The Negritude Movement by Rabaka Reiland;

Author:Rabaka, Reiland; [Rabaka, Reiland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Fanonian Negritude: Frantz Fanon

FANONISM: INTRODUCTION TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS INTELLECTUAL HEIR and DISCURSIVE DETRACTOR OF THE NEGRITUDE MOVEMENT

This book began with a discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois as the central intellectual antecedent of what eventually came to be called “Negritude,” and it will end with an extended exploration of Frantz Fanon as the Negritude Movement’s most noted discursive descendant. Similar to the Du Boisian Negritude discussion in the introduction, the argument here in the book’s conclusion is not that Fanon was an orthodox Negritudist (there quite simply is no such thing), but that, much like Du Bois prior to the emergence of the Negritude Movement, Fanon deployed and deconstructed Negritudesque themes throughout his oeuvre. Fanon’s relationship with Negritude is obviously distinctly different from Du Bois’s proto-relationship with Negritude in light of the fact that Du Bois’s discourse predates and provides a discursive point of departure for Negritude, where Fanon’s philosophy postdates and generously draws from Negritude, even as he ultimately came to reject certain crude and unsavory aspects of it.

Perhaps more than anything else, the previous chapters on Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor reveal that even the great triumvirate of Negritude did not come to some kind of card-carrying consensus as to exactly what Negritude is and is not. Orthodoxy amongst the intellectual-artist-activists of the Negritude Movement simply did not exist (à la the “Niggerati” of the Harlem Renaissance), and there is no need for us to force the scholarship on the movement to fit into nice and neat (mostly Eurocentric) conceptual categories that frequently fly in the face of the core beliefs and practices of the movement. This last point is one that needs to be strongly stressed in order to fully understand why I am invoking “Fanonian Negritude” and how I am analytically utilizing the term “Fanonian Negritude” to chronicle, critique, and demonstrate the continued conceptual relevance of many elements of Negritude—even if only via Fanon’s enormous influence on those of us interested in developing a wretched of the earth-centered radical politics and an Africana critical theory of contemporary (i.e., twenty-first century) society.

At the outset, then, I should state outright that there is no such a thing as “Fanonian Negritude.” As a matter of fact, the intentionally ironic term “Fanonian Negritude” is a premeditated misnomer—much like the term “Du Boisian Negritude.” Allow me, if you will, to briefly explain: Fanon understood Negritude to be an extremely important, although impermanent or, rather, transient stage in continental and diasporan African psychological, social, political, intellectual, and cultural consciousness-development that symbolized the wretched of the earth’s angst-ladened response to anti-black racism and racial colonial capitalism. As Cynthia Nielsen noted in “Resistance through Re-Narration: Fanon on De-constructing Racialized Subjectivities” (2011), “[w]hile recognizing that colonization and the construction of colonized subjectivities are contingent creations and hence malleable, Fanon nonetheless understood that the process of decolonization and re-narrating new, positive identities and conceptions of ‘blackness’ would take time and would proceed in stages” (371). Therefore, Nielsen went on to importantly

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