries as much as Algerian revolutionaries.
Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/07/05/50-years-of-algerian-independence-scenes-from-a-20th-century-war/photo/algeria-independence-1962/#ixzz2FJfnuMWp—
The extent of his celebrity can be measured by the number of attempts extremist French groups made to murder him. In 1959, while visiting an FLN base camp on the Moroccan-Tunisian border, Fanon’s jeep was blown up by a land mine. The lower half of his body was paralyzed. He had fractured twelve vertebrae and was flown to Rome for special care. The FLN representative there was supposed to drive to the airport to meet his plane. Before he reached his car, it blew up in the street, killing tow children.
A time bomb in the engine had gone of prematurely. Having safely reached the hospital., Fanon spotted an item in an Italian newspaper disclosing the number of his room. He changed rooms, and that night two masked men broke into the first room and emptied their submachine guns into the empty bed. The assassination attempts were credited to the Red Hand, an organization of right-wing colons who carried out terrorist attacks in Europe against arms dealers supplying FLN and FLN sympathizers. ( to be continued)…
—The individual undergoes a radical alteration in the very moment of lashing out against a system of total oppression. Frantz Fanon took this observation a step further in arguing that at the very center of the individual participating in revolutionary struggle is not only a “remodeling” of the consciousness we have of ourselves, of the ruling class and its world “at last within reach”—there is also a “renewal” of the “symbols, the myths, the beliefs, the emotional responsiveness of the people.” This double helix of experience and thought is the critical focus of Fanon’s conception of revolutionary praxis, a lived-reality of the body in motion with the world.
Revolutionary praxis opens up the door for our capacity to recreate the world and us in it. Yet this potential for human growth is not guaranteed. Nothing new ever is. Drastic shifts in human behaviors and attitudes in times of revolt present an opportunity for forward motion, but also for desperation and betrayal.
Fanon looks to the future, to human potential, as open-ended. This consideration stimulates the question: How and why does revolutionary praxis develop in the battle for a new humanity?
To study Fanon’s ideas is to engage in a continual process of self-reflection.—Read More:http://firenexttimenetwork.org/2012/07/26/down-a-new-road-reflections-on-fanons-revolutionary-praxis-by-arturo-castillon-philly/
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Nigel Gibson (NG): I do think that Fanon has relevance, and so the question is: how do you approach Fanon? Are there categories in Fanon’s thought that can simply be applied to new situations and, if so, what new thinking would emerge? Applying Fanon’s categories to new situations is valuable to a degree, but the question I am asking is: what does Fanon offer us methodologically? In other words, how does he actually get us to rethink our concepts? I think Fanon is basically an open thinker and a radically humanist thinker. If you look at the first pages of Black Skin White Masks, where he is critical of scientific methods, to the final pages of the Wretched of the Earth, where he talks about working out new concepts, the question is how and on what basis do you work on new concepts with the goal of human freedom? For Fanon, becoming actional is connected to his idea of a new humanism, which is explicitly critical of European humanism so intimately connected with colonialism. So, it is not simply about finding new concepts from anywhere, but being both critical and self-critical and also being very open to what is happening on the ground. So, inIn other words, a critic could have said last January in 2011 in Tahrir Square that if you read Fanon, you know that the liberatory moment is going to be closed down by the military or the state, and therefore end up with a kind of ontological pessimism. We are defeated before we begin. The critic might add, Fanon tells us that all these revolutions in the end will fail, and look: they have. But, for me, that is not how one engages Fanon. If Fanon is alive he is in the revolts because the revolts themselves open up something very new. One has to be aware, or listen, or open one’s mind to what are the new beginnings. Read More:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6927/frantz-fanon-and-the-arab-uprisings_an-interview-w
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