Stuart Hall, 'The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?'
In: The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 12-37.
Why Fanon? Why, after so many years of relative neglect, is his name once again beginning to excite such intense intellectual debate and controversy? Why is this happening at this particular moment, at this conjuncture? And why is it around the text Black Skin, White Masks that the renewed 'search for Fanon' is being conducted? This essay addresses these questions as they were posed in the context of the ICA's Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, a programme of film, installation, performance and visual art works by contemporary black artists who acknowledge some debt of influence, usually indirect, to Fanon's work. It is written in the spirit of the title of the conference which took place during the season: 'Working with Fanon'.
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Rather than trying to recapture the 'true' Fanon, we must try to engage the after-life of Frantz Fanon - that which Jacques Derrida would call, following his recent essay on Marx, his 'spectral effect' (was that the Mirage of the title?) in ways that do not simply restore the past in a cycle of the eternal return, but which will bring the enigma of Fanon, as Benjamin said of history, 'flashing up before us at a moment of danger.' [1] 'The colonial man who writes for his people' - that is, of course, colonial man and woman, an elision in Fanon which is as characteristic as it is un-timely - 'ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future', Fanon observed; 'an invitation to an action and a basis of hope'. [2] What action, what hope is proposed to us here? And why, of all his writings, is the subject of these aspirations Black Skin, White Masks?
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There can be little doubt that, as Gates suggested, 'Fanon's current fascination for us has something to do with the convergence of the problematic of colonialism with that of subject-formation". [15] This bringing to bear of the post-structuralist and psychoanalytic engines of contemporary theory on the primordial - and primordially resistant - structure of racism and the historic colonial relation excites in us a disjunctive frisson of stimulation and pleasure which is only, in part, cognitive (the jouissance of theory having long been underestimated). Nevertheless, the familiarity of these concepts, now, may lead us to under-estimate the novelty and originality of Fanon's insights at the time of writing. The grain of his text runs incontrovertibly towards the recognition that an account of racism which has no purchase on the inner landscape and the unconscious mechanisms of its effects is, at best, only half the story.
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Today, the question for us is how to read, how to interpret, the problem he posed, the answers which his text proposes, and the invitation to action and hope which it prefigured?
One response has been to occupy the structure of Fanon's argument, turning the mechanisms which he identifies against themselves. This takes the question of 'the look' seriously, goes to the heart of the representational process itself, which Fanon - against the objectivist grain of the history of the analysis of racism - gave so central and constitutive a role. By the practices of trans-coding and re-signing, he attempted to contest, to disturb, to unsettle, and to re-inscribe the look 'other-wise'.
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For those who take these questions of representation and subjectivity as constitutive of the politics of decolonisation, especially amongst the young cultural practitioners and visual artists of the African diaspora, Fanon's work has had an enormous, unpredicted, and unpredictable influence in recent years - evidence of which is to be seen everywhere in the work exhibited, screened and performed in Mirage. The principal counter-strategy here has been to bring to the surface - into representation - that which has sustained the regimes of representation unacknowledged: to subvert the structures of 'othering' in language and representation, image, sound and discourse, and thus to turn the mechanisms of fixed racial signification against themselves, in order to begin to constitute new subjectivities, new positions of enunciation and identification, without which the most 'revolutionary' moments of national liberation quickly slide into their post-colonial reverse gear (Algeria being one of the most troubling and heart-wrenching instances).
From this practice of resignification - this new politics of the black signifier - has flowed both the amazing volume, but more significantly, the astonishing formal diversity, of much recent black art work. Again and again, this practice has taken the form of working on the black body itself: driving the suppressed violence of racism so deep into itself that it reveals the transgressive lineage of the suppressed desire on which it feeds: putting together what we may think of as new 'corporeal schemas'; that which Fanon himself describes as having been fixed 'as a chemical solution is fixed by dye,' dismembered 'fragments...put together again by another self.' [26] Often, this process consists of the artist taking his or her own body as the 'canvas', light-sensitive 'frame' or 'screen', so that the work of translation and re-appropriation is literally a kind of 're-writing of the self on the body', a re-epidermalisation, an auto-graphy. Elsewhere, I have called this re-working of the abjected black body through desire the production of a new 'black narcissus'. [27]
[1] See Walter Benjamin, 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' in Illuminations trs. Hannah Arendt (Fontana, London 1973) p 247.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, New York 1966) p 69.
[15] Henry Louis Gates, 'Critical Fanonism' in Critical Inquiry vol 17 no 3 Spring 1991 p 485.
[26] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, London 1986) p 109.
[27] Stuart Hall, '"Race" - The Sliding Signifier' in Race, Ethnicity and Diaspora (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).