“It is too soon… or too late:” Frantz Fanon’s Legacy in the French Caribbean

Andrew M Daily

doi:10.16993/karib.28

Abstract

The Martinican psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon’s work is foundational to studies of imperialism, decolonization, and postcolonial studies, with new articles, books, and conferences dedicated to his thought appearing year after year. Yet, despite his outsized influence and impact in the academy, observers have suggested that in his native Antilles Fanon was largely forgotten. Close attention to the archival record casts doubt on this reading of his legacy in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyane. Rather than disappearing into obscurity following his premature death in 1961, Fanon’s work and his life shaped French Caribbean students, activists, intellectuals, and writers. His sharp critique of the Antillean situation and the Antillean psyche, as well as his committed revolutionary example, proved a fecund resource for Antillean student activists, whether Marxist or Catholic, for poets and writers such as Maryse Conde, Sonny Rupaire, Bertene Juminer, and Daniel Boukman, and for critics and social scientists like Edouard Glissant, Roland Suvelor, Michel Giraud, and others. Fanon’s work was not forgotten, but remained explosive and provocative, the subject of intense political and intellectual organization and debate.

Highlights

The Martinican psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon’s work is foundational to studies of imperialism, decolonization, and postcolonial studies, with new articles, books, and conferences dedicated to his thought appearing year after year
What is Frantz Fanon’s legacy in his native Antilles? To ask the question denotes the ambivalence and ambiguity of Fanon’s ties to and impact in his native land. Beginning with his earliest interlocutors and critics, it was suggested that his fellow Martinicans, Guadeloupeans, and Guyanese forgot him, and that if he was remembered at all, it was as a traitor or a shameful secret
When the American activist James Forman traveled to Martinique in 1969 to research a Fanon biography, he reported many willing and interested in discussing Fanon’s life and work (Forman)

Summary

University of Memphis

The Martinican psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon’s work is foundational to studies of imperialism, decolonization, and postcolonial studies, with new articles, books, and conferences dedicated to his thought appearing year after year. While there was no “Fanonist Party” in Martinique or Guadeloupe, Peau noire and Les Damnés marked an entire generation of Antillean students and intellectuals that would play important roles in Antillean culture and politics His diagnosis of the Antillean situation, and the questions he asked about colonialism, culture, and mental life, set the framework for subsequent Antillean critics and thinkers. Fanon had read Antilleans’ fraught and alienated relationship to the metropole as pathological, symptomatic of their attachment to a France that continued to deny their humanity Glissant and his collaborators contextualized Fanon’s psychological inquiries in the longer social and cultural history of the Antilles. 24 I read Glissant’s later work as, in part, a struggle against colonization at the level of histor-

Conclusion

Works Cited