Frantz Fanon's Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening

Abstract

youthful Fanon seated in the living room of his family home in Martinique, one ear pressed to the speaker of a radio. mother appears, a disapproving look on her face, switches off the radio, and remonstrates with her child. Against his middle-class parents' express wishes, Fanon has been listening to a Creole radio station rather than to the prescribed French fare. scene, of course, rehearses biography in miniature. But it also allegorizes one of his most important writing strategies. As a practicing psychiatrist, Fanon spent much of his life as a professional listener. As a writer, he produced texts that frequently function as transcripts of his diverse acts of listening. Indeed, Black Skin, White Masks, most celebrated work, is often less Fanon's text than a compilation of those voices to which he has inclined his ear and a record of his responses to what he has been hearing. It is not simply that vast sections of Black Skin, White Masks are passages taken from books Fanon has read, poems he has heard, or conversations he has had, or listened in on, but that the sound of these voices is so carefully staged. Fanon quotes, certainly, but the idiom of citation in Black Skin, White Masks is frequently less one of quotation than one of dramatization.1 The Fact of Blackness, perhaps the most influential chapter of text, exemplifies