“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States

Abstract

“What Matters Now”: Reading Fanon’s Call for Decolonization and Humanization in the Contemporary United States Courtney L. Gildersleeve (bio) In a passage from the “Conclusion” of The Wretched of the Earth,1 some of Frantz Fanon’s last printed words before his death in 1961, he cautions his comrades throughout the decolonizing world against adopting any aspects of the model through which “a particular Europe” had long brutalized humanity.2 Fanon identifies colonialism and capitalism, and the racism and racialized violence on which they are predicated, as systems that must be thoroughly overcome for human life to persist, making clear that the work of decolonization is not complete after formal independence. With a palpable sense of urgency, he writes: What matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. . . . It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. (Fanon 2004, 238) [End Page 24] Speaking from his lived knowledge of the colonial order in Martinique, Algeria, and France, Fanon advocates a categorical rejection of colonialism at all levels of society, and within the body and mind of the human being. As we see in the passage, this task crucially involves renouncing a capitalist notion of progress. Such efforts would inaugurate a radical transformation, ultimately effecting, in Fanon’s words, the creation of a “new man.” Fanon’s work resonates strongly today because “not dragging man in directions which mutilate him” arguably remains a “very basic question.” From ongoing drone strikes, to mass deportations, to military occupation, to assaults on basic social services, to various forms of terrorism, not only can one name countless instances of the breaking of human bodies and minds, and the destruction of lives, but the “mutilation of the human” seems to stand as a dominant feature of this age.3 It is not enough, however, simply to lament the current state of the world, in which the dehumanizing conditions that Fanon so fiercely contested in his work and his life persist. We know that his methodology, grounded in psychiatric practice, involves a precise naming of the ills of a society and an attempt to diagnose their origin, and, as a revolutionary, taking actions to fundamentally transform what causes harm. With regard to the still-existing colonial rule in his time, Fanon theorized what one might call the corrective role of violence in destroying colonialism. Rather than assert an absolute position toward Fanon’s analysis of violence, much less speak of violence in abstract terms, I want to locate this matter within another core preoccupation of his work. Coming to Fanon with a concern for the current proliferation of extreme brutality, but wary of merely moralistic appeals to nonviolence, what I am most interested in highlighting is the capacious notion of human agency that his work develops, and of which violence is but one part. When he states that “the dreams of the colonial subject are dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality,” Fanon identifies that fundamental to colonialism’s pathology is a reliance on inhibiting, even destroying, the mobility and agential capacity of a whole group or groups of people (2004, 15). It is such petrification—and the means of reproducing it—that must be challenged. One of the most generative aspects of Fanon’s work is his advocacy of human agency—his foregrounding of the human as a being who can act in and upon the world, and in history. For one thing, this way of thinking presents an antidote against the threat of powerlessness that one might experience before the problems of our time, and arguably [End Page 25] against systems of oppression at large. In this spirit, and in order to move beyond a general commentary on the unjust global order, another moment in the “Conclusion” begs our attention. In urging his comrades in the anti-colonial struggle to choose a path...