Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification

Abstract

$ I begin this discussion of identification with two claims: first, that identification has a history-a colonial history; and second, that this colonial history poses serious challenges for contemporary recuperations of a politics of identification. I do not mean to imply that identification, a concept that receives its fullest elaboration in the discourse of psychoanalysis, cannot be successfully mobilized for a radical politics. I mean only to suggest that if we are to begin to understand both its political usages and its conceptual limitations, the notion of identification must be placed squarely within its other historical genealogies, including colonial imperialism. To assist me in this reading, I turn to one of the most important twentieth-century writers working at the intersection of anti-imperial politics and psychoanalytic theory, the practicing psychiatrist and revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon. Psychoanalysis's interest in the problem of identification provides Fanon with a vocabulary and an intellectual framework in which to diagnose and to treat not only the psychological disorders produced in individuals by the violence of colonial domination but also the neurotic structure of colonialism itself. At the same time, Fanon's investigation of the dynamics of psychological alterity within the historical and political frame of colonialism suggests that identification is neither a historically universal concept nor a politically innocent one. A by-product of modernity, the psychoanalytic theory of identification takes shape within the larger cultural context of colonial expansion and imperial crisis.