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Fanon and the trauma of the cultural message

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360500196201

1470-1308

Laura Christian,

African history and culture studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement This article was developed in the context of ongoing conversations on Fanon's work in which I have had the privilege of participating at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the past several years: Teresa de Lauretis' 2001 graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, which incorporated texts by and about Fanon, including Julien and Nash's documentary, and which introduced me to Jean Laplanche's Essays on Otherness; and a one-day seminar on Black Skin, White Masks offered by David Marriott upon his first visit to UCSC in 2002. University of California at Santa Cruz Notes 1. See Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (London, Seattle: Institute of Contemporary Arts: Institute of International Visual Arts; Bay Press, 1996). The volume comes out of a 1995 visual arts conference and conference on Fanon held by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an event that provided a formal occasion to reflect upon the intersections of postcolonial theory and contemporary black diasporic cultural practice. 2. Stuart Hall, ‘The after-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?’ in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, (London, Seattle: Institute of Contemporary Arts: Institute of International Visual arts; Bay Press, 1996), pp. 16-17. Hall's phrase recasts the title of Rose's classic Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, New York: Verso, 1996). 3. I could not possibly list all of the participants in the black independent visual and performance arts movements in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, but will mention just a few: in the 1980s, British film witnessed the emergence of a generation of cinematic activists with the formation of collectives such as Ceddo, Sankofa, Retake and the Black Audio Film Collective. The work of individuals such as Julien, Hanif Kureishi, John Akomfrah and Ngozi Onwura is particularly noteworthy in this context. In the USA, one thinks of film-makers such as Marlon Riggs, Julie Dash and Cheryl Dunye. There are the visual artists who participated in the watershed conference on Fanon at the ICA in 1995: Martina Atille, Renée Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Marc Latamie and Steve McQueen. I would also mention the American visual artists Alex Donis and Kara Walker. 4. Including, interestingly, Gillo Pontecorvo's ‘fictional’ 1966 film, Battle of Algiers, itself composed of a combination of archival French newsreels and reconstructed scenes. 5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 143. 6. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 154. 7. Fanon has been criticized by countless postcolonial, feminist and queer thinkers for the relentless masculinism of his analysis. In my reading of Julien's film, I return to the thorny issue of Fanon's misogyny, as well as his homophobia. In this first section, however, I use the term ‘man’ and masculine pronouns as Fanon does, pursuing certain implications of his argument from within its masculinist frame. 8. Jacques Lacan, ‘Le complèxe, facteur concret de la psychologie familiale’, in Lucien Paul Victor Febvre (ed.), Encyclopédie Française (Paris: Société de gestion de l'Encyclopédie française, 1935), quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 141. 9. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 149. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Fanon is not citing Lacan's famous essay on the mirror stage, which in 1952 had not yet been published, but an earlier formulation of this concept found in the Encyclopédie française. 13. Fanon, for instance, mentions that his patients who had experienced ‘mirror hallucinations’ when asked ‘What colour were you?’ invariably replied, ‘I had no colour’. This is not surprising, given that whiteness is what goes unmarked as the universal, the ‘race-less’, in hegemonic colonial discourse. 14. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 145. 15. Quoted from ibid., p. 144. 16. Ibid., p. 145. 17. Ibid., p. 146. 18. Ibid., p. 145. 19. Ed. John Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1998). 20. Laplanche, Essays on otherness, pp. 208, 212. 21. Ibid., p. 225. 22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 152. 23. For an overview of these debates, see Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991); Diana Fuss, ‘Interior colonies: Frantz Fanon and the politics of identification’, Diacritics, 24(2) (1994), pp. 20–42, and Hall, ‘The after-life of Frantz Fanon’. 24. In scattered passages like the following, Fanon offers a brief glimpse of Martinican family life that would seem to confirm this view. He recalls, ‘When I am at home my mother sings me French love songs in which there is never a word about Negroes. When I disobey, when I make too much noise, I am told to “stop acting like a nigger”’ (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 191). 25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 152. 26. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 69. 27. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 152–3, note 15. 28. ‘Desire in narrative’, in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984). 29. Christian Metz, ‘The imaginary signifier’, Screen, 16(2) (1975), p. 51. 30. Marriott, p. 69. 31. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 153, note 15; emphasis added. 32. Marriott, p. 69. 33. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 140. 34. Ibid., p. 169. 35. ‘On retrospectatorship’, in Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 194–216. 36. White, ‘On retrospectatorship’, p. 197. 37. De Lauretis takes up the concept of the ‘semiotic square’ from Algirdas Julien Greimas' ‘The interaction of semiotic constraints’ in her reading of Fanon, ‘Difference embodied: reflections on Black Skin, White Masks’, parallax, 8(2) (2002), pp. 54–68. 38. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 180. 39. Ibid., p. 180, note 44. 40. De Lauretis develops the notion of ‘public’ and ‘private’ fantasies in her essay ‘Popular culture, public and private fantasies: femininity and fetishism in David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24(2) (1999), pp. 303–34. 41. Among the actors, as it happens, are a number of well-known figures associated with independent black film and video production in the U.K., such as Hanif Kureishi and Stuart Hall – another detail that lends some cultural specificity to the setting (if not an air of clique-ishness!), though again, it could be any gallery. 42. In Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: Braziller, 1965). 43. Art in America, 71(4) (1983), pp. 119–89. 44. Orientalism, 1st edn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 45. Roland Barthes, ‘L'effet De Réel (1968)’, in Le Bruissement De La Langue: Essais Critiques Iv (Paris: Seuil, 1984); reprint, English, ‘The reality effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 46. In 1995, a multimedia exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled ‘Black Male’ drew critical attention to this dynamic by installing in the museum lobby a row of headless black mannequins in guards' uniforms. 47. Laplanche, Essays on otherness, p. 165. 48. The transgendered/transvestic identification that the attendant performs in singing the part of the female lead, Dido, seems actually to be in keeping with the opera's roots: the opera was first performed at a girls' school in Chelsea, London, by an all-female cast. It is assumed therefore that the tenor and bass parts in the chorus were added at a later date. 49. (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993). 50. Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat, p. 13. 51.‘The grain of the voice’, in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 179–89.