Underground Fanon

Anthony C. Alessandrini (bio)

A review of Arnall, Gavin. Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change. Columbia UP, 2020.

Given the tragically short time Frantz Fanon was given to live and to write, it is remarkable that we can now regard him as one of the most important political and intellectual figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Equally remarkable is the fact that there is a field that can rightly be called “Fanon studies”—and that it continues to boom sixty years after his death.¹ In part this is because, despite his short and eventful life, Fanon was shockingly prolific. In addition to writing three books in less than ten years, he also wrote dozens of articles, many of them while serving as an editor of El Moudjahid (the newspaper of the Front de libération nationale), as well as speeches for some of the major political gatherings of his time, including the First and Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists, the All-African People’s Congress, and the Afro-Asiatic Solidarity Conference.

And this is not even to mention Fanon’s day job. For most of his adult life, he worked as a psychiatrist, including serving as director of the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953 to 1956. Over the course of his medical career, Fanon co-authored an astonishing number of articles for journals in his field, documenting in particular his interest in alternative methods for treating psychiatric disorders. Add to this the literary efforts of his youth—while still a student, he founded a short-lived literary journal, Tam-Tam, and wrote three plays (not performed or published during his life) before the age of 25—and we are left with the staggering legacy of a figure who burned his mark into an often hostile world.²

But if Fanon’s writing has produced a rich and varied response from readers since his untimely death, this is not so much because of the sheer amount of writing he was able to produce but rather because of the complex, sometimes opaque, and occasionally outright contradictory nature of his thought, and the remarkable amount of territory he managed to cover as a writer in just one decade. This has inspired a wide and disparate range of responses, which is one reason why the field of Fanon studies has often been a contentious place indeed.

This contentiousness manifests itself most clearly in the distinction drawn by many commentators between the so-called “early” and “late” Fanon, which, in practice, means the distinction between Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.³ Some who focus primarily on the first book—including those who, following Homi Bhabha’s powerful but controversial reading, see Black Skin, White Masks as an example of poststructuralism avant la lettre—consider The Wretched of the Earth to be a retreat to more conventional Marxist analysis. Other critics have tended to argue that The Wretched of the Earth should be understood as the culmination of Fanon’s mature political thought, while Black Skin, White Masks by and large fails to “slough off its petit-bourgeois stink,” as Cedric Robinson famously declared (82). I’m only marking out a few coordinates of the field, of course, and plenty of readings fall between these two extremes. Nevertheless, the early/late binary continues to haunt the field.

Given these different emphases and the stakes involved, Fanon studies has occasionally taken the form of meta-commentary among critics more concerned with squaring off against other Fanonists than engaging with Fanon’s texts. This in turn leads some critics to stake a claim to the “true” Fanon. The title of Lewis R. Gordon’s 2015 book, What Fanon Said, sums up this tendency. Gordon has been an important and deeply perceptive reader of Fanon for more than two decades—his 1995 book Fanon and the Crisis of European Man remains one of the finest English-language readings of Fanon’s body of work—and in What Fanon Said, he insists that his goal is less to present an authoritative, conversation-ending interpretation than to provide an introduction to Fanon’s work via close readings. But the book’s title reveals something important about the nature of Fanon studies: more often than not, the subtext is a claim to deliver to the reader what Fanon really said.

This is one of many reasons why Gavin Arnall’s brilliant book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change, is such a welcome arrival to the field. Although he is a close and careful reader, Arnall makes no claims about revealing to us what Fanon “really” said. Instead, he presents us with a Fanon who, in pursuing his tortured attempts to analyze, as a step towards destroying, the workings of racism and colonialism, was in a constant state of disagreement with himself. Subterranean Fanon persuasively traces a constant preoccupation with change throughout Fanon’s disparate body of work, asking “what constitutes an instance of change, what role the past and the present play in effecting or obstructing change, how something new comes into existence, and how the new relates to what precedes it” (11). Arnall thus follows the lead of Achille Mbembe in characterizing Fanon’s project as one of “metamorphic thought.” In Mbembe’s memorable words, Fanon’s language functions “like an artillery shell aimed at smashing, puncturing, and transforming the mineral and rocky wall and interosseous membrane of colonialism” (Mbembe Critique 162, qtd. in Arnall 10–11). Arnall also cites the influence of contemporary activists’ appropriations of Fanon’s work to attest to his continued relevance to those struggling in the name of revolutionary change. Given Fanon’s active role in the struggle for decolonization, Arnall rightly concludes that change—specifically, change in the form of true decolonization—is “not only the object of Fanon’s thinking but also its primary objective” (11).

Indeed, Arnall argues that Fanon’s engagement with the question of change is so intense that it splits his metamorphic thought in two. On the one hand, he follows many readers in identifying Fanon’s primary mode of analysis as dialectical. For “the dominant Fanon,” as Arnall refers to this strand of his thought, “change entails a dialectical process set in motion through contradiction” (12). It is a mark of Arnall’s care that he doesn’t merely leave it at that, but takes the time to describe precisely what Fanon’s dialectical approach entails—especially in those moments when he explicitly declares the need to “stretch” Marxist analysis to suit the colonial context (for example, in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth). For the dominant Fanon who works in this particular dialectical mode, Arnall writes, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into a new version of itself so as to place it in the service of the struggle for liberation” (13). This approach allows Arnall to acknowledge Fanon’s engagement with many different forms of analysis—from Marxism to existentialism to psychoanalysis to phenomenology—without pinning him down to one at the expense of another.

But alongside this “dominant Fanon” who works in a recognizably dialectical mode, there exists what Arnall calls “the subterranean Fanon.” This underground current breaks through sporadically but insistently throughout Fanon’s whole body of work, exhorting us towards a very different kind of thinking about how change comes to be. For the dominant Fanon, contradiction and its overcoming constitute the basis of dialectical change. But the subterranean Fanon has very different ideas: “If contradiction is the sine qua non of dialectical thinking,” Arnall argues, then “the subterranean Fanon thinks about other kinds of opposition: oppositions without interpenetration or unity, oppositions that do not follow a both-and logic, oppositions between incommensurable or radically heterogeneous phenomena” (16). “For the subterranean Fanon,” Arnall concludes, “such nondialectical oppositions are not static but rather generate a different, nondialectical kind of change” (17). This is the Fanon for whom decolonization represents not a stage in an ongoing dialectic but rather a tabula rasa that wipes clean all that came before: “decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless” (Fanon, Wretched 1).

The most famous of these nondialectical oppositions can be found in the opening pages of The Wretched of the Earth, where Fanon presents us with a Manichaean vision of the colonized territory as “a world divided in two.” Describing the “sectors” inhabited by the colonizer and the colonized respectively, Fanon declares that “the two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion. There is no conciliation possible, one of the terms is superfluous” (Wretched 4). What this means in terms of the practice of decolonization is quite radically different from what would be implied by a dialectical approach, which is why, for Arnall’s subterranean Fanon, “instead of canceling and preserving the old to make the new, the old is to be cleared away, completely destroyed, irreversibly annihilated so that something new can emerge as the result of sheer invention” (16–17). Put differently: if for the dominant Fanon to theorize is to translate, for the subterranean Fanon “to theorize is to invent, to bring into existence an entirely new way of thinking corresponding to an entirely new society” (Arnall 17).

Arnall is certainly not the first reader to detect either of these strands—the first often referred to the Hegelian/Marxist, and the second to the Nietzschean, traditions—in Fanon’s work. What makes Subterranean Fanon such an important departure is his refusal to resolve the tension in either direction and thereby force Fanon’s multivocal work into line with either school or political ideology. While Arnall is a generous reader of previous work in Fanon studies, he patiently but insistently refuses any attempt to close down the agonistic debate that Fanon’s two voices carry out. As he puts it at the end of his reading of Black Skin, White Masks, in one of the few moments when he shifts into a slightly more polemical mode: “I have focused on the text’s distinct approaches to the problem of change instead of offering yet another commentary that willfully ignores or acrobatically resolves every conflictual statement and unexpected image in an anxious, anti-Fanonian impulse to no longer question” (65).

But if we accept Arnall’s argument for two distinct currents that run through Fanon’s work, what’s the relationship between them? His answer seems to be: it depends. That’s in part because he proposes not simply isolated moments of contradiction between a dialectical and nondialectical approach, but rather a dynamic in which the latter acts as a subterranean mode of thought, one that never overtakes the dominant dialectical approach but is always present just beneath the surface. More specifically, he proposes three forms of contact between the dominant and the subterranean Fanon. On some occasions, they are juxtaposed without conflict; on others, they arise as visible contradictions, indicating the extent to which Fanon’s thought is internally split; and then, most interestingly, there are moments when “the underground current of thought in Fanon’s oeuvre manifests itself in a more ambiguous manner” via slips in language, the introduction of terms or images that diverge from an ongoing argument, or other slippages that reveal Fanon’s continual multivocality (18). By the end of the book, Arnall employs Fanon’s own term “scissiparity” (the literal division of cells via fission) to describe this split within Fanon’s work, asking whether it might ultimately be understood as “a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking” (131–32). Arnall never quite answers this question, and one wishes that the book’s conclusion, which raises interesting questions but is frustratingly short, had focused a bit more clearly on how readers might best encompass this split between the dominant and subterranean Fanon.

What is most important about this framing of Fanon’s work in terms of dominant and subterranean is that it allows Arnall to perform a virtuosic set of readings. He is a close and careful reader, sensitive to literary devices like Fanon’s tendency to repeat the same term with slight variations, and curious enough to follow Fanon’s wordplay wherever it takes him. Indeed, his renderings of Fanon into English often catch on to subtleties lost by Fanon’s official translators. Arnall’s close attention to the twists and turns of Fanon’s texts encourages a similar sort of ethic in his readers: indeed, the phrase “careful readers of Fanon may have already noticed…” is sprinkled throughout the book. His thesis about the split within Fanon’s thought means he does not have to corral his readings into an argument about which aspect of Fanon’s thought is “correct,” or offer pledges of loyalty to one school of thought in Fanon studies; instead, he is free to follow where Fanon leads. Arnall’s reading of The Wretched of the Earth, carried out over the course of two chapters, is exemplary in this regard, moving carefully and brilliantly through that complicated and tortured text.

Subterranean Fanon is also one of the first critical works in English to engage closely with a range of Fanon’s clinical writings and psychiatric papers, as well as with his early unpublished play Parallel Hands. These texts have now been collected in the anthology Alienation and Freedom, but Arnall had already gone to the source to read them in the archives of the Institut Mémories de l’édition contemporaine, located in a small village near Caen, France, where Fanon’s papers are held. Indeed, Arnall tells us that the main focus and argument of his book developed around this work in the archives. As a result of these beautiful close readings and his ability to range over the whole of Fanon’s body of work, Subterranean Fanon is the book I would hand to any novice reader of Fanon looking for an introduction or critical guide to his work. Arnall provides a thorough overview at once deeper and wider than many of the books that explicitly set out to introduce Fanon’s work.

As for how he pursues his argument about the dominant and subterranean currents in Fanon, it could be said that Arnall’s own analysis follows a similar sort of structure: basically dialectical with bursts of subterranean, anti-dialectical thinking. Rather than organizing the book thematically, he reads Fanon front to back, beginning with the early work collected in Alienation and Freedom, continuing through Black Skin, White Masks and Fanon’s writings on Algeria during the late 1950s (including A Dying Colonialism), and culminating in an extended reading of The Wretched of the Earth. In a funny sort of way, Subterranean Fanon reminded me of another book that might be its mirror image (or its dialectical opposite): Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, published in 1996. Like Arnall, Sekyi-Otu is a close and careful reader of Fanon, and also treats Fanon’s body of work as an interconnected whole with recognizable patterns throughout. Both Arnall and Sekyi-Otu draw on the work of Antonio Gramsci to elucidate important aspects of Fanon’s thought. But whereas Arnall follows the nondialectical currents that move underground throughout Fanon’s work, interrupting and supplementing it, Sekyi-Otu’s project is the diametrical opposite: he proposes to “read Fanon’s texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative” (4). While he, like Arnall, understands Fanon to be engaged in a constant and complicated dialogue with himself, for Sekyi-Otu it is always in the interest of pursuing a larger dialectical narrative whose subject is “political experience.” If Arnall’s subterranean Fanon is in constant tension with the dominant dialectical flow, Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon introduces moments of rupture that are ultimately “reviewed, renounced, and replaced in the course of a movement of experience and language”—an explicitly dialectical movement, that is (Sekyi-Otu 5).

I have always found Sekyi-Otu to be among the most persuasive readers of Fanon. In particular, I have been deeply influenced by his reading of the Manichaean argument of “On Violence” (the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth) against critics like Hannah Arendt who accuse Fanon of confusing violence with politics. In fact, Sekyi-Otu insists, Fanon “is saying with the most classical of political philosophers that where there is no public space, there is no political relationship, only violence, ‘violence in a state of nature’” (87). In other words, Fanon presents us with a description of the colonial context in which no dialectical movement— indeed, no movement of any kind—is possible. However, the sticking point for me in Sekyi-Otu’s argument is his insistence on resolving any moment of discontinuity or rupture into a larger “dialectical narrative.” Arnall, who provides a generous but critical reading of Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, makes a similar point, and I find his approach more persuasive. But of course the whole reason for having a field like Fanon studies is to allow such interconnected but ultimately disparate readings to proliferate, and Subterranean Fanon and Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience can best be read together, as part of this larger dialogue with Fanon and his work.

If there is a downside to Arnall’s reading, it results from his focus on what he calls “the continuity of Fanon’s internal division” throughout his body of work. It’s not that Arnall fails to mark the crucial historical shifts that influenced Fanon’s life and work, in particular his move to Algeria and subsequent commitment to the Algerian Revolution. Even in this transitional moment that led to his later work, Arnall rightly insists that

Fanon remained the deeply divided thinker who wrote Parallel Hands and Black Skin, White Masks, split between an explicitly declared and developed project of dialectical analysis and a more implicit, subterranean current of nondialectical and sometimes antidialectical thought.

Arnall’s reading is subtle enough not simply to mark this larger continuity but also to track “how it acquires new dimensions as [Fanon] directs his gaze toward a new set of historical circumstances” (66).

But in pursuing this continuity, Arnall at times effaces the wild shifts in Fanon’s work as he moves between genres, methodologies, and audiences. Indeed, Fanon often makes such shifts within the same text or even on the same page. One reason Fanon studies has been so generative is because Fanon’s work speaks to so many disciplines. At the same time, any attempt to claim him for a particular discipline breaks down or is forced to radically simplify his work. A book like Black Skin, White Masks is most often read in terms of its engagement with phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, but at least two chapters of the book consist entirely of what a colleague once called “weird-ass literary criticism.” Similarly, Alienation and Freedom brings together highly technical clinical articles for specialized medical journals, Fanon’s early (and sometimes unfortunate) efforts at existential drama, and unapologetically polemical political writings that sought to rally support for the Algerian Revolution. It reflects the oeuvre of a writer with an insatiably restless mind who made a habit of doing many things at the same time.

Arnall’s chapter on several early texts from Alienation and Freedom does an admirable job of weaving together an argument from these disparate strands. He begins with Fanon’s clinical writings, in particular those Fanon produced with his mentor François Tosquelles, which outline a form of “annihilation therapy”; pauses to note parallels with “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” a short essay influenced by Fanon’s reading of Nietzsche; and concludes with an extended reading of Parallel Hands, a play written while Fanon was still a medical student. Arnall finds in all of these texts an important continuity: glimpses of “another, subterranean Fanon bubbling volcanically beneath the dominant form of analysis and occasionally exploding to the surface” (43). It’s a deeply impressive reading. But as he draws our attention to this continuity, we sometimes lose the differences in genre, situation, and address that distinguish these disparate texts. In particular, it feels odd to describe the work being done by a play as “analysis.” Granted, Parallel Hands is, among its other faults, a fairly transparent political allegory. But the distinctions between Fanon’s dramaturgy and his clinical writing, between the deeply poetic passages of Black Skin, White Masks and the self-conscious propagandizing he did for El Moudjahid, between the moments of crystal clarity and those where by his own admission he seeks to induce in his readers a form of vertigo: surely these demand that any attempt to trace continuities must also grapple with Fanon’s disparate genres, voices, and methods. Arnall’s impressive work in tracing a dominant and subterranean Fanon through his body of work provides an important way to think about the problem of political change, in both Fanon’s time and in our own. But there are moments when Arnall’s reading threatens to turn Fanon into a writer who is solely a political theorist, even when he is writing plays or clinical notes or memoiristic essays. Fanon is unquestionably a political theorist. But he is also many other things.

It may be that I’m demanding the impossible, praising Arnall for tracing this continuity between the dominant and subterranean Fanon so brilliantly and doggedly while also demanding attention to the many other Fanons whose voices make themselves known in his work. But engaging the impossible is precisely what collective intellectual and political work is for. At its best, a field like Fanon studies can be precisely that: collective work towards liberation, inspired by a thinker for whom liberation was always at the center of all he wrote and did. Subterranean Fanon is a necessary book for this collective liberatory work, and readers of Fanon will be deeply grateful for it.

Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism is forthcoming.

Footnotes

1. I refer specifically to the reception of Fanon’s work in English; the French reception of Fanon’s work has been quite different and, with some important exceptions, more belated. For an excellent overview of this reception, see Magali Bessone’s introduction to the 2011 edition of Fanon’s Oeuvres, “Frantz Fanon, en équilibre sur la color line” (23–43). I’m grateful to Professor Bessone for illuminating conversations about the French reception of Fanon’s work.

2. Much of Fanon’s writing—including his medical writings—remained widely dispersed until the publication of the invaluable collection Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (translated as Alienation and Freedom), edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young. Among their other important archival achievements, Khalfa and Young discovered and published typescripts of two plays Fanon had written in his twenties: The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands.

3. It seems important to note that I’m not just an observer of the field of Fanon studies but a participant in it, so I have my own stakes here. In particular, I have tried to argue against this very division of Fanon’s work into “early” and “late”; see Alessandrini (75–100).

Works Cited

• Alessandrini, Anthony C. Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. Lexington Books, 2014.
• Bessone, Magali. “Frantz Fanon, en équilibre sur la color line.”
• Fanon, Oeuvres, pp. 23–43. Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. Edited by Jean Khalifa and Robert J. C. Young, translated by Steven Corcoran, Bloomsbury, 2018.
• ———. Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté. Edited by Jean Khalifa and Robert J. C. Young, Paris, La Découverte, 2015.
• ———. Oeuvres. Paris, La Découverte, 2011.
• ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove, 2004.
• Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Routledge, 1995.
• ———. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fordham UP, 2015.
• Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke UP, 2017.
• ———. “L’universalité de Frantz Fanon.” Fanon, Oeuvres, pp. 9–21. Robinson, Cedric. “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon.” Race & Class, vol. 35, no.1, 1993, pp. 79–91.
• Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Harvard UP, 1996.