Race, Marxism, and Colonial Experience: Du Bois and Fanon

Abstract

All of existence lived as a masked form leads thereby to a grotesque and caricatural world in which man never for long feels himself at ease...: it is a world in which man does not feel sheltered from danger. Roland Kuhn, Phenomenologie du masque . It is characteristic of twentieth-century black radical intellectual culture that, moving toward Marxism, it comes to discover its difference from Marxism. Canonically, this was stated by the Martiniquan poet and thinker Aime Cesaire in his Lettre a Maurice Thorez , his letter of resignation from the Parti Communiste francais in 1956. Cesaire does not dismiss the revolutionary project to which he had devoted his life since his student days at the Ecole Normale in Paris, his encounters with Surrealism and Andre Breton, his formative friendship with Leopold Sedar Senghor and the collective formation of Negritude, rather he asserts an issue of singularity, what he terms a “fact of capital importance”: Singularity of our “situation in the world,” which can be mistaken for no other. Singularity of our problems, which can be subsumed under no other problem. Singularity of our history, interrupted terrible transformations that belong to it alone. Singularity of our culture, which we intend to quicken in ever more real ways... There are variations on this position and Cedric J. Robinson's important book on Black Marxism (1983) is a study motivated by the way in which the encounter with and difference from Marxism by black radical thought has been a means of self-definition.