Sartre, Fanon, and the Case for Slavery Reparations

Abstract

Throughout his writings, Frantz Fanon remains committed to what Francoise Verges has described as the seductive dimension of [his] vision1: the notion that revolutionary activity aimed at moving beyond situations and systems of oppression enables those engaged within the struggle to break free from the fetters of the past and set afoot a new man.2 One of the first and arguably most moving appearances of this aspect of Fanon's thought occurs in the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, in which he critiques the ten dency of some black intellectuals alienated by the colonial condition to lose sight of the present and future by attempting to reconstruct the cultural past destroyed by the occupying powers. Surprisingly, when read in light of contemporary debates over racial injustice in the United States, Fanon also renounces the right ... to claim repa ration for the domestication of [his] ancestors, since doing so would involve remaining the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized [his] ancestors.3 The dilemma appears to take the following form: demanding reparations for the historical injustices stemming from the practice of slavery requires the descendants of slaves, as a collec tive, to affirm an identity that unites them with their enslaved ances tors. The adoption of this identity, however, has the potential to constrain the possibility of engaging in projects of self-creation that depart from the identity. Faced with the choice between reparations and radical self-creation, Fanon opts for the latter. But do these options constitute mutually exclusive courses of action? Must the pursuit of slavery reparations necessarily entail sacri ficing the possibility of recapturing the self' from the dead weight of the past (BS 231)? Francoise Verges concludes that the either/or dimension of this decision is inevitable, but suggests contra Fanon