Kobena Mercer, 'Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics'
In: The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 114-130
Drawing out some of the themes from the essay I contributed to the Mirage exhibition catalogue, I would like to pick up on three strands of the conference debate. [1] The first relates to the interrogative character of the dialogue between the legacy of Fanon's ideas and the concerns diaspora artists have with issues of postcolonial subjectivity. In relation to this I would like to highlight questions of gender and sexuality as indicative of a significant, generational, shift. The second theme relates to the questions with which Stuart Hall starts this book: why Fanon? why now? and why Black Skin, White Masks in particular? In response to these questions my comments seek to situate a contemporary re-reading of Fanon in relation to sexual politics as the Achilles heel of black liberation. My sense is that questions of sexuality have come to mark the interior limits of decolonisation, where the utopian project of liberation has come to grief. The third theme is about the changing historical relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, and the question of locating the violence: where the violence comes from and where it goes.
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By characterising diaspora art practices as postconceptual, I mean not only to imply that contemporary artists refuse the dichotomy between theory and practice, but that what diaspora aesthetics have placed in the foreground is an actively dialogic relationship with the conceptual frameworks and problematics that postcolonial theorists have delineated, most often in relation to literary texts. Issues of ambivalence, fetishism, paranoia and masquerade have been investigated by artists in their own right. I raise the issue in this way because it is somewhat mistaken to assume that visual art is theory-led. Visual artists are exploring diverse forms of knowledge that are not necessarily identical to that which gets produced in rational, analytical, discourse.
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What has happened over the last thirty years such that a counter-hegemonic vision of universal liberation has given way to a horrific mirror-image of the politics of resentment and retribution? To the extent that such sources of disappointment are an enigma, for which there is no available explanation or narrative, perhaps this is because such issues are simply not talked about as widely as they need to be. Could it be that such silences in black politics have been perpetuated as a defensive reaction against the racialist construct that somehow blacks are intrinsically more homophobic by virtue of being supposedly closer to nature and hence 'less civilised'? It is in relation to such questions in the psycho-politics of sex and race that Fanon returns as an indispensable source for contemporary thinking. At the risk of simplification, I would argue that one of the reasons why Black Skin, White Masks has been re-read with such a sense of urgency has to do with Fanon's recognition of the value of psychoanalysis as the site of the talking cure.
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Lesbian and gay critics have reaffirmed a commitment to working with Fanon by using his analysis of negrophobia to open up the issue of homophobia both in Fanon's own text and in broader narratives of nationalism as a whole. By framing the political task of theory as one of translation there is a critical displacement of the demon of analogy among the social movements, which postpones understanding the intersectionality of psychic and social differentiation. There is also a displacement of the reductionist notion of 'internalised oppression', a concept central to psychological discourses that informed the project of black liberation, but one which never filled out intellectually: the inner world remained an empty place.
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Once we see self and other not as two opposites that are externally defined but as interdependent locations on a möbius strip of desire and identification, we come back to Fanon's profoundly disturbing insight that coloniser and colonised mutually constitute each other's identity. However, aware that such power relations are constantly being cut across by masculinity and femininity, as arbitrary names for complex bundles of psycho-sexual positionings, we also recognise that the violence of the colonial relationship does not respect the ego's boundaries of inside and outside. In the sense that what violence does is violate the fragile boundaries established by relations of differentiation, then it has no one origin or endpoint: it has no necessary belonging.
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[1] Kobena Mercer, 'Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia' in Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (Institute of Contemporary Arts/Institute of International Visual Arts, London 1995) pp. 15-55.