Gender and colonial transitioning: Frantz Fanon's Algerian freedom fighters in Moroccan and Caribbean novels?

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which Frantz Fanon's revolutionary narrative in L'An V de la revolution algerienne is reworked in selected novels of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Shani Mootoo. Focusing on Fanon's transitional politics, it draws out how these novelists employ gender transitioning to challenge colonial, nationalistic and familial violence. The article suggests that the intersections of anti-colonial rhetoric and familial discourse present in Fanon's work are reconfigured in these novels through a questioning of assumed gendered, sexual and national taxonomies of belonging. It proposes a notion of community that seeks to avoid the reiteration of colonial and familial violence through a transitional politics and an ethics of becoming.