fanon: prospero complex

Frantz Fanon. The prophet scorned. Fifty years after his death, the audience is still attentive. Violence as the path of least resistance?

…The second symptom of the Prospero complex is the symbolic equation of black skin with evil. One descends into darkness, and rises into light. Virginity is white, truth is white, therefore its opposites must be black. Birds of prey are black. Shakespeare made Lago express his envy of Othello through the imagery of blackness. Later, psychiatrists called this “Manichaeism delirium.” The colored natives become contaminated by it. In Martinique it was still said of a worthless white man that he possessed “a nigger soul.”

---investigates the Islamic renewal in Sudan as symptomatic of a larger postcolonial predicament. It investigates the dual judiciary, dubbed “Manichaean” by Fanon, whose laws have been at the center of this renewal. This colonial organization of the institution was characterized by a conflict between its dominant Civil Division and the subordinated Sharia Division. ---Read More:http://www.brill.com/manichaean-delirium. click image for link...

—investigates the Islamic renewal in Sudan as symptomatic of a larger postcolonial predicament. It investigates the dual judiciary, dubbed “Manichaean” by Fanon, whose laws have been at the center of this renewal. This colonial organization of the institution was characterized by a conflict between its dominant Civil Division and the subordinated Sharia Division. —Read More:http://www.brill.com/manichaean-delirium. click image for link…

Having established that the white settler substitutes for the Black’s true identity a set of neurotic myths, which incidentally and somewhat ironically fabricated themselves around Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau’s Noble Savage and the secular racism of a Voltaire, Fanon posed what he conceived as the fundamental dilemma of his race:

Liberation begins by recognizing these constructions for what they are. The first impulse at the arrival of awareness is self loathing: as I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling. If all you represent—your history, your culture, your very self—is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution: to rise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal….Read More:http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf

But having rejected the image that white men make of him and the white mask that they hold out for him to wear, Fanon in his first book suffers a failure of nerve. He avoides the obvious conlusion advocating revolutionary action and ends Black Skin, White Masks with a lyrical passage on the eventual reconciliation of blacks and whites that is badly out of key with the rest of the book.

---The process of criminalization not only disenfranchises, but also dehumanizes individuals to the point that their oppression becomes invisible. A return to a Fanonian discourse seems appropriate to describe this invisibility and non-reciprocity and the criminalized mass of black and brown people in the urban ghetto who are seen as a moral cancer and a threat to civil order. The situation is Manichean, with the "dividing line" enforced by the police and prison system "creating an atmosphere of submission" (1968 38). A return to Fanon describes not only the brutal and mechanical violence of the state, as well as the sociopolitical discourse that is akin to colonization, but also its psychological trauma. For Fanon, the real revolt against colonialism is carried out by those dispossessed and marginalized people, who are completely "outside the colonial system"- people who, in the words of apartheid, are "surplus populations." ---Read More:http://www.anarkismo.net/article/22834

—The process of criminalization not only disenfranchises, but also dehumanizes individuals to the point that their oppression becomes invisible. A return to a Fanonian discourse seems appropriate to describe this invisibility and non-reciprocity and the criminalized mass of black and brown people in the urban ghetto who are seen as a moral cancer and a threat to civil order. The situation is Manichean, with the “dividing line” enforced by the police and prison system “creating an atmosphere of submission” (1968 38). A return to Fanon describes not only the brutal and mechanical violence of the state, as well as the sociopolitical discourse that is akin to colonization, but also its psychological trauma. For Fanon, the real revolt against colonialism is carried out by those dispossessed and marginalized people, who are completely “outside the colonial system”- people who, in the words of apartheid, are “surplus populations.” —Read More:http://www.anarkismo.net/article/22834

He concludes by saying: “on the field of battle, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes hanging by their testicles, a monument is slowly being built that promises to be majestic. And, at the top of this monument, I can already see a white man and a black man hand in hand.” How this monument is to be erected, he does not say.( to be continued)…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…There is then another uncomfortable realization tied to this conclusion that the totality—capitalism—must itself be transcended: “There is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white” . But, paradoxically, the obverse, that whiteness is the flipside of blackness, is false. This is the central claim of BSWM that stands at both ends of the book. For the black man

mits the narrator, offers “no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” .

BSWM starts with the observation that the isomorphic relationship between the races results in “a massive psycho-existential complex” . A “cure” can only be had if one analyzes racism as a symptom. Fanon argues that “only a psychoanalytic interpretation” can transfigure the significance of the symptom so as to make life more livable. That is, if we bracket the socio-structural causes of racism, then we can attack the psychopathology of race. Anti-black racism often serves to alibi poverty or class differences, but to confuse anti-black racism as the cause of structural disparities is to misunderstand the particularity of modern racism, which is also why a psychoanalytic explanation of racism differs from a sociological one, despite the fact that its object of analysis is the same. A psychoanalytic treatment of racism takes as its concrete concern the affective satisfaction that blacks as well as whites obtain from anti-black racism. One manifestation of this “double narcissism” is that the “white man is locked in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness” . Fanon thus develops an analysis of racism rather than race—the naturalization of race is the object of this critique. Read More:http://platypus1917.org/2010/03/15/book-review-frantz-fanon-black-skin-white-masks/

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