Episode 172 - Closer Look: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] Ellie: The podcast where two philosophy professors sometimes spend an entire episode doing a deep dive of a single text.

[00:00:26] David: I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:28] Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson, as always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode. Community Discussion and More. Join overthink on Substack.

[00:00:37] David: Ellie. Today we're gonna be talking about a text that is really important in philosophy, but also in some ways very unique, and that is France Fanon, the wretched of the Earth. It is a wonderful text that has been quite influential in a number of fields, including political theory, decolonial philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, you name it, the text has left its mark.

And the reason that I say it's also a unique text is because it's a text that was written at the very end of fan's life when he was dying from leukemia in the 1960s. And so it is fan's final word to the world, and the text is written both as a work of philosophy, but it also reads very much like a manifesto of sorts, which is why it doesn't really have a lot of references or citations.

And so that makes it, somewhat challenging, from the standpoint of a scholar.

[00:01:43] Ellie: although I'll say that's really standard for text written in French at this time. The French rarely cite a lot of other thinkers.

[00:01:50] David: That No, that's true, but it also gives the text a poignancy and a sense of urgency that is very powerful and that you sense as a reader when you're moving through the pages. It's a text that I've read in the past as a student that I have taught now that I am a professor and each time I read it, there are new things that come to the foreground.

And so I'm really happy that we're doing this closer look on this text.

[00:02:17] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and in fact, so I think one of the important things to mention about this text is that it was banned in France upon publication, and this is due to one of the things that we're gonna be talking a lot about today, which is its advocacy of violence. I mean, Fanon thinks that Decolonial projects require violence, and that was obviously very threatening in France at the time.

So Fanon is writing in French. He himself was a native French speaker. He was born in 1935 in the French colony of Martinique to a pretty high social status because his father was accustomed. Inspector and his mother owned a hardware store. And then at the age of 18, he left to join the free French forces during World War ii.

And then after the war, he studied psychiatry and medicine at the University of Leon. And you know, I think his psychiatric background is very important for his work in general. It's also something that we'll be talking about a little bit later in the episode because he talks a lot about psychiatric maladies in this book.

And he was also very active in the Algerian independence movement. Um, the Algerian War of Independence against France began in 1954 and fanon trained nurses for the front and edited newspapers, wrote articles about the movement.

[00:03:36] David: Yeah, no, his participation in the Algerian National Liberation Front is really interesting. And honestly, you know, like if you're, if you're talking about philosophers who. Who talked the talk and walked the walk. Fanon is right up there. His participation in the liberation movement is, is really interesting to me because he participated both as a writer.

Uh, for example, in Tunisia, he was known as the Pamphleteer from Martinique as he would write these pamphlets for the cause. He also joined the cause as a psychiatrist and he would help revolutionary militias to cope with their own anxieties of terror and the what we now would call PTSD, that they would get from participating in the war from committing acts of violence.

And he also helped them by training them with psychological and also physiological techniques for being able to withstand interrogation in case they were captured by, French soldiers. And, uh, you know, we'll talk also about his, his clinical work with dealing with psychosis that are specific to the colonial context.

But it's somebody who is three things at once. He's a philosopher, he's a revolutionary, and he is a clinician. And that's a combo that you don't really find. In a lot of other thinkers.

[00:04:51] Ellie: and I think too, I mean, we're gonna be focusing on a close reading of this text, and so I think our listeners have become familiar by now with a relatively recent form of episode we've introduced, which is the Closer Look episode where we focus on one single text and do a relatively close reading of it, as well as drawing out some of its broader themes.

And so we'll be focusing mainly on, you know, the book itself here. But I wanna mention that, I mean, I think you can see how influential this text has been. If you look at the fact that in the edition that you and I have at least, David, which is the 60th anniversary edition, there is a preface by Jean Paul sart.

This is very famous that SART wrote the preface for this text when it first was published. But then there's also a foreword by homey K Baba, one of the most important, uh, decolonial thinkers and. There's a new introduction by Cornell West, one of the most influential public intellectuals and philosophers of the present day.

So, you know, that's, that's a pretty, pretty big deal.

[00:05:51] David: It tells you something about the place that it occupies in the contemporary philosophical landscape. But I also wanna say that it was already that influential already 50 years ago back then. Um, because there is, in the Forward by Homey Baba, a passage where Homey Baba talks about just how many revolutionary movements in the 1960s and onward were influenced by this particular text, which has been called the Bible of decolonization.

And in particular, he points out the following. I'm just gonna, uh, read a very small paragraph that talks about the influence that this had on the formation of the Black Panthers in the us. Homi Baba writes. In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton read The Redhead of the Earth in a house in Oakland. And so the story goes when they were arrested some months later for blocking the sidewalk.

The text provided foundational perspectives on Neocolonialism and nationalism that inspired the founding of the Black Nationalist Party. And later he goes on to talk about how this also influenced other, uh, revolutionary movements in Africa, as well as a number of other revolutionary movements across the world.

So this is a text that has again, in some ways shaped what movements of liberation against colonialism look like by virtue of having been read by the people at the forefront of those

[00:07:19] Ellie: Not only theoretically influential, but deeply influential in terms of concrete material conditions and actual revolutions.

[00:07:30] David: Today we are taking a closer look at Frantz Fanon, the Wretched of the Earth.

[00:07:34] Ellie: Does decolonization require violence?

[00:07:37] David: How do colonized subjects struggle to achieve their freedom?

[00:07:41] Ellie: And what are the challenges that a newly independent nation faces? Once a colonial power has been overthrown? Undoubtedly, the most influential yet also controversial claim of this book is that decolonization is always violent. Fanan suggests that when a colonized people seeks to overthrow their colonizers. They have to fight violence with violence. He says that the emergence of a new nation and the demolition of the colonial system are the result of either a violent struggle by the newly independent people or outside violence by other colonized peoples, which has an inhibiting effect on the colonial regime.

We're gonna mainly focus on the first of those two options. That's his main focus too. But I think the point is just that, look, a nonviolent movement is not going to effectively overthrow a situation of colonization. And so I think a question for us, a good place to begin is why is that the case? Why does Fanon think that decolonization is necessarily violent?

[00:08:46] David: Yeah. And right off the gate, he makes this point, right? So it's not like he eases us into this claim about violence. He opens up by saying decolonization cannot be accomplished. He says by like the wave of a magic wand, it cannot be achieved by a natural cataclysm, where magically the colonial regime implodes.

And it certainly, this is the important point also for me. It cannot be achieved through a gentleman's agreement. There is no coming to the table to negotiate because there is no negotiating with the colonial power, since the colonial power is itself oppressing, uh, the colonized population.

And so the defense of violence, I think is what makes this text so powerful and so useful. And also why it made the text be read as Fanon intended it to be read as a kind of guide for the liberation of colonized people on the ground, right? A justification for organizing and organizing violently.

[00:09:48] Ellie: Well, he thinks that in order for the colonial situation to be overcome, there has to be an annihilation of the colonist, at least as colonists. I mean, he's not literally arguing for massacre. He is. He has a more complex view of violence. You know, he's not ruling that out either. But again, it's more complex.

But he thinks that, yeah, there has to be an annihilation of the colonist in overthrowing the colonial situation. And so I think the answer to this question, why is this? The case has to begin with the fact that fanon points out, and this seems to be a pretty uncontroversial point, that the colonial situation is itself necessarily violent.

There is no benevolent colonialism. There is no nonviolent colonialism. And so, David, what do you think about this? Like in what senses is the colonial situation violent for Fanon?

[00:10:37] David: So I think it's violent in every imaginable sense because a colonial relationship between a ruler and a colonized it's usually a relationship of extraction. Uh, here we can think about the extraction of natural resources from a colony. Resources that then get siphoned off to the metropol to enrich, you know, in this case France.

So there is an economic violence. There is also literal Violence in the form of repression. There is the institution of a police, state of military rule, the creation of a public space that is inhospitable for the people for whom that space is their native land. And finally, it's also a phenomenon logically and psychically violent relationship because part of the logic of colonialism entails the colonizers convincing or at least sending the message to the colonized that they are subhuman and that they do not deserve basic consideration, basic rights, basic human dignity.

And so the kind of violence he's talking about really stretches across all these manifestations of abuse.

[00:11:49] Ellie: Yeah, and we'll talk more about the dehumanization and the effect that that has on the colonized subject a bit later in the episode. But I think what we see already here, and I think this is an important point for understanding the violence of colonization. Is that in being dehumanized and being treated as an animal, the colonized subject is also construed as evil.

And so Fanon has a really interesting philosophy of history. Undergirding this approach that I think we could broadly say is Marxian, or at least dialectical, where he thinks that history moves forward due to the conflict between different forces that reaches such a fever pitch, that it becomes suddenly unsustainable.

And so what you have in the colonial situation is the realm of the colonizers who construe themselves as good. The realm of the colonized, whom the colonizers construe as evil or bad, what he describes as a mannequin in logic. And those two groups then get reified strongly distinguished from one another, you know, kind of treated as entities in and of themselves rather than as like, you know, dynamic processes and so on and so forth.

And so the colonized subjects have to, in overthrowing the situation of colonization, kind of play with the fact that they have been construed as evil and reverse the situation where suddenly they become the good ones. And the colonizers are the evil ones, hence the need to fight violently against them.

[00:13:19] David: Yeah, and so that mannequin logic of black, evil, white good is really important. Even though it sounds simplistic, it's really important for understanding the instability of the colonial relationship because Fanon says even if colonialism manages to produce the semblance of institutional endurance, right?

Like let's say that there's a colonial power that steps in and they create prisons and police headquarters and schools, et cetera, even if those institutions have a kind of stability just by virtue of the fact that they're standing up and they are functional. As long as there is a colonial relationship in place.

He says phenomenologically, there is an air of instability in the colonized environment that puts the environment always on the edge. Things are always about to blow up in a colonial space, and that's the really important thing that you get based on this dialect that you're, that you're talking about in this conflict.

You reach what he calls a point of no return at which it's unthinkable not to engage in forms of violence just by virtue of your material reality.

[00:14:29] Ellie: and I think maybe I would slightly adjust what you said, and it's not that things are always about to blow up. I don't know, unless may, maybe you're right and I'm wrong on that, but I take him to be a little bit more, you know, dialectical in the sense that there's a tension at work always, but the tension becomes so unbearable at a certain point that then the situation necessarily needs to blow up.

But I think this is also a place where we could say that Fanon is not accepting wholesale, a Marxian dialectical approach to history because he thinks that, so when I say Marxian, I know some of our listeners are probably already familiar with what that means. Others might not be. But this basic idea that history moves through the material conflict between different realities that then kind of construct themselves in a dichotomy that eventually needs to be overcome, starts with hagel, then gets developed further by Marx because Marx makes it material.

Hagel thinks about it in terms of spirit. But Fanan says that this Marxian approach needs to be extended for a couple of reasons. For one, Marxist's approach tends to think about the parties that are at odds with one another as emerging from the same context. So think about the classic example here being the capitalists or bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Fanon also uses the example in feudalism of the knight versus surf. Like those are people who live in the same space emerge out of the same space, whereas the colonizer is an outsider and he describes the colonizer as actually a permanent outsider or foreigner who inserts themselves into the situation.

And so the dichotomy is not kind of organically emerging, but something imposed. And I think a second difference from the Marxian perspective that we have here with Fanon. Is that the economic infrastructure in the colonies, he also says is already a superstructure. So in a classical Marxian analysis, you have a base material conditions being the base, and then you have the superstructure, the ideology that serves to justify that set of material conditions.

And Fanon suggests that that distinction just doesn't really quite hold for the colonized situation. There is like much more of a blurring of the lines between base and superstructure.

[00:16:46] David: And also he says something really interesting about how kind of capitalism fits into colonialism, because it's not only that the colony becomes a side of extraction of natural resources, although that is certainly true, but also the colony becomes its own market from which. The colonizers can profit right there is like the buying and selling of products on the colony.

And aside from that, I think another important difference, and this goes to his claim, that race is primary in the colony, is that in a colonial setting, you can't just think in terms of the split between the proletariat and the capitalists, that the meean opposition is different. It's colonized and colonized, and that requires a different kind of analysis, especially when you keep in mind that these groups don't have the same cultural upbringing, the same cultural values, and the same cultural expectations.

[00:17:41] Ellie: Yes. Yes. Good point.

[00:17:43] David: That introduces obstacles and challenges that anybody who is fighting for decolonization will have to learn to navigate that maybe don't apply in the same way to a traditional Marxist analysis where you're dealing with people from the same culture who just occupy different socioeconomic positions.

And just like to highlight what this might mean. For example, there's a lot in Fanon, um, especially in the chapter on violence about ritual. You know, what's the role of religion? What's the role of ritual, what's the role of mythology in a culture where they colonized have their own religious mythic traditions?

And those traditions can maybe be used to fuel liberation, but also can be co-opted by the colonizers in order to further legitimize and sustain the status quo. So that's, that's a dynamic that you wouldn't quite get in an orthodox Marxist reading.

[00:18:36] Ellie: And that also allows me to kind of clarify too, that the superstructure would also typically include things like riko legal institutions, which I think, you know, are maybe also in a sense, obviously material. Um, but the economic infrastructure would refer to the base. And so I think what you're pointing to, David, is that maybe there's not already a kind of move of the economic infrastructure into the superstructure, as Fanon describes, but also a way that the superstructure, whether it's ideology, forms of, you know, political, legal institutions is not quite the same for colonizer and colonized.

Is that fair to say? And like the religion or cultural aspects, which would also be part of the superstructure. Those are different, right.

[00:19:21] David: Yeah. Those are different by virtue of the fact that they come from different cultures. But even beyond that, Fanon says even if we accept the colonizer colonized distinction. At some point, we also have to go beyond that. 'cause even that is not granular and nuanced enough. Especially when you consider that, in a colonial setting, you can have a lot of people who are members of the colonized race or nationality, but who are complicit because either they work for the colonial rulers or because they get some kind of economic benefit.

So you can be a member of the colonized and still have a vested interest in the maintenance and the perpetuation of the system of colonialism. And similarly, he says it's in theory possible to find a member of the colonizing group who at some point turns on the colonial regime and becomes an ally to the decolonial cause.

And so again, it's just drawing our attention to the need to think about colonialism on its own terms. Right. And attend to its, to its complexities.

[00:20:28] Ellie: And we'll talk about the colonized bourgeoisie in the episode as well. 'cause I think that's the main group that you're referring to here, David. So, you know, to kind of round out this part of the discussion on why decolonization requires violence, I think what we can see is that the colonial situation is already violent in these various ways that we've been discussing and that kind of separation between colonizer and colonized.

Fanon describes as dividing the world in two, where the colonizer and the colonized essentially become different species. He uses that word here and he thinks that. The violence and domination in the colony is more direct than in capitalist countries. So he thinks that capitalism is violent in general, and capitalism in the colony colludes with the forces of violence that erupt in these colonial territories.

However, the situation in the colony is a much more straightforward one of violence and domination.

[00:21:29] David: Yeah, so I think that's exactly right. And uh, one question that we might ask about violence in connection to this text is, what exactly does violence do for the colonized? Because certainly we understand how it can help the colonized, destabilize colonial infrastructure. You can blow up police headquarters, you can destroy and tear down the walls of a school building, so on and so forth.

But I think Fanon is saying something more profound than that, and it has to do with his analysis of the dehumanization that is at the heart of the colonial relation. And this is where he takes us from maybe a purely, let's say, destructive interpretation of violence to a more constructive understanding of violence where violence actually achieves something positive, precisely at the moment that it seeks the annihilation of the colonist.

And I really love the way Fanon puts this. He says, what violence does for the colonized is it restores them their basic dignity and humanity, of which they have been robbed by the colonizing force. And so with violence, you see actually, um, a restoration or a recreation of the very humanity of the colonized.

[00:22:42] Ellie: and I would say we might construe that in terms of two steps. So the first step is to reverse the situation of good colonizer, evil colonized. So then it becomes good colonized, evil colonizer. And then the next step after that is to let that dichotomy fall away and to recreate a new vision of humanity.

[00:23:01] David: Yeah, I really like this two stage framework that you're using for interpreting this. That first you reverse the manism and then you sort of step forward into the world as a new subject. And it's largely because of the connection to action, An act of violence is an act, it is a form of activity.

And that activity is what also colonialism denies the colonize. And so Fanon has some really interesting language around this where he says. All the creative active impulses that are normal to a human being get stifled and repressed and blocked by colonialism because colonialism must turn the colonized into passive recipients of its violence.

And so in enacting violence, the colonized become literally agents who do things, and that is what it means to be human. It means to be an agent in history and violence allows the entry of the colonized into the the process of world making, which is a historical process.

[00:24:05] Ellie: And part of what I find really interesting about this is that Fanon describes that process of enacting violence. As a process of coming to awareness of the violence of one's own colonial situation. And so I don't know really whether this is super fair to Marx or not. I'd have to look back, but I think one common way of understanding Marx and I, I think this is, I think this is right, at least if I'm thinking about Communist manifesto, is that you first develop class consciousness and then you enact revolution, right?

You seize the means of production and you know, do these other material things that end up changing the landscape entirely. And then, you know, you don't have capitalism anymore or whatever phase it is that that you're overcoming. And I think what Fanon is giving us is a pretty different picture of that.

So he says that we overcome mystification through violence. Mystification is a term that comes from Marxist philosophy and basically refers to a lack of awareness or an ignorance about your own situation, especially a situation of oppression. He says, we overcome that through violence. And he says that violence alone provides the key for the masses to decipher.

Social reality. So that suggests to me you don't first figure out what's wrong with your society and then enact violence. Those are actually simultaneous, and violence is, you know, what enables it.

[00:25:22] David: Well, and I think that highlights why violence is not just the outward expression of an inner interpretation of the world. It is actually the creation of that interpretation. You come to interpret the world in the process of changing it. So there is no separation here between the cognitive labor that we have to do as revolutionaries of making sense of our reality, and then the task of materially changing the world.

Those two are actually the same. Violence reveals the world as it is in the present and as it can be in the future at the same time?

[00:25:59] Ellie: David, you mentioned the heterogeneity among the colonized earlier we said we'll come back to the bourgeoisie later, but for now, I wanna think a little bit about who is doing this violence, who starts the violence and who sustains it because it's not the colonized bourgeoisie.

[00:26:14] David: Uh, no. That's right. So when Fanon talks about this violence, which he often describes as a wave, A wave that just sort of washes over a community and cannot be stopped, uh, because of that dialectical force that you, that you described earlier, he is very clear about a point that I think we need to. Linger on it.

And that is that revolutionary violence begins with the most disenfranchised among the colonized. It's not all the colonized, specifically, it is the peasants. And so he draws this distinction between, well, he draws actually two distinctions. We can distinguish between the economically affluent colonized and then the economically disenfranchised colonized.

And then also we might draw a distinction that is geographical in nature between the colonized who live in urban centers and those who live in rural areas. And he says it's the poor. Rural peasants who start maintain and to a large degree achieve liberation. And so it means that liberation doesn't really come from people with relatively privileged social positions like, um, you know, like colonized intellectuals or teachers or lawyers or party leaders or politicians.

[00:27:36] Ellie: Or Fanon himself, as we mentioned.

[00:27:38] David: Exactly. Uh, it comes from what the title of this book designates as the Wretched of the Earth.

As we mentioned earlier, Ellie, in the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that in the colonies race is primary because we have here a confrontation between a colonizing and a colonized group of people. But in his forward to this text, homie, k Baba points out that fan's interpretation of race is actually quite complex and nuanced because he applies a psycho effective framework to our understanding of race.

And in this regard, this book is quite similar to his earlier publication, black Skin White Masks, which also helps us understand the psycho affective dimensions of racism and colonialism. And that means that when Fanon here is talking about the creation of the colonized through the violence of colonialism, he's not only talking about a subject who has been disenfranchised politically and economically.

A subject who has been molded psychically and effectively in particular ways, creating a very unique kind of subjectivity that it is our task now to try to decode and analyze.

[00:29:02] Ellie: Yeah, so I guess question for us for starters is what kind of subjectivity does the colonized have? Because Fanon says that the colonist fabricates the colonial subject, so in what sense do they fabricate it? And so for one, as we already mentioned, the colonist fabricates, the colonized subject as subhuman, as animal, and as depersonalized and Fanon mentions that colonialism, depersonalizes both the colonized and also the very collective structure of society.

So the colonized is seen as an animal, but he also notes importantly that the colonized see through this, they know they're not animals. And he also addresses the fact that colonized subjects are very often super resistant to doing anything above the absolute bare minimum for the colonizers in order to stay alive.

And I think this is interesting when you think about kind of stereotypes of enslaved and oppressed people, as lazy Fanon explicitly says, like the duty of the colonized subject in rejecting the oppressor before the conditions are set in place to really realize, oh wow, this is a situation of oppression that we need to overcome, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him to not lift a finger for the colonizer.

And he says, this colonized subject is always presumed guilty, but deep down they acknowledge no authority. They're like, I know I'm not guilty. I know that you're in the wrong.

[00:30:33] David: , And that awareness is what produces a very unique psychic frame for the colonized, which Fanon refers to as a feigned form of guilt. So the colonized knows that he or she's not guilty, but rather has to pretend to be guilty in the eyes of the colonizer in order to, in a sense, fulfill the perception that the colonizer has of them.

And in that way have a space for maneuvering under the radar of the colonizer's gaze. And so there is this really interesting play of what is really there, what is not really there, what is surface, what is depth, and it's encapsulated really neatly in fan's claim that this is a quote in the colonial context.

There is no truthful behavior, the, the colonizer. Never really knows where he stands in the eyes of the colonized, because the colonized will never show their true cards in, in his or her presence.

[00:31:35] Ellie: Yeah, and I mean, I think that all is right. And also that doesn't mean that the colonized subject for phon has an inner citadel that is completely immune to suffering and depression. Right? So even though they know that they're not what the colonizer says they are, that doesn't mean that they're like secretly good.

In fact, the effect that colonization has on them is devastating. One of the ways that it's devastating is on an affective level. He writes that the colonized subject is one whose activity is kept on edge. Overexcited, like they constantly have an open soar. And you mentioned ritual, religious ritual earlier.

I don't really know what to make of fan's analysis of dance and possession, but he talks about the role of dance and possession among colonized subjects. And he mentions things like. Ideas of being possessed by zombies or vampires or gins. And that manifesting a splitting of the personality of the colonized world.

That is a way of achieving a kind of relaxation in a situation that always keeps the colonized subject on edge. And so, as you alluded to earlier, Fanon thinks that ultimately when colonization is overcome, so too will be these rituals of dance and possession.

[00:32:54] David: Yeah, so he's critical of. Ritual and traditions, even if they belong to the history of the colonized. And largely it's because he interprets them as providing an outlet for the pent up energy that defined the condition of the colonized. But it's an outlet that's ultimately politically ineffective. So all that pent up energy gets released in dance in other forms of ritual instead of being channeled in the direction of armed struggle, which is what Fanon ultimately.

And so I think this is a point on which we might, , wonder whether Fanon is completely right, whether he's completely right on this point, whether it, it really is something akin to the opiate of the masses to borrow that, uh, Marxist expression. But either way, I think your point is really, really good and really important that we cannot assume that just because there is this double consciousness or this feigned performance on the part of the colonized, that they are free in their mind.

In fact, one of the insights of Fanon that make him quite original as a thinker of violence and colonialism is that the violence of colonialism reaches into that inner citadel of the colonized. And you see this in his analysis of envy. He begins by saying, look. Above all the colonizer is an exhibitionist.

They love to show off what they have done to the local population, and they love to bask in the glory of their own efforts at dehumanizing others. And so they rub salt in that womb that you're talking about, and that creates in the colonized, not just the pain of the extraction and the violence, but also this deep feeling of envy, where for very good reasons, the colonizer looks at the colonized and says, I want to live in that big nice house.

I want people serving me instead of me serving them. And so from the very beginning he says, the primary psychic emotion in a colonized space is envy, and that defines that subjectivity that we're talking about that belongs to the colonized.

[00:35:06] Ellie: Envy and lust. I mean, he mentions also, I think, uh, not present in what you just said, is the colonized also wants the women that the colonizer has, and that's something he gets into a little bit in black skin, white masks as well. But I think, you know, he writes that the colonist is actually aware of this, and that's part of why they're threatened by the colonized subject.

He says the colonist is basically right when he is on his guard against the colonized subject and says they wanna take our place. He's like, yeah, it's true. He writes, there is not one colonized subject who at least once a day does not dream of taking the place of the colonist. And so I think what you see there, in addition to this envy and lust, is the way that the very value system of the colonized subject becomes.

Either an imitation of, or if not an imitation of then at least existing in relation to the dominant values of the colonizer. And that represents a real shrinking of human ability, you know, for imagination. He also says that the colonist aims to shrink the imagination of the colonized.

[00:36:12] David: Yes. And so I'm really happy that you mentioned this point, that the colonized dreams of, in a sense, being the colonizer, at least taking his possessions and his women, because I think we need to take Fanon literally on that point, that it changes the psychic economy of the colonized to the point that literally their dreams take on a particular form.

That when you analyze them, and remember he was a psychiatrist who you know, was often talking to people about their dreams. They become a tool for diagnosing what is wrong with colonialism. And there is a passage on page 15 where he talks about dreams that I just wanna read in light of what you just said.

So immediately after talking about how the colonial world is a mannequin compartmentalized world, he says , this is also a world that reaches into the world of dreams. Quote, the colonial subject is a man penned in apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits.

Hence, the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream. I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream. I burst out laughing. I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization, the colonized subject frees himself night after night, between nine in the evening and six in the morning end quote.

So initially, the colonized finds freedom only in their dreams, and they tend to dream of all the activity that they cannot actualize in the external world.

[00:38:01] Ellie: And this dream of freedom, I think opens us up to questions about what it would look like for a subjectivity to emerge that overcomes colonization, or rather, that is the expression of an overcoming of it. Um, it's gonna have to happen after violence, I think, on Phons account. I wanna get into that, but David, I know you also wanted to mention Nan's last chapter.

Has a series of case studies about colonial war and mental disorders, and I think this is probably the place to mention that before we go to a positive place. Maybe you can find a case to, to for us to quickly address. And while you're doing that, I can just say one of the ways that Fanon introduces this approach is to say that colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question, who am I in reality?

So the colonized subject doesn't have a sense of who they are, and also he thinks that the aim of a militant is to assess the daily humiliations inflicted on man by colonial oppression. I think you can kind of get a hint of how Fanon saw his own role here as a psychiatrist, right? He's the one who's assessing the daily humiliations, inflected on man by colonial oppression.

[00:39:11] David: yeah. So there is this chapter called Colonial War and Mental Disorders, where he begins by saying, look. You might not think that what I'm about to present you, all these clinical cases make sense in a book like this, but so be it. I think they're connected and sort of leaves us as the readers to figure out the meaning of these clinical reports.

And so these are patients that found their way to his clinic who presented with all kinds of psychotic and neurotic symptoms connected to the colonial situation. There is a lot of them. They're really heavy and heartbreaking. It includes cases of children who murder other children for racial reasons.

It includes cases of people hallucinating or having psychotic breaks. It includes cases of people developing all kinds of disturbances that can only be attributed to the manism of the US versus them logic of colonialism. But just to pick one example here, there is a case that stuck with me, which is the case of a militant.

So this is a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, who was sent on a mission to murder a colonizer. They arrive at the house of the colonizer and they only find the wife . He was not there at the time. And so they're trying to figure out what to do. And as all of this is happening, they end up killing this woman who is also a member of the colonizing population, of course.

But what ends up happening is that when this militant is looking at this woman, she bears certain resemblances to his own mother who was killed by colonists. And so he starts having this psychic internal conflict of, I know that my mother was killed by people like you, yet you remind me of my mother.

And he is the one who ends up killing her and has a breakdown after the fact. And so finds his way to, to fanon for, uh, clinical work and, uh. Fanon interprets the case as this is the sort of thing that you would expect to happen. This is the symptomatology that makes sense when colonialism is the defining feature of somebody's reality.

And so, you know, things like hallucinations, chronic nightmares, all get presented in all these cases, not this is the important point, not as problems of the individual, but as problems produced by their social

[00:41:40] Ellie: Yeah, and I think also what's powerful about these case studies in part is that they show that Fanon is not offering in this text. Uh. Celebration of violence. I think the fact that he offers a defense and a justification of violence sometimes gets misunderstood as like, oh my God, he loves violence and no.

If anything, I think what these cases really show are the tragedies that violence reeks on individuals. But as you mentioned, David, those individual tragedies speak to broader social systems, and so I think his, I read his point about we have to fight violence with violence as somewhat an expression of resignation and compatible with the acknowledgement that violence is a tragedy.

[00:42:27] David: Maybe a, a phrase that I would use for this is, violence opens a horizon for a group of people for whom all horizons seem to have closed up until that moment. So it, creates an opening and a sense of hope. And so there, I would say that it's not a celebration in the sense of somebody who is trigger happy, but it is an affirmation of the need for a future for a people that has been subjected to systematic violence and oppression.

And so in that regard, violence paves the way for something that is as of now unknown.

[00:43:01] Ellie: Okay. And you're teeing me up perfectly for the last point I wanna say in this part of this discussion, which is that once the colonial situation has been overcome, the formerly colonized subjects then get an opportunity to invent themselves. And I think this is something that puts Fanon very much in line with existentialism.

He thinks that the colonized or in a process of self reinvention and of inventing new values. And you know, in the same way, David, that you said that the individual psychiatric maladies of the colonized are more than individual. He also thinks that that's true of subjectivity in even a more positive sense.

He says the creation of new values is not the creation of a new individual. In fact, individualism is a colonial ideal that needs to go. And so he has this really interesting point where he says, you know, I gotta hand it to Europe. Europeans were really onto something and I think what he is talking about is humanism and the kind of enlightenment philosophy that advocated for the liberation of all people.

But you suggest, what did they do with that? They enslaved and oppressed people. And so there was this big contradiction between European thinking and European reality, and he says that all the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity have existed in European thought, but it's now up to the colonized after colonization to accomplish what that humanistic ideal promised.

So he says, we should invent a man in full. And it's not an imitation of what European humanism envisioned. Actually, what European humanism offered is idea that we can invent a human in full, and so we should stop envying Europe. He says once we have no reason to fear it and get to work on the creation of new values, vomiting up the values of the colonizers, and changing the social fabric inside out.

[00:44:47] David: Yeah, the creation of a new humanism is where the book. Ends in a sense. And it's also where the chapter on violence ends, this idea that there is a project that is awaiting us for the creation of a new mode of subjectivity that is more communal and that is oriented to the liberation of all. And that's what Europe failed to do, and yet congratulates itself on doing at the same time as it is maintaining colonial relations all over the world.

And the one point I want to add to your description, which I think is accurate, is that it's not just about the creation of new values, but it's also about the articulation of demands that fix something that was broken and maybe restore some semblance of balance to the imbalance introduced by colonialism because he says we need, he's very clear on this point, he says.

The liberation of the colonize must also include the redistribution of wealth, and he means that in, in terms of the colonies, ex colonies relationship to the metropol, France not only needs to give back the land that it has stolen and occupied and get the hell out of the place, but they need to give back the wealth that they extracted.

And he says, this claim for economic

[00:46:08] Ellie: Reparations.

[00:46:09] David: Yeah, for reparations, it has to go beyond a kind of like moral hand waving that just says, oh, you need to right your wrongs in some general way. No, it's very concrete. You need to give back the goods that you stole because until you do that, you are not only living on stolen land, but you're also living off of stolen bread.

[00:46:36] Ellie: We've talked a lot about the subjectivity that the colonized has under colonization, and then also what it means for the Decolonial project to get underway, namely through violence. A big concern of this text also though, is to talk about what happens after the colonial powers have been overthrown. And so I wanna talk about that here and then I know, David, you wanna introduce some critiques towards the end of the episode, so.

Fanon describes this post colonization period as requiring the development of a national consciousness because that national consciousness doesn't exist just in virtue of overthrowing the colonial power. He says at first it's just a crude empty shell, and one of the big obstacles to developing an national consciousness is a tension between the colonized bourgeoisie and the colonized proletariat.

He says that the elite and the masses don't really have a lot of practical ties. You know, the elite or the colonized bourgeoisie are accustomed to being a lot closer actually to the colonizers than they are to the other colonized. And so there has to be a long process of development of national consciousness, which then he says, leads to a development of social consciousness and education has a really big role there.

And I think, you know, we don't need to get into that too much here because I wanna talk a little bit more about the tension between the bourgeoisie and the masses here. But I will say that he has what I take to be a relatively enlightenment picture of education, where individuals will learn, you know, about their history and whatever it might be, and then that will go on to develop a national and social consciousness.

As for the tension between the bourgeoisie and the masses, I find this to be an extremely interesting part of the text because he says that there are really serious risks here. And, and in fact he doesn't even really present them as risks. He presents them like as phases, I would say. One is the rise of ultra nationalism among the workers.

He thinks that especially the urban proletariat artisans and small traders start to pick fights with outsiders within their spirit. He talks about like the ivory coast rejection of people from Benin, for instance. And so there's a, a kind of xenophobia that often emerges among the urban proletariat. And then on the side of the colonized bourgeoisie, what happens often is that this colonized bourgeoisie, or I should say ex colonized bourgeoisie, become the sort of tokens welcoming Europeans back to the country.

But now on different terms, that is the terms of tourism. And so he essentially says the ex colonized bourgeoisie become the party planners for Europeans. He talks about places like Acapulco and Copa Cabana suddenly becoming, you know, rife with holiday pleasure resorts, and the ex colonized bourgeoisie are like, welcome, because it's good for the economy.

We'll give you a little taste of our culture. He says, this is just such a great quote, and then I wanna hear what you think. I'll stop talking. He says, the national bourgeoisie assumes the role of manager for the companies of the West and turns its country virtually into a bordello for Europe. David, you might especially have thoughts on this as somebody who grew up near Puerto Vallarta.

[00:49:50] David: Somebody who loves to go to Acapulco. Um, um, no, I, I think this is a really important point and something that gets developed in a lot of detail in the text. We haven't really talked about this in, in as much detail as maybe it deserves because of time limits for the podcast, but he walks us through all these various ways in which the peasants who are the wretched of the earth and who are the engines of history have to avoid being co-opted, both by the colonizers who will do everything in their power to maintain their, their grip on the colony, but also by these collaborating.

Bourgeois colonized whose primary interest is maintaining their economic status. And aside from the fact that the colonized bourgeois sea, then welcome after independence. The, the colon is just a new terms where people go on vacation and so on and so forth, He also worries about how those, uh, bourgeoisie from the local population will also create literally a party, like a political party that will install itself into power and try to fill in the vacuum that was left by the exit of the colonizers. And essentially now produce, a form of like brother on brother, sister, and sister oppression where they.

Take all the resources, from the nation and steal them. So in that same section where he talks about Acapulco and parties, he says the ex colonized bourgeoisie will often steal from the people if they get their hands on institutions of political power. And so the danger for the peasants after the revolution really is actually their compatriots who are, are in a position of power economically and

socially.

[00:51:33] Ellie: that end, he says the national bourgeoisie must be opposed. They literally serve no purpose other than continuing the heritage of colonialism economically and in terms of their thinking and institutions. And one thing I also just wanted to add here is that when he is using the term bourgeoisie, he suggests that that's not actually really literally what this ex colonized group is because they're a bourgeoisie in spirit only.

They don't actually have the money or economic power that we traditionally associate with the bourgeoisie. So he suggests that African unity here, he's talking Lia Africa, African Unity can only be achieved with total disregard for the interests of the bourgeoisie.

[00:52:13] David: so in thinking about the dangers that exist, you outlined one there is the danger of the ex colonized, bourgeoisie, sort of appropriating power or, you know, using tourism as a way of making profit and welcoming back the colonizers. There are a couple others that I wanna mention very, very quickly just to avoid any worry that he has a romanticized understanding of the challenge of creating a new nation because he says, even if the people succeed at kicking off the colonizers and at avoiding this capture by the bourgeoisie, there are a number of other dangers that are lurking in the waters for a new nation.

One of them is that the people who were previously colonized don't really have a lot of infrastructure, and that's a really difficult thing to create. You need to create schools, you need to bring electricity to rural areas, and you have to do all of this without a lot of resources because you've been impoverished by your history of colonialism.

And he says, even if you manage to overcome that problem, which is a practical one of creating the infrastructure that is a precondition for a nation state. Then you have a second problem, which is that if the nation state that you decide to create really tries to embody this new humanism that is more collective, more socialist and more communitarian, you have to now face the danger of other already existing nations putting pressure on you not to go down this socialist, communist path.

And so it's not as if the kind of country that people create is not going to be subjected to new pressures once that country enters into the international sphere. Right? Like that's what we know has happened throughout the 20th century, that whenever any country challenges the hegemony of capitalism, that country is squashed by an alliance of capitalist nation states.

And so. I say that only to underscore that he is painfully aware of just how difficult the path ahead is and to avoid this impression that violence will bring about a fully formed new nation from one day to the next.

[00:54:27] Ellie: Tell us about the critiques of this text that you wanted to mention.

[00:54:32] David: So I'll limit myself to a couple. Uh, two of them are just a quick mention. One critique, which is not mine, but belongs to Gayatri. Spiva is that although this text is very, very good at diagnosing and analyzing colonialism, it's not very good when it comes to questions of gender and sex. So, uh, there is this really wonderful documentary from 2014 that was written and directed by Goran Hugo Olson.

It's called Concerning Violence, and it is a look at decolonial movements in Africa. Inspired by the redhead of the earth. And a lot of the voiceover of, of the documentary is actually quotes from this text. And so you're watching these scenes and you're hearing essentially fan's voice,

not, not his literal voice, but the text over, the images and the documentary opens with an image of Gayatri Spiva in her office talking about the importance of this text and making the claim that a blind spot for Fanon was gender. And so he never really understands, uh, women's position under colonialism, and he never really understands women's role also in the liberation of an ex colony.

And so that's one criticism that I just wanna mention.

[00:55:53] Ellie: Yeah. And although Fanon does say that women's participation in daily life after colonialism will be equal to men's, there's like basically no other mention of gender in the entire book. Um, and I do think that might also be kind of a limitation of this like quasi Marxist approach too, which is just like focused on, you know, subjects that are implicitly male.

[00:56:15] David: Yeah. Now a second critique is that I don't think his analysis of ritual and tradition is super fair. I don't think that people's dancing traditions or religious traditions or uh, mythic narratives are only distractions that will keep them from doing the hard, practical, and interpretative work of revolution.

Um, and so there we might want to combine his philosophical perspective with an anthropological one that recognizes that potentially liberatory promise of these practices. The one that I think I want to, I want us to bounce back and forth a little bit more carefully. His claim that the new humanism that must sprout from the ex colonized must lead to a new nation state, right?

Like his claim is that this is about nations. We need to create a nation state that is independent and free, and that new humanism that he has in mind. He says it cannot repeat the errors of Europe. We cannot reapply a blueprint that we know where it ends. Uh, and it ends in colonialism and in capitalism, and in dehumanization.

And in thinking about both of those claims like that, we cannot repeat the errors of the past and that the aim of liberation is the creation of a nation state. I cannot but think about the fact that the nation state itself as a form of political organization is a European creation, right? It's a, it's a product of it Europe.

I understand that there is a practical reality, uh, that nowadays that is the dominant way in which we cut up the world geopolitically it's nation states, and so to claim independence sort of requires that. But I also wonder whether that already boxes in this new humanism and prevents us from really exploring the forms that it could take in a post colonized world.

[00:58:26] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

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[00:58:47] Ellie: We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor, Erin Morgan, production assistants Bay Arm Bat ine, and Kristen Taylor and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.