Pascal Emmer Socy 202 March 17, 2012 Paper #2

Fanon Reframed: Conversations between Postcolonial Thought and Critical Disability Studies Frantz Fanon is considered by many to be one of the preeminent thinkers of the decolonial liberation era; some attribute to him the status of being the bellwether of postcolonial theory. Perhaps best known for his theorization of the psychic effects of colonial domination, Fanon demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks that Hegels dialectical ontology is denied to the colonial subject by a racist imperial imaginary which consigns this subject to a zone of nonbeing (Fanon 1952:xii). Despite the fact that Fanon himself pledged no allegiance to any single body of philosophical thought - he freely appropriated and remolded concepts from European phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism as well as from Third World revolutionary theory - his work has held so much influence among postcolonial and cultural studies scholars over the past fifty years that Fanon has been canonized into a field of his own, what David Marriot calls critical Fanonism (Marriott 2011). In this essay, I would like to take critical Fanonism on a field trip, as it were, to another field with which it has hitherto had little interaction - critical disability studies. Not only do I intend to bring Fanon into conversation with critical disability scholars, I also hope to bring Fanon into dialogue with himself. By this I mean that Fanons work is invaluably multi-faceted, and

many of these facets resonate with critical disability studies but tend to get overlooked when Fanon is read through a narrowing lens of postcolonial criticism. Marriott argues that such a reading of Fanon reduces the political potential behind Fanons notion of the tabula rasa, the aporetic moment of revolution, to a limited demand for a new sovereignty...whose proud claim is to redeem colonized humanity (Marriott 2011:33). Part of the problem I see with interpreting Fanons exegesis of decolonial liberation as a call for salvational humanism is that humanism itself often presupposes an able-bodied sovereign subject, especially as the object of revolutionary redemption from the debilitating effects of colonial interpellation. Reading Fanon differently or, rather, with an expansive frame of difference in mind, what theoretically opens up when critical Fanonism and critical disability studies speak to one another about the affective meanings and consequences of interpellation? In Fanons conceptualization of the epidermal racial schema, he posits interpellation as a racializing project, one which enacts a violence upon the psychic and bodily life of the colonial subject. Critical disability scholars analyze how the impaired body becomes disabled, oppressed in other words, by the hail of ableist discourse. Both theories ask about the workings of power in interpellation. I wish to ask: How does disability mediate the epidermal racial schema and vice versa? In turning to critical disability studies, what possibilities emerge for reading within the grain of Fanons writing the antecedent of what one might now call a postcolonial theory of affect? Conversely, how can such a reading of Fanon intervene to bring an analysis of racial formation to the study of disability?

How might the inter-reading of critical Fanonism and critical disability studies bear upon the question of resistance beyond a proper revolutionary subject? For Fanon, the epidermal racial schema ontologically disables the body of the colonial subject. This is evidenced in his use of graphic, visceral language to describe how interpellation in the colonial context is a fundamentally violent process of subjectivation. Caught in the white gaze of the Other, Fanon describes his corporeal form being rent asunder: sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing...I burst apart (Fanon 1952:109). Fixed by the colonizers gaze, Fanon consequently internalizes his own objectification: I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood. (Fanon 1952:112). What Fanon is pointing to here is that the body, in this colonial schema of interpellation, is rendered excessive - an excess which gets violently anatomized. It is important to note that Fanon is not using the language of debilitation bursting, amputation, hemorrhage - metaphorically. Rather, he shows that it is precisely through the ontological disabling of the body that the epidermal racial schema achieves the abjection of the colonial subject. The nexus of race and disability find its most dramatic articulation in Fanons account of his experience being interpellated by a white child while aboard a train in France. In this vivid passage, Fanon brings into relief the powerful affective dimensions of colonial interpellation:
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My body was returned to me spread-eagle, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winters day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro; the Negro is trembling, the Negro is trembling because hes cold, the small boy is trembling because hes afraid of the Negro, the Negro is trembling with cold, the cold that chills the bones, the lovely little boy is trembling because he thinks the Negro is trembling with rage, the little white boy runs into his mothers arms: Maman, the Negros going to eat me (Fanon 1952: 93).

The question I believe Fanon poses implicitly but leaves unanswered in Black Skin, White Masks is: Why does the white French child on the train assume that Fanons body trembles with rage? Why not another feeling fear, nausea, shame, etc.? Fanon himself observes that there is a dissonance between how his affective state is read by his interpellator and how he actually experiences his body in the moment of interpellation. What then accounts for this discrepancy? This is where I find it useful to bring Fanon into a dialogue with himself, for the response to this question might be found in one of his later works, A Dying Colonialism. Speaking back to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon puts forward what could be considered an early postcolonial theory of affect, which I tie to disability. In A Dying Colonialism, he discusses the connection between colonial medicine and power. According to Fanon, in British and French colonial psychiatry there emerged a diagnostic discourse of the African Mind. Through this discourse, black masculinity was constructed in pathological terms, which included a propensity for aggressivity, violent behavior, mental ineptitude, and psychosis. Returning to the question of

why the little boy projects the feeling state of rage onto Fanons trembling body, I argue that operating below the visible epidermal racial schema was a cultural trope of mental pathology linking race, gender, and embodiment in the colonial imaginary. At the same time, Fanon recognizes that the colonized Algerian subject undermines French colonial medicine by disobeying the doctors orders, which Fanon understands as a mode of resistance. Yet, this is not the resistant mode of a sovereign, able-bodied subject, but a disappearing act which thwarts the attempts by the colonial medical gaze to fix (in both senses) the body of the colonized:
Hence the general impression that the patient plays hide-and-seek with his doctor. The doctor has no hold on the patient. He finds that in spite of promises and pledges, an attitude of flight, of disengagement persists. All the efforts exerted by the doctor, his team of nurses, to modify this state of things encounter, not a systemic opposition, but a vanishing on the part of the patient (Fanon 1959:128-129).

This trompe-loile of the colonial patient - to hide some aspect of ones phenomenological body which has been rendered hypervisible by dominant medical discourse can be read as a counter-hegemonic strategy of disabled embodiment. Gayle

Salamon uses this Fanonian politics of phenomenology to reconsider what resistance via disengagement might mean for the disabled body in Merleau-Pontys description of female hysteria. In Merleau-Pontys account, the hysteric girl who refuses to speak, who is ostensibly rendered speechless with mourning, shows agency by retreating from the threat of the outside world into her bodily interiority, or the

place where life hides away. The problem with this account, according to Salamon, is that Merleau-Ponty confers a normativity to the body as subject, which at all times... retains the power to put itself into relations with the world and with others or to withdraw from them (Salamon 2006:206). Salamon wants to put a Fanonion gloss on Merleau-Pontys notion of bodily interiority in order to show how it is partial and contingent due to the ways in which bodies are interpellated differently according to race, gender, and ability:
If the body is the place where life hides away, then understanding this interiority can help us come to know, and perhaps finally retrieve, the life that hides there, the life that cannot find a way to hide there, and the life that stays only hidden there. (Salamon 2006:111).

One might then view the gap between how Fanon experiences his trembling body (chilled) and how his body is read (enraged) as an affective seam through which something escapes the hail; where, in Massumian terms, life hides away in bodily potential beyond the capture of the racialized and able-bodied corporeal schema. Where Fanon directly addresses disability in his work an interesting ambivalence arises, which is most poignantly expressed in his encounter with the disabled white veteran. The crippled soldier from the Pacific war tells my brother: Get used to your color the way that I got used to my stump. We are both casualties. Yet, with all my being, I refuse to accept this amputation, writes Fanon (Fanon 1952:119). By refusing this amputation, Fanon is denouncing a rhetoric of victimization that tells

people of color and people with disabilities that they must resign themselves to their abjection from a white, able-bodied society. Here, he is also rejecting a collapsing of racism and ableism by the veteran, who presumably had once belonged to the normative white world and who was now exiled from it versus the black subject who never had access to begin with: The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation (Fanon 1952:114). In his refusal to allow racial alienation to be used as an analogy for the social exclusion of white bodies with disabilities, Fanon again raises the problem of the body as metaphor. When race is used metaphorically to describe disability this forecloses a consideration of how difference gets interpellated differently. Fanons rhetoric in this passage could be read as ableist, and some feminist critics have argued that his writing contains the trace of a heteronormative masculine revolutionary subject who, I would say, is also assumed to be able-bodied: I feel my soul as vast as the world...my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple (Fanon 1952:119). There is a slippage between contested meanings of disability in this last sentence which I think hinges on the question of whether or not Fanon is advocating for a redemptive humanism. If the answer is yes, then Fanon can be viewed as trying to

restore the integrity of the colonial subjects humanity, a wholeness of being based on the disavowal of the amputated body, which is less the sum of its parts (amputee = parahuman). If the

answer is no, that is, if Fanon is rejecting a humanistic sovereignty, then one could view this passage as an indictment of ableism and the role it plays in the epidermal racial schema. I am arguing the latter because I think Fanon shares an analytical affinity with critical disability scholars who look at how disability is discursively and ontologically produced by politics. Speaking of the social construction of amputation, Alexa Schriempf writes:
I pun seriously on the term "amputated" to refer to both the impaired body as well as the body which is removed (cut-off) from richly interwoven social, cultural, psychological, physical, and biological environments (Schriempf 2001:58).

Just as Fanon views neurosis among the Antilleans as a social condition of being colonized rather than an individual, innate pathology, Schriempf warns against theoretically amputating the body from those social and cultural contexts that play a central role in shaping how disability and impairment occur (Schriempf 2001:58). Fanon interjects with the important caveat that race cannot be separated from questions of who is said to belong a priori to these contexts. For him, the racialized contingency of amputation must be understood by scholars who wish to create critical genealogies of disability. Whereas the white veteran became physically impaired through his participation in an imperialist war, the black philosopher was ontologically disabled by the colony. In bringing critical Fanonism into conversation with critical disability studies, I have tried to show how this particular reading of Fanon can fruitfully open up new interpretations of his postcolonial thought and its relevance to disability politics. Just as Fanon challenges the idea of an original ontological belonging to a (white) social world from which the disabled body is

then cut off, critical disability studies upends the presupposition that there is whole sovereign subject whose (able) embodiment can be reclaimed from the refuse of colonial abjection.

References Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. Grove Press, Inc.: New York, NY. Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. Grove Press, Inc.: New York, NY. Fanon, Frantz. (1959). A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. Grove Press, Inc.: New York, NY. Marriott, David. (2011). Whither Fanon? Textual Practice. Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 33-69. Salamon, Gayle. (2006). The Place Where Life Hides Away: Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Location of Bodily Being. differences. Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 96-112. Schriempf, Alexa. (2001). (Re)fusing the Amputated Body: An Interactionist Bridge for Feminism and Disability. Hypatia, Vol. 16, No. 4, Feminism and Disability, Part 1, pp. 53-79.