Decolonizing Ourselves: The Subtler Violences of Colonialism and Racism in Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa - OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research

The following essay titled “Decolonizing Selves: The Subtler Violences of Colonialism and Racism in Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa,” is an updated preprint edition of what was later published in 2009 by Mohammad Tamdgidi in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy, a collection edited by Elizabeth A. Hoppe and Tracey Nichols, with a foreword by Mirelle Fanon-Mendes France (Lexington Books, A Division of Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group). It had previously appeared in the proceedings of the Fourth Annual Social Theory Forum held at UMass Boston in 2007, having been earlier presented at the forum. The conference was titled “The Violences of Colonialism and Racism, Inner and Global: Conversations with Frantz Fanon on the Meaning of Human Emancipation.”

How were Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gloria Anzaldúa personally troubled by the violences of colonialism and racism in their respective Martinican/African, Palestinian/Arab, and Chicana/Mexican regional historical contexts? And how did such personal experiences motivate and explain—and how were they in turn informed by—their highly visible public intellectual discourses and actions? In this essay, Tamdgidi comparatively explores the sociological imaginations of colonial and racial violence in the writings of Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa, seeking to identify the theoretical and broader philosophical implications such a study may have for de-colonizing selves and for advancing human emancipatory discourses and practices.

Fanon’s ideas and activism have often been associated with an advocacy for cruder forms of revolutionary response to the violence brought on by colonialism and racism. Revisiting such misinterpretations of Fanon’s work in conversation with Said’s and Anzaldúa’s writings, Tamdgidi argues that the differing (respectively embracing, ambiguous, and rejective) responses of the three intellectuals regarding revolutionary physical violence is reflective of the regional historical conditions of colonialism and racism confronting each intellectual.

He argues, further, that what commonly motivated the highly visible and committed public discourses and struggles of these three public intellectuals were their sensitivity to deeply troubling and much subtler personal experiences of racism and colonialism each had endured in their lives, especially experiencing an alienated/ing multiply-selved landscape within that accommodated both the victimhood and the perpetration of racial and colonial identities and practices in oneself. It is one thing to witness and be a victim of racial prejudice and colonial oppression in and by others, and another to realize that one and one’s loved ones have been turned into perpetrators of, or accomplices in, the same, at times against oneself.

The study points to what Tamdgidi has proposed as a need to move beyond Newtonian and toward quantum sociological imaginations whereby the presumed atomic “individual” units of sociological analysis and practice are problematized and transcended in favor of recognizing the strange, sub-atomic and quantum, realities of personal and broader social lives in terms of relationalities of intra/inter/extrapersonal selfhoods. Such exercises in the sociology of self-knowledge may more effectively accommodate the subtler realization that one may be at the same time not only an oppressor and an oppressed vis-à-vis others, but also an oppressor of oneself—an awakening that is indispensable for pursuing what Fanon called the “total liberation” of humanity.

For the published edition by Lexington Books, please visit here.

Decolonizing Selves: The Subtler Violences of Colonialism and Racism in Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa

Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?” (p. 203). … You are forced to come up against yourself. Here we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies. … Once again, the objective of the native who fights against himself is to bring about the end of domination. But he ought equally to pay attention to the liquidation of all untruths implanted in his being by oppression. … Total liberation is that which concerns all sectors of the personality (p. 250). —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1966)

Thus it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, “Edward,” a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said (p. 3). … The underlying motifs for me have been the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my parents tried to construct, the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and how an extraordinarily increasing number of departures have unsettled my life from its earliest beginnings. To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years (p. 217). … I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance (p. 295). —Edward Said, Out of Place (1999)

Yes, yes. And then I think of the human personality. It’s supposed to be one. You know, you’re one entity—one person with one identity. But that’s not so. There are many personalities and subpersonalities in you and your identity shifts every time you shift positions (p. 158). … There’s this heroic fallacy that it’s OK to penetrate a country—rape it, conquer it, take it over—and not only to do that but to tell the inhabitants that they aren’t who they are. This to me was the greatest injury: to take the identity away from these indigenous people, to put a foreign identity on them, then make them believe that that’s who they were. (p. 188-9). … To take the problem of censorship one step further, there’s also internal censorship. I’ve internalized my mom’s voice, the neoconservative right voice, the morality voice. I’m always fighting those voices (p. 260). —Gloria E. Anzaldúa, quoted in Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas (Keating, 2000)

I. Introduction

How were Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Edward Said (1935-2003), and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) personally troubled by colonial and racial violence in their respective Martinican/African, Palestinian/Arab, and Chicana/Mexican, regional historical contexts? And how did such personal experiences motivate and explain—and how were they in turn informed by—their highly visible public intellectual discourses and actions? In this paper, I comparatively explore the sociological imaginations of colonial and racial violence in the writings of these three public intellectuals, seeking to identify the theoretical and broader philosophical implications such a study may have for de-colonizing selves and for advancing human emancipatory discourses and practices.

The sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills wrote, “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise” (2000, p. 6). He further added, “No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey” (Ibid). Such an imagination would enable its holder to relate how one’s “personal troubles of the milieu” and broader “public issues of social structure” (Ibid, p. 8) interrelate. This involves, in Mills’ more specific formulation, how a person’s “inner life” and “external career” on the micro level are constituted by the present global and even the broader world-historical social forces and structures at the macro level. Mills was insistent on the need for adopting such a framework in every sociological inquiry because he believed that such an approach was already a “major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature” (Ibid, p. 14):

It is not merely one quality of mind among the contemporary range of cultural sensibilities—it is the quality whose wider and more adroit use offers the promise that all such sensibilities—and in fact human reason itself—will come to play a greater role in human affairs. (Ibid, p. 15; italics in the original)

Why was the cultivation and application of the sociological imagination so important for Mills? What difference does it make, theoretically and/or practically, to pursue such a line of inquiry in, as Mills encouraged, every line of sociological inquiry? In this study, along with its primary concern with understanding the sociological imaginations of colonialism and racism in the life and works of Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa, I hope to illustrate the usefulness of a distinction between Newtonian and quantum sociological imaginations where the “social” is redefined in terms of relations among subatomic selves rather of presumed atomic individuals.

Of particular interest here is to explore how the three public intellectuals’ differing discourses on and political attitudes toward colonialism and racism across their respective regional historical contexts shaped and can be explained by their particular biographies and the subtler, more intimate and personal, ways they were troubled by colonial and racial violence in their own lives. Fanon’s views on violence have often been de(con)textualized and thereby misrepresented in terms of his more explicit advocacy of revolutionary physical violence in reaction to global racism and colonialism, particularly in the Algerian and African contexts. Said—more ambivalent on the use of physical violence in the context of the Palestinian nationalist struggles amid the Arab/Israeli conflict—seems to have been inspired in part by a more intimate (not cruder and caricatured) and contextualized reading of Fanon’s discourse on revolutionary violence while waging an intellectual struggle against the underlying ideological, especially orientalist, structures of knowledge fueling the West’s colonial and racial violence.

In contrast to both, Anzaldúa advocates a different, spiritually activist, strategy in the struggle against colonialism and racism centered on the thesis of the simultaneity of self and global transformations, especially targeting, at the emotional and subconscious level, the dualistic inner structures of knowing, feeling, and sensing that perpetuate the interpersonal and societal conditions of colonial and racial oppression and violence. Questions may be raised as to whether Anzaldúa unintentionally rationalizes political impotence by adopting such an inner strategy for global transformation, neglecting the need for “outward-directed” action that is presumably indispensable for socio-political transformation. I will seek to demonstrate that for Anzaldúa, the dualism such a two-fold strategy implies is the very target of her theoretical and political practice and struggle, a dualism that along with others is at the root of what causes oppression and violence, and has perpetuated the hitherto failures at ending them.

It is possible to explore the different modes of articulation of the private-public discourses among public intellectuals in terms of a consideration for how they may respond to their “celebrity” status, leading some to prioritize the public good over the preoccupations and interests of their private lives, in contrast to those who consciously use their private lives as a vehicle for advancing their public agenda—the latter including cases where the self becomes itself marketable as an object for public consumption. The distinction may also be further complicated in consideration of historical context of the political culture in which the intellectual has matured (e.g., Fanon writing at a time the personal was not or was only beginning to be regarded as political, not to mention his untimely early death, leading him not to engage with and leave behind a major autobiography; Anzaldúa, writing in the context of a consciously Feminist movement where the personal is actively regarded as being political, leading her to intentionally choose autobiographical reflection as an important vehicle for social transformation; and Said, finding himself uncomfortably somewhere in between, and yet rediscovering the value of autobiographical writing following his fatal diagnosis with Leukemia).

To be sure, the reactions the three intellectual garnered and continue to receive have also much to do with the conceptual frameworks used and political cultures amid which their audiences are themselves embedded. Strong reactions to Anzaldúa’s thesis of the simultaneity of self and social transformations, for instance, may also be regarded as a product of the gendered socio-cultural location and continually displaced observation posts of those among her diverse audience. The patterns of how public intellectuals are received, in other words, are only partly to do with their own private and/or public discourses and actions, and may have also to do with the observant positioning of us as their audiences, including the readers of these lines. Transitions from Newtonian to quantum sociologies and adoption of reflexively relativist outlooks may also prove fruitful in this area, for they can help to constantly remind us that the extent of appreciation of the subtleties of colonial and racial violence in Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa, will have also much to do with the extent to which we as their audiences and readers have experienced, and have become aware of, the same in our own private and public affairs.

Were the motivations for differences, if warranted, among Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa in reaction to colonial and racial violence rooted primarily in the regional-historical contexts of their struggles as reflected in their intellectual and wider public political discourses, or did they arise more (or also) from the more intimately personal ways each was troubled by and experienced racial and colonial oppression? Are the differences reflective of irreconcilable conceptions of and attitudes toward colonial and racial oppression, or are they complementary toward one another within a common emancipatory project? And how can we explore these issues amid a “quantum” and “uncertain” (rather than Newtonian, predictable, and prejudged) conceptual environment that keeps us, as readers, constantly on guard as being always reflexively implicated in how we come to know, evaluate, and react to the comparative study at hand?

II. The Theory of Violence, Traveling from Fanon to Said

Edward Said, in his “Travelling Theory Reconsidered” (1999), presents alongside a reading of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (hereafter The Wretched)—and of Lukács, Hegel, and Adorno, among others—a critique of the “caricatural reduction[ist]” readings of Fanon, and a useful interpretation of Fanon’s arguments regarding violence in the anticolonial struggle.

Contrasting Fanon’s rendering of the dialectic between the colonizers and the colonized with, on the one hand, that in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1971) between the subject and object (as manifested in the relation of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in terms of class consciousness), and, on the other hand, that in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1977) between master and slave, Said points to an important insight in Fanon’s thought. Lukács’ and Hegel’s theories of the oppositional dialectic, grounded in a European context, do not travel via Fanon’s mind unchanged, but are significantly transformed and reinterpreted in the context of the anticolonial struggle.

For Fanon, the dialectic of the colonist and the colonized does not have the same attribute of reciprocity that the subject-object dialectic of class consciousness of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or that between master and slave, have in the European context. According to Fanon, in Said’s reading, the colonist does not need the affirmation of the colonized for its existence in the colonial context. Here, it is rather based on the possibility of absolute annihilation of the colonized, of their absolute objectification and dehumanization, of waging an absolute violence against them: “Here [in the colonial relationship between races] the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (Fanon, as quoted in Said 1999, p. 210).

Renate Zahar, in her Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (1974), had previously drawn attention to the same discussion of Hegel by Fanon in The Wretched. Zahar and Said, however, seem to have read and appreciated Fanon differently on this matter. Zahar was cognizant of the extent to which Fanon drew a sharp contrast between the master-slave (or “noble-bondsman”) dialectic in the European and the colonial contexts; however, in contrast to Said’s agreement with Fanon’s observation, Zahar seemed to question whether the distinction Fanon drew in fact held true to the extent Fanon envisaged. She had read the difference between Fanon and Hegel mainly in terms of how in Fanon’s view the black slave does not turn to the object, and remains fixated on the white master, to free himself, hence preventing the radical transformation of the objective conditions for oppression. However, Zahar finds that the same pattern may be observed in Europe:

The question is whether the same does not likewise apply to European conditions and whether Hegel’s dialectical turn is not only an idealistic one. Neither did the bourgeoisie in its struggle for emancipation succeed in freeing itself entirely from feudal structures …nor did the proletariat succeed in its emancipation as the working class. (1974, p. 17)

Zahar did not seem to appreciate, in other words, what Said does in reading Fanon, that the very reciprocity of the master-slave dialectic is what Fanon regards as being dispensable in the colonial question, and not its presumably differing nature or extent.¹

According to Said, interpreting Fanon, it is the sheer crudity of the oppositional dialectic in the colonial context that renders colonial domination so brutal and violent, calling in turn for a resistance equally bent on using physical violence as an absolute survival strategy in self-defense to prevent total annihilation and dehumanization by the colonist. “No one needs to be reminded that Fanon’s recommended antidote for the cruelties of colonialism is violence,” Said writes (1999, p. 209). However, he immediately qualifies his assertion by asking, “… does Fanon, like Lukács, suggest that the subject-object dialectic can be consummated, transcended, synthesized, and that violence in and of itself is that fulfillment, the dialectical tension resolved by violent upheaval into peace and harmony?” (Ibid, p. 209). Said’s response to the question he poses is clearly negative, and he is keenly aware of Fanon’s consideration that resorting to such absolute violence, as well as the “national independence” it is supposed to give birth to, while necessary, will by no means be sufficient for total liberation:

Yet both expulsion and independence belong essentially to the unforgiving dialectic of colonialism, enfolded within its unpromising script. Thereafter Fanon is at pains to show that the tensions between colonizer and colonized will not end, since in effect the new nation will produce a new set of policemen, bureaucrats, merchants to replace the departed Europeans. (1999, p. 211-212)

Said then continues to note how a careful reading of The Wretched reveals that for Fanon, neither violence, nor nationalism and its consciousness, are sufficient (nor have they, Said adds, historically proven to be) emancipatory goals. The essential point of The Wretched, rather, is to note how anticolonial struggle must necessarily take upon a broader, and more radical, global human emancipatory dimension in order to succeed. “[I]f nationalism ‘is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words, humanism, it leads up a blind ally…,’” Said quotes Fanon as saying (1999, p. 212-3).

While Said sheds important light on the necessity and the limits of revolutionary physical violence in the anticolonial struggle as envisaged by Fanon, to his reading of Fanon one can add additional considerations in order to highlight the historically contingent nature of Fanon’s discourse on violence, and the much subtler dimensions of Fanon’s arguments regarding violence in the anticolonial struggle.

First, it is important to consider the historically contingent and transient nature of the crude dialectics of colonial opposition Fanon and Said point to in contrast to the class dialectics of bourgeoisie-proletariat and/or master-slave as found in the European context. Fanon was writing at a time when anticolonial wars were predominantly waged against a cruder form of colonialism where the brute force of colonial domination invited an equally brutal form of anticolonial struggle. While he was anticipating that the subtler forms of colonialist rule might emerge in the aftermath of nationalist revolution with the deepening of capitalist penetration of the Third World, Fanon’s prognosis and prescription reflected the necessities of such forms of struggle as those arising from the earlier cruder forms of colonial domination. But Fanon is not oblivious to the subtler—and in fact much more effective—forms class and colonial rule may take in the postrevolutionary period. To detach Fanon’s argument for a cruder form of revolutionary violence pertaining to a particular stage of colonial domination, and to advocate that for all anticolonial struggles—including those in the present period when the neocolonial modes of domination are mediated through the machinery of a capitalist enterprise firmly established in the former colonies—would be an exercise in ahistorical analysis.

Fanon is himself highly aware of both the subtler and the cruder forms of domination when he contrasts the conditions in capitalist and colonized countries. In The Wretched, for instance, he makes a distinction between the subtler forms of class domination in the capitalist societies—where seemingly invisible lay or clerical educational systems, “moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service,” and a multitude of other subtly affective and behavioral structures help perpetuate the status quo—and the racialized forms of class rule in the colonies accompanied by brutal, open, direct, and crude violence (p. 31). However, the above contrast, and especially the dualistic (or in Fanon’s often repeated word “Manichean”) nature of the antagonism between the rulers and the ruled in the colonial situation, should be regarded as historically contingent and transient. In a neocolonized global context when, as anticipated by Fanon himself, the boundaries of the colonizer and the colonized have become increasingly blurred, the Manichean practice of violence on both sides would no longer be as effective or practical:

The people who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manicheism of the settler—Blacks and Whites, Arabs and Christians—realise as they go along that it sometimes happens that you get Blacks who are whiter than Whites and that the fact of having a national flag and the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the population to give up their interests and privileges. … This discovery is unpleasant, bitter and sickening: and yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses. (p. 115)

This brings up the second reason that has caused significant misunderstandings surrounding Fanon’s argument regarding physical violence in The Wretched. This has to do with inadequate considerations given to the method of Fanon’s presentation in the work. The misunderstandings are not dissimilar to the problems posed when reading Marx’s Capital (1992), or even his and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (2002), given the methods employed therein. In Capital, Marx begins with an inductive analysis of the commodity form to arrive at his labor theory of value, and then proceeds in the rest of his work to deduce his theory of capitalist accumulation. His subsequent method of proceeding from the abstract to the concrete where, at each step, he adds a new element to the unity of diverse aspects of his subject matter has led those unfamiliar with his method to take what he has articulated at a given step in his concretion process as a final statement of his theoretical conception of capital as a whole.

Fanon’s method of presentation in The Wretched has a similar quality as that found in Marx’s Capital, of a careful, step-by-step, progression of the narrative parallel to the development of the consciousness of those he seeks to enrage, inflame, invite, motivate, educate, and guide in the course of the anticolonial struggle. The Wretched is also, in effect, a manifesto of the damned of the earth in contrast (and perhaps—given the differing revolutionary potentials attributed to the peasantry, the non-European world, and to masses versus intellectuals—arguably a challenge) to Marx’s Manifesto of the proletarian communist revolution. However, the point here is to note their similar modes of presentation of the material. To take Fanon’s pronouncements early on in The Wretched regarding the necessity of waging revolutionary physical violence in reaction to the colonial violence as his last word would be the equivalent of taking Marx’s attribution of a positive historical role to the bourgeoisie in an earlier section of the Manifesto as a declaration of his total view of what capitalism is and/or what communism is supposed to accomplish. In both cases, as in the context of Marx’s method in Capital, a keen awareness of the methodology employed in the presentation of the work is called for.

Here we should also remember that Fanon was writing The Wretched during the last months of his life, consumed with a desire and commitment to leave behind a work that can shed light not only on the complexities of anticolonial struggle at his then present historical time, but also provide guidelines for the later phases of it. Those who contrast Fanon’s first chapter with the later ones, may find contradictions and inconsistencies in his arguments. However, in this particular case, the contradictions arising in Fanon’s thought seem to be a result not of inconsistencies in his thought, but of a careful and methodical application of a style of writing which aims to take his sympathetic readers from the cruder and “primitive,” “Manichean,” stages of struggle in the most immediate present, to the increasingly subtler and more challenging tasks facing the movement in regard to the post-revolutionary phases of the struggle. That Fanon ends The Wretched with case studies of the much subtler psychopathological issues afflicting those involved in the struggle, and ultimately with a call to his comrades to open the horizons of their struggle—beyond the confines of their narrow historical or regional challenges in favor of appreciating the world-historical nature of the task at hand for global human emancipation—illustrates the complexity, and in my reading quite pre-meditated and intentional, method of presentation of the material in The Wretched. One may find fault with Fanon’s method of presentation therein, but it would be unfair not to acknowledge it and not to take it into consideration in assessing the substantive merits of his argument as a whole.

Those who take Fanon’s words in the first chapter of The Wretched and transpose them as a universal statement on his part in regard to the nature of colonial and anticolonial violence run the serious risk not only of misinterpreting but especially misapplying Fanon’s thought under changed historical times. Fanon’s discourse on violence in the later chapters of the book is highly critical of the limits of revolutionary physical violence as an ultimate solution to the colonial question. He takes pains to explain how the so-called criminality of the Algerian is a result of historical and social conditions resulting from colonial rule. He sheds detailed light, especially in the chapter on “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” on the lasting harms done to the human psyche by violent conditions of combat on both sides of the opposition—regardless of how “collectively cathartic” violence may prove to be in the initial phases of the struggle in expelling the colonizers from the colonies. Here he illustrates how colonial violence is perpetrated in the inner landscapes of the tortured and the torturer alike.

The Manichean dualism of the colonist and the colonized, as noted in the beginning of The Wretched, has now given way to an awareness of the immense subtleties of the struggle at hand where one’s body is home to both oppressor and oppressed selves (cf. Tamdgidi 2004b)—examples, by the way, that are taken from the midst of the very Manichean historical context he began his book with. The journey of the chapters in the book, in other words, has not been merely one in historical time or stages of struggle, but, logically, in a conceptual spacetime of the here-and-now². This is why he proposes that the psychological front need not and should not be postponed, but to be also taken as a point of departure:

… The important theoretical problem is that it is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself. There must be no waiting until the nation has produced new men; there must be no waiting until men are imperceptibly transformed by revolutionary processes in perpetual renewal. It is quite true that these two processes are essential, but consciousness must be helped. (Ibid, p. 246)

The historically contingent and the methodological aspects of Fanon’s discourse on the necessity of revolutionary physical violence in the anticolonial struggle, therefore, need to be both taken into consideration when evaluating his diagnoses and prognoses as well as prescriptions for the illnesses of colonialism and racism. For Fanon, the crude and sharply dualistic, “Manichean,” conditions of anticolonial struggle are historically specific, “objective” points of departure he finds himself and his comrades inevitably facing. The revengeful nature of the defensive violence of the anticolonial movement, the “criminal” nature of elements attracted to it in diverse rural, urban, and marginal (“lumpen”) sectors of a society already afflicted with the structural violence of equally crude colonial rule, the immediate “collectively cathartic” function the revolutionary violence is supposed to serve in mobilizing and transforming the masses, are all seen by Fanon not as ends in themselves, but as aspects of what appears to be a historically imposed struggle that in later stages increasingly proves to be much subtler and more complex than originally considered.

One may argue that, in fact, the reason why Said finds himself attracted to Fanon’s thought is because of the complexity he finds in the latter’s acknowledgment of both the cruder and the subtler forms of violence perpetrated by colonialism and racism. But here we should note an important distinction between the two. Said, coming later, and in a different regional historical context where the cruder form of US-backed Israeli colonial violence in Palestine has uncharacteristically and seemingly asynchronously survived into a neocolonial global era, provides Said with the hindsight of seeing both the contributions and the historically contingent nature of Fanon’s thought at the same time. Said, weary not only of the destructive nature of the Israeli policies toward Palestinians in occupying their lands and in denying their right to self-determination and viable statehood, is also witness to the bankruptcy and failures of the “national elite” and the “political leadership” prophetically warned against by Fanon in The Wretched. What for Fanon, due to his untimely early death, was considered more or less a theoretical possibility in the postrevolutionary period is for Said an actual fact, but strangely juxtaposed at the same time onto an enduring Manichean duel in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the midst of a global context long overran elsewhere, more or less, by the much subtler and organic logic of capitalist neocolonial oppression.

The violences of colonialism and racism, Said also finds, are much deeper and subtler than the crude force of physical violence. He does acknowledge the physical dimension of the struggle at hand when he throws a symbolic stone against the Israeli colonial rule when visiting his homeland, but devotes much more of his life’s work targeting the subtler structures of orientalist ideology fueling the West’s and Israel’s colonialist and racist adventures.

III. The Difference Anzaldúa Makes

What distinguishes the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, the late Chicana lesbian feminist and cultural theorist, from both Fanon and Said may also be attributable to the regional historical context in the midst of which she developed her conceptual architecture. Fanon was facing a global struggle against colonialism and racism where the cruder, “Manichean,” form of colonialism is predominant. Said wrote in a unique historical-regional context where the cruder colonialism of US-backed Israeli occupations in Palestine are asynchronously juxtaposed with an already emergent, on a global scale, reality of neocolonialism. In contrast, Anzaldúa, as a Chicana living in the US, confronted and problematized the much subtler forms of oppression at the heart of an already accomplished and established neocolonial matrix.

For Anzaldúa, an awareness of the cruder physical colonial borderlands must give way to the complexities of much subtler “geography of selves” (2000, p. 265) bearing class, racial, gender, sexual, and psychic “Borderlands” of dualistic thinking, feeling, and sensing that help perpetuate global colonial and racial oppression from within. Anzaldúa, in other words, takes what Fanon begins The Wretched with in terms of a Manichean duel of the colonist and colonized worlds and problematizes it as having become internalized at the heart of the neocolonial and racist structures of oppression. In many ways, for her, it is such inner Manichean dualisms that lead to the realities of overt violence and war in the first place. The outer dualisms that explode into cruder physical violence in particular spaces and times, in other words, are only volcanic eruptions of world-historically enduring dualistic structures fragmenting the inner realities, the geographies of selves, of humankind.

This, for Anzaldúa, necessitates a different conception of the architecture of self and social oppression that in turn calls for a different strategy based on the simultaneity of self and broader social liberation. In other words, what for Fanon, given his method of presentation in The Wretched, seemingly becomes separated historically and/or logically as stages of revolution whereby the Manichean dualism of the colonist and the colonized are dealt with first in their cruder forms, so as to provide conditions for cultural and psychological healings later, are transformed in Anzaldúa into an alternative mode of transformative practice whereby the order is not simply reversed, but turned into a liberatory practice of simultaneity in self- and global transformations. Fanon at times, in Black Skin, White Masks, for instance, gives credence to such practices of simultaneity of self and social change, when, for instance, he writes:

What emerges then is the need for combined action on the individual and on the group. As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure. (1967, p. 100)

But note two points here. First, the outward bend of work on the individual and group in contrast to self-work on the part of the individual (or the group, one may add) is to be noted. It is one thing to work on another individual, as in a psychoanalyst-patient relation, and another to work on oneself; for Anzaldúa, the reflexivity of the transformative act is crucial. Second, it is important to note that Fanon’s conception in the specific passage above is still dualistic, in the sense that he does not see the processes of self-knowing and self-transforming themselves as processes of social structural understanding and transformation (and vice versa). This is a crucial distinction between Fanon and Anzaldúa, since for her the process of self-change is, at its own level and in its own magnitude, a process of social transformation. Anzaldúa’s diagnosis and transformative agenda are based on a different conception of colonial practice, one which differs from Fanon’s favored “sociogenic” or “sociodiagnostic” method where psychological maladies are deemed to be logical effects of a dualistically conceived society standing apart from the self and shaping it.

In other passages of Black Skin, White Masks (1967) Fanon gives the impression of such dualistic thinking, separating the individual from the society, as if one stands apart from the other. When critiquing the Adlerian line of argument regarding the Antillean “psychological” attributes, for instance, Fanon asks: “Now that we have marked out the Adlerian line of orientation of the Antillean, our task is to look for its source” (Ibid, p. 213). Fanon continues by noting that,

Here the difficulties begin. In effect, Adler has created a psychology of the individual. We have just seen that the feeling of inferiority is an Antillean characteristic. It is not just this or that Antillean who embodies the neurotic formation, but all Antilleans. Antillean society is a neurotic society, a society of “comparison.” Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in the “soul” of the individual but rather in that of the environment.” (Ibid.)

The taint is in environment, but not in the soul, in the A but not in the B of the dialectic, in the whole but not in the part. This is formal logic at work, and different from a dialectical logic where A and B can be conceived in terms of the dialectics of both difference and identity, at the same time. In other passages, however, Fanon himself rejects such crude dualisms of the self and the world: “I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit” (1967, p. 140). The latter is much more akin to Anzaldúa’s formulation, “I change myself, I change the world” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 71), where the soul and the world are regarded as being twin-born in terms of the dialectics of part and whole. This, I argue, is what gives distinctiveness to Anzaldúa’s transformative strategy based on the simultaneity of self and social transformations—conveying a quantum, rather than a Newtonian, notion of society in terms of interactions of sub-atomic selves than of presumed atomic individuals, a notion where predictable hegemonies of the whole over the part, of the macro over the micro, of the world over the self, break down—where the explosive powers of minute quantum self-interactions and realizations can prove to be world-transformative.

In Anzaldúa, colonialism is regarded as simultaneously a social and psychological process that invites, in turn, the simultaneity of self and social liberatory strategy:

Right. It’s a new colonization of people’s psyches, minds, and emotions rather than a takeover of their homes or their lands like in colonialism. (Anzaldúa, in Keating 2002, p. 216)

I think you’re right. La gente de Tejás, rural, agricultural people, have kept that link with the land, with a particular place, more so than urban people. Part of it is due to internal colonialism or neocolonialism, a psychological type of being taken over. Beginning in the sixteenth century, colonialism was material, it appropriated bodies, lands, resources, religion … Everything was taken over. Psychologically, that kind of colonization is still going on. (Ibid. 2000, p. 184)

The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads. (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 87)

My “awakened dreams” are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world’s soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espíritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world. (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 71).

While, as a Western-educated psychiatrist, Fanon borrows important conceptual arsenal for his antiracist and anticolonial praxis from Freud’s thought—his awareness of the limits of the latter in a Third World context notwithstanding—Anzaldúa is quite flexible in using the spiritual legacy of her ancestors in devising her psychosociological awareness and liberatory strategy. She is also highly aware of the significance of the subconscious mind in perpetuating the dualistic structures of thinking, feeling, and sensing that in turn make possible the perpetration of colonial and racial oppressions. She taps into the vast reservoir of spiritual symbols and imageries inherited from her ancestors to invent new ways and means of infusing emotional catharsis and transformation in the subconscious at both personal and collective levels, inner transformations that are simultaneously steps in global transformation.

This may point to an important distinction between Anzaldúa on the one hand, and Fanon and Said, on the other. The latter two, and despite Fanon’s call for inventing new concepts for human liberation beyond those advanced by Europe, still legitimate themselves within the frameworks of a secularist, Western-informed, paradigm. With Anzaldúa, it is different. Here, a reconsideration of Said’s purpose in Orientalism (1979) becomes necessary.

Said’s stone thrown at the heart of orientalism reveals much about the subtleties of a looking glass self logic that has fueled and perpetuated the West’s colonialist and racist aggressions across the world and centuries (Tamdgidi 2005). To facilitate such aggressions and to be able to mobilize its own resources for the colonial quest, the West has fashioned an image of the East, and of the Arab and Islam in the particular regional historical context more directly relevant to Said, that serve to give legitimacy to its own assumed superiority and civilizing mission across “others’” lands. For this reason, in Orientalism, Said does not see it necessary to delve into what the “real East” is like, or what the “true Islam” or “Middle East” or “Arab world” may be, because his purpose is to expose the closed narcissism³ and the self-perpetuating logic of the Western attitude toward the East, the Middle East, and Islam. The project of exposing these rather much subtler forms of intellectual and cultural violence that in effect make possible and legitimate the perpetration of the cruder forms of colonialist and racist aggression by the West across the globe seems to be for Said a much more urgent and fundamental task to fulfill than becoming personally involved in military campaigns against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

However, we need to distinguish between Said’s literary and political rhetoric and the substantive point he makes in Orientalism in regard to the East-West difference and orientalism (Tamdgidi 2005). His work is a critique of a particular, that is, orientalist, way of seeing, reading, imagining, and subsequently ruling the non-European, the non- Western, world exacerbated by the political and conjunctural realities of the post-WWII and especially post-Cold War period. He is not, in substance, dismissing the East-West cultural difference itself. Said’s own argument needs to be historically contextualized, in other words, to reveal the severity of his critique of orientalism. His is, at heart, a critique of a particular way of gazing and imagining the East-West difference, not the denial of the possibility or reality of a difference itself. His Orientalism is not a statement on what the East of Islam is, but an effort in exposing the imaginary nature of the orientalist vision of the East, the Arab, and Islam:

Yet Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world as a systematic defense of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly in the book that I have no interest in, much less, capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are. (Said, 1979, p. 331)

But then he immediately follows this statement in which he confesses to a lack of interest and capacity for showing the true Orient and Islam with the statement:

Actually I go a great deal further when, very early in the book, I say that words such as “Orient” and “Occident” correspond to no stable reality that exists as a natural fact. Moreover, all such geographical designations are an odd combination of the empirical and imaginative. (Said, 1979, p. 331)

These kinds of rhetorical claims and counter-claims somewhat obstruct Said’s main purpose in Orientalism of primarily critiquing an idea which “derive[s] to a great extent from the impulse not simply to describe, but also to dominate …” (Said, 1979, p. 331). But in the process of such rhetoric, space is opened not only for an inconsistency in his argument but also for a misreading of his intentions (cf. Ahmed 1994).

Said himself warned his readers, in the concluding chapter of his Representations of the Intellectual (1994), not to turn creeds and intellectuals into “Gods that Always Fail.” “I am against conversion to and belief in a political god of any sort,” Said continues, “I consider both as unfitting behavior for the intellectual.” It would be fitting therefore not to turn Said (and Fanon and Anzaldúa for that matter), into gods, for, if not their words, but our misreading of their rhetoric, may lead us to impute certain meanings and intentions to their texts that were not intended. At other times, however, we must always take into consideration that Said’s and Fanon’s own biographies and perspectives—their secularism and Western upbringing and education, for instance—may have played an important role in their dismissal of certain aspects of non-Western culture which they may have considered, for political reasons, unacceptable or indefensible. Those who insist on historicizing the discourses of public intellectuals such as Said, Fanon, and Anzaldúa, cannot make an exception to historicizing their biographies and the historical context shaping (and perhaps limiting) their world-views.

An important difference between Anzaldúa on the one hand, and Fanon and Said, on the other, in regard to the struggle against colonial and racial oppression can indeed be found in their differing attitudes toward indigenous culture and spirituality.

It is true that in many ways, Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa all find agreement in their questioning of institutionalized religion as often serving colonialist interests as accomplices in oppression. In The Wretched, for instance, Fanon particularly mocks the “turn the other cheek” policy of the church (1967, p. 53) when arguing for the need to confront the violence of colonialists with the equal force of anticolonial violence, and Anzaldúa is adamant on the oppressive role played by the Catholic Church (2000, p. 95): “Religion eliminates all kinds of growth, development, and change, and that’s why I think any kind of formalized religion is really bad” (Ibid, p. 8-9). As a secularist, Said would have likely not quarreled with Fanon and Anzaldúa in regard to the oppressive role played by institutionalized religion in history.

However, contrary to the ultimately modernist Fanon (who equally regards with contempt and criticism the mythologies and superstitions inherited from precolonial society and calls for their abandonment in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary struggles against colonial racism) and the ultimately modernist Said (whose critique of orientalism subtextually avoids a similar effort to critically embrace what may be of value in indigenous Islamic or Arab culture⁴, Anzaldúa is flexibly open to the positive role spirituality and traditional cultural symbols and practices can play in personal and social transformation. In her interviews, she reiterates the role played by spirituality in her own personal life and struggles:

But the main spiritual experience has been a very strong sense of a particular presence. One of the reasons I don’t get lonely is because I don’t feel I’m alone. How can you be lonely when there’s this thing with you? This awareness was the strength of my rebellion and my ability to cut away from my culture, from the dominant society. I had a very strong rhythm, a sense of who I was, and I could turn this presence into a way of shielding myself, a weapon. I didn’t have the money, privilege, body, or knowledge to fight oppression, but I had this presence, this spirit, this soul. And that was the only way for me to fight—through ritual, meditation, affirmation, and strengthening myself. Spirituality is oppressed people’s only weapon and means of protection. Changes in society only come after that. You know what I mean? If you don’t have the spiritual, whatever changes you make go against you. (Keating, 2000, p. 98)

It is true that for Fanon, speaking particularly of the African context, “chiefs, caids and witch-doctors” (1967, p. 98) represent the interests of the feudal society in rural areas that need to be eradicated in the revolutionary struggle against colonialism. However, he does not seem to allow space for a positive and useful role for elements of local culture and traditional spiritual folklore in the anticolonial and antiracial struggle—at least not as clearly, explicitly, and self-consciously as Anzaldúa does⁵. At times, he mocks traditional spirituality to make way for the kind of revolutionary struggle that should really matter:

During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The native’s back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrodes at his genitals): he will have no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life—the forces of colonialism. And the youth of a colonised country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djinns who rush into your body while you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom. (Fanon, 1967, p. 46)

As much as the secularist Said may agree with Fanon’s Marx-inspired regard for religion as the opiate of the masses on political grounds, one should not ignore the powerful critique of orientalism, as an ideological strategy serving colonialism, as advanced in Said’s work (1979). The broad strokes in caricaturizations of the East and “traditional” culture can serve a similar purpose in divesting local cultures from their symbolic means of knowing the self and the world that may play important (even psychologically cathartic) role in the anticolonial and antiracist struggle. Anzaldúa’s approach, in contrast, is an open one, where she critically borrows and transforms the spiritual artifacts and symbols of her indigenous culture as a strategy in favor of self and global transformation.⁶

As another illustration of the above, where Fanon finds tribalism a liability in the anticolonial struggle, Anzaldúa borrows and invents the new concept “New Tribalism”—imbued with a sense of global solidarity while preserving ethnic identity and diversity:

We looked for something beyond just nationalism while continuing to connect to our roots. If we don’t find the roots we need we invent them, which is fine because culture is invented anyway. We have returned to the tribe, but our nationalism is one with a twist. It’s no longer the old kind of “I’m separated from this other group because I’m a Chicana so I therefore don’t have anything to do with blacks or with Asians or whatever.” It’s saying, “Yes I belong. I come from this particular tribe, but I’m open to interacting with these other people.” I call this New Tribalism. It’s a kind of mestizaje that allows for connecting with other ethnic groups and interacting with other cultures and ideas. (Keating, 2000, p. 185)

Anzaldúa’s notion of New Tribalism aims to get across the notion that we do not need to homogenize humanity in order to save it. This means having respect for cultural difference, cultivating an ability to travel across diversities, maintaining respect and appreciation for one’s own traditions and at the same time cultivating awareness, appreciation, and respect for the values and cultures of the “other.” This seems to be at the very heart of what it would take to move beyond colonial and racialized structures of discourse and social organization:

As I came into feminism and began reading—when I became a lesbian, when I had a little more time to grow—I realized it wasn’t enough to fight, to struggle for one’s nationality; one also had to struggle for one’s gender, for one’s sexual preference, for one’s class and for those of all people. These issues weren’t addressed in any of the nationalist movements because they struggled for ethnic survival and, because the male leaders felt threatened by these challenges women presented, they ignored them. …

I read an article by a white guy hostile to my writing and Borderlands in particular who wrote that I was romanticizing and idealizing the pre-Hispanic cultures. He called this the “New Tribalism.” He may have been the first person to coin the phrase. My tribe has always been the Chicano Nation, but for me, unlike the majority of Mexican Americans, the indigenous lineage is a major part of being Chicana. Nationalism was a good thing to seek in the ‘60s, but in the ‘70s it was problematic and in the ‘80s and ‘90s it doesn’t work. I had to, for myself, figure out some other term that would describe a more porous nationalism, opened up to other categories of identity.

… Existing language is based on the old concepts; we need a language to speak about the new situations, the new realities. There’s no such thing as pure categories anymore. My concepts of nos/Otras and the New Tribalism are about disrupting categories. Categories contain, imprison, limit, and keep us from growing. We have to disrupt those categories and invent new ones. (2000, p. 214-5)

At the end of The Wretched, Fanon persuasively calls for creativity and inventiveness, of not blindly following and imitating the ready-made Western models of development. He writes, “But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. … For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (1966, p. 255). How faithful Anzaldúa seems to be to this important call and invitation by Fanon, and how strange it may be to consider, even if we are wrong in our judgment, the possibility that at the very same time Fanon was calling for new models of development and revolution beyond those borrowed from Europe, his vision carried orientalist elements that broadly eschewed cultural traditions of the very peasants whose cause he so deeply championed in his short life. Even stranger would be to note how at the very same time “Said” calls for the dismantling of the orientalist ideology fueling colonialism and racism, his “Edward” adopts a contemptuous and belittling attitude toward Eastern culture (see footnote 4).

Conversely, how Fanonian Anzaldúa is in her inventive anticolonial and antiracism struggles here, and how Saidian it is to resist caricatured and orientalist images of the East and traditional culture as found in Western dominant and opposition ideologies, and to be willing to absorb and reinvent one’s indigenous symbolic heritage in the context of new global social realities.

IV. The Subtler Violences of Colonialism and Racism in Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa

Strangely, we encounter in the above a Fanon that invites us to move beyond Western models of thinking and acting and to seek creative and radically new ways of liberating ourselves, and another Fanon that is bound by the Western, secular, and “scientific” and psychoanalytic, models borrowed from the West. We similarly encounter a self in Said that radically shatters and critiques orientalism, and another self that mocks aspects of traditional Middle Eastern culture. It seems that both imperial and colonized selves voice themselves, at times unconsciously, in the geographies of selves of these public intellectuals, at the very same time and in the same passages they devote to exposing imperiality and racism.

Even more paradoxical is that all the three intellectuals are vividly aware in their writings of the multiple natures of their selves and more or less explicate them in the texture of their writings dealing with public issues and personal troubles. If they themselves realize how divided they are, what leads us to read them as if there is one Fanon, one Said, and one Anzaldúa speaking in their various writings?

The divide-and-rule strategies of colonialism and racism, the cruder violences of colonialism and racism, cannot work without a simultaneous processing of the subtler violences of social and psychological structures permeating divided and alienated geographies of selves. A careful reading of The Wretched reveals that for Fanon the immediate need to counter colonial violence with revolutionary violence serves a broader understanding that physical violence, even if psychologically cathartic, in and of itself is not the ultimate solution and, sociogenically, the social structural roots and psychological manifestations of the “Manichean” dualism of colonial and revolutionary anticolonial violence will need to be eventually tackled as a necessary component of the broader human emancipatory project.

Fanon in fact argues in The Wretched that the “brutal manifestations” of occupation may well disappear as a matter of colonial policy, in favor of subtler forms of colonial oppression and violence. He writes, for instance, “Historic examples can be quoted to help the people to see that the masquerade of giving concessions, and even the mere acceptance of the principle of concessions at any price, have been bartered by not a few countries for a servitude that is less blatant but much more complete” (1966, p. 113). While Fanon’s resignation from his psychiatric post and active participation in the Algerian revolution may best be understood in the context of the evolution of his thought in favor of the sociogenic tracing of the roots of psychological maladies to socio-political, economic, and cultural structures of colonial rule, on the one hand, and the urgent need to participate in an objectively imposed violent struggle in self-defense against colonists, on the other hand, it would be wrong to dismiss his skepticism that the pursuit of such social activism and revolutionary physical violence would automatically lead to “total liberation.” Despite his revolutionary social activism, Fanon still maintained a parallel emphasis on the need for psychological awareness and activism.

Reading Fanon’s overt arguments in The Wretched for the necessity of revolutionary violence, therefore, should not distract us from appreciating the minute attention he devotes to the subtleties of the colonial and racial struggle at hand, for such a misreading would be tantamount to not noticing the trees for the forest. To see the significance such subtleties of racial oppression and struggle against it have for Fanon, one needs only to turn to his earlier work Black Skin, White Masks (1967).

It is difficult for one to read this earlier text and not wonder if Fanon is actually unmasking himself or, rather, removing his own multiple white masks, as he delves into and analyses the psyches of his Antillean fellows. “This book is a clinical study,” Fanon writes early on; “Those who recognize themselves in it, I think, will have made a step forward” (1967, p. 14). And he ends, “by way of conclusion,” with an explicitly self-reflective account of how he should disalienate himself and those like him. “The situation that I have examined, it is clear by now, is not a classic one. Scientific objectivity was barred to me, for the alienated, the neurotic, was my brother, my sister, my father” (p. 225). And finally, “It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tensions of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world… My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (p. 231). It would be difficult to regard a treatise Fanon intended as an effort in the “disalienation of the black man” to be one from which Fanon himself was exempted. Given the scholarly and academic traditions of the time, and the intimately personal nature of the issues explored in Black Skin, White Masks, would it be far-fetched to consider that Fanon was as much psychoanalyzing himself as he was analyzing the psyches of “my brother, my sister, my father”?

If violence is broadly defined in terms of what violates human dignity—i.e., the human rights to self-determination and creativity—acts of violence aimed at the physical destruction of bodies may be regarded as constituting only the more readily visible, overt, and extreme forms of violence. In contrast, the imposition of societal policies and structures that engender economic, cultural, and political dependency and oppression as obstacles to human self-determination and creativity, on the one hand, and the behavioral attitudes that perpetuate such structural practices and in turn cause personal physical, intellectual, and emotional injuries in violation of one’s right to personal self-determination and creativity, on the other hand, constitute progressively subtler dimensions of what violates human dignity.

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, is epigraphed with the Césairean thought that “I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement” (1967, p. 9). Absent from the list are any references to the sheer destruction caused by physical violence; prominent are examples of its subtler, emotional, forms. It is the surfacing, of bringing to conscious awareness of the forms of such subtler violences, in other words, that constitutes the real purpose of Fanon in writing the book. Here, for instance, is the way Fanon notes how the feelings of inferiority are subtly internalized via language: “In the Antilles Negro who comes within this study we find a quest for subtleties, for refinements of language—so many further means of proving himself that he has measured up to the culture” (p. 38-39). Nor does the subtlety of the “smile of the black man,” to which Fanon’s attention is continually drawn throughout the book (p. 49, 72, 150, 200) escape his attention. Citing how the image of the smile appears “…on every advertisement, on every screen, on every food-product label…,” Fanon quotes the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer in noting that ““…the whites demand that the blacks be always smiling, attentive, and friendly in all their relationships with them”” (p. 50). “There are ups and downs, all told by a laughing, good natured, easy-going Negro, a Negro who serves with a smile” (p. 72). The smiles worn by racists are subtlety significant too. Comparatively, in regard to the experiences of the Jewish children just encountering the face of racism, Fanon writes: “…however it comes about, some day they must learn the truth: sometimes from the smiles of those around them, sometimes from rumor or insult. The later the discovery, the more violent the shock” (p. 150). I have yet to see a public photo of Fanon wearing a smile.

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon speaks of how “In any group of young men in the Antilles, the one who expresses himself well, who has mastered the language, is inordinately feared” (1967, p. 21). “I am not at all exaggerating:” he adds elsewhere, “A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds” (p. 31). It is as if Fanon speaks of the causes of his own anger:

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.” (p. 32)

There is “nothing more exasperating than to be asked,” Fanon writes: “How long have you been in France? You speak French so well” (1967, p. 35). “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” he adds. “The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. … The fact that I had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white man’s language gave me honorary citizenship,” Fanon sarcastically remarks (p. 38).

Fanon’s exploration of love in a racialized context in Black Skin, White Masks is equally revealing about what may have confronted him personally as well. He is angry, using the mulatta Mayotte Capécia as an ideal-type, that the black woman feels so racially inferior that she abhors falling in love with a black man, aspiring to wed a white man instead—even though she recognizes that the white man considers it a natural right of his to sleep with as many women as he pleases. But when a black man—encountering such an attitude on the part of the black woman, it may be implied—falls in love with a white woman, it is presumed to be not due to his own credit for engaging in such a relationship, but because some romance must have been at work on her part:

Since he is the master and more simply the male, the white man can allow himself the luxury of sleeping with many women. This is true in every country and especially in the colonies. But when a white woman accepts a black man there is automatically a romantic aspect. It is a giving, not a seizing. (1967, p. 46)

For Capécia, according to Fanon, discovering a white lineage in her grandmother (rather than a black male ancestor) is a source of racial pride. A white woman marrying a black man is perceived as marrying “down” whereas a black woman marrying a white man is perceived as marrying “up.” Social pressures encourage marrying “up,” whereas marrying “down” must be a choice, even against social pressures. A white woman “decides” to marry a black man, whereas the same black man “succeeds” in marrying the white woman.

The complexity of the challenge facing the black man or woman, according to Fanon, is not that of facing an oppressive other, but one that has become internalized in the very inner geography of selves in his or her being: “…one can observe in the young Antillean the formation and crystallization of an attitude and a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially white” (1967, p. 148). “White civilization and European culture,” Fanon writes, “have forced an existential deviation on the Negro. … what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (p. 16). After all, this thesis is at the heart of the message of his book, as illustrated by its title Black Skin, White Masks. The oppressive relation is no longer across white and black bodies. It is internalized between black and white souls, among black and white selves, between black skin and white masks. This experiencing of the multiplicity of selves in conflict with one another is also diagnosed psychoanalytically in terms of the neurosis of the individual:

The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences. (1967, p. 81)

“Hence a Negro is forever in combat with his own image” (1967, p. 194). Countering Mannoni, Fanon insists that the “arrival of the white man in Madagascar shattered not only its horizons but its psychological mechanisms” (p. 97). But the shattering takes place, for Fanon, even in the simplest of everyday confrontations, say, in a train station, as illustrated by the incident of the child noticing Fanon:

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. …

In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. … I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. (p. 111-112)

Fanon does not abandon his sensitivity to the subtler violences of colonialism and racism when he moves on to write his The Wretched of the Earth years later, when in deathbed. Despite the now broader scope of his investigation of the violences of colonialism and racism, moving from personal troubles to public issues, he still ends his treatise with case studies of the multiple selfhoods afflicting his tortured and torturing subjects (1966, p. 203-251). He comes to insist on seeing the war as a “total war” (p. 204)— encompassing not only physical and social, but also psychological fronts, involving a diversity of violences, and necessitating a diversity of liberatory strategies.

The consideration of the diversity of the overt and the subtler forms of violence, therefore, is crucial here, for, in many ways, the more overt forms of violence may not be explainable, let alone erasable, without serious considerations given to the continued perpetuation of its subtler societal and inter/intrapersonal forms. Karl von Clausewitz may have been correct in proclaiming that “war is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means;” but politics may as well be regarded as a continuation of economic and cultural conditions that are, together with the political ones, embodied in the concrete, intellectual, emotional, and physical behaviors of a multiplicity of selves constituting specific human actors in everyday/night life.

Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) may also be read as another confrontation on the part of its author with orientalism, but now turned inwards. It is one thing to see how Said exposes orientalism as an ideological fountainhead of colonialism and racism worldwide, and it is another to see how he painfully untangles the fabrics of orientalism shaping intricate aspects of his own inner life and biography. Shocking in his narrative is the extent to which Said exposes the orientalist design of his very name. “Edward” for Said represents a colonial self and identity imposed on his life, continually in confrontation with an Arab “Said” that seemingly has “no place” in his genealogy and regional history:

True my mother told me that I had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales, who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year of my birth, and Said was the name of various uncles and cousins. But the rationale of my name broke down both when I discovered no grandparents called Said and when I tried to connect my fancy English name with its Arabic partner. For years, and depending on the exact circumstances, I would rush past “Edward” and emphasize “Said”; at other times I would do the reverse, or connect these two to each other so quickly that neither would be clear. The one thing I could not tolerate, but very often would have to endure, was the disbelieving, and hence undermining, reaction: Edward? Said? (Said, 1999, p. 3-4)

It is quite instructive to see how Said’s “other self” gradually gains strength to assert itself in confrontation with his imposed colonial and upper class selves. Several particular episodes seem most illustrative, and subtly revealing of the extent to which Said felt personally violated and injured. In one event, during his graduation ceremony at Mount Hermon, he notices his father, having come all the way from Cairo, carrying a gift in his hands, which he presumes to be one intended for him:

At this point my father gave me his fruit punch cup to hold and in his characteristically impetuous and untidy way started to tear at the wrapping paper to reveal an immense embossed silver plate, the kind that he and my mother must have commissioned from a Cairo bazaar silversmith. In his best presentational style he handed it rather pompously to the overjoyed Rubendall. “My wife and I wanted to give you this in grateful gratitude for what you’ve done for Edward.” Pause. “In grateful gratitude.” (Said, 1999, p. 249)

Said then notes how this very same Rubendall and his colleagues had previously considered him unfit for the position of either class valedictorian or salutatorian, despite his having achieved all the credentials to deserve it (including having received admissions to both Harvard and Princeton around that time). Even Fisher, the student who had been selected instead, had expressed surprise at Said’s having been excluded (Said, 1999, p. 247). Said writes,

Mount Hermon School was primarily white: there were a handful of black students, mostly gifted athletes and one rather brilliant musician and intellect, Randy Peyton, but the faculty was entirely white (or white-masked, as in Alexander’s case). Until the Fisher-graduation episode I felt myself to be colorless, but that forced me to see myself as marginal, non-American, alienated, marked, just when the politics of the Arab world began to play a greater and greater role in American life. I sat through the tedious graduation ceremonies in my cap and gown with an indifference that bordered on hostility: this was their event, not mine, even though I was unexpectedly given a biology prize for, I firmly believe, consolation. (p. 248)

Another episode relates to Said’s involvement—or, rather, noninvolvement—in his father’s business. He cites with contempt how his father expected him to spend long days at his business, simply to be there doing nothing, and yet required him to stay in line to receive a monthly salary which then had to be returned to his father later when at home:

SSCo [elder Said’s lucrative Standard Stationary Company] was never mine. He paid me what was then a considerable monthly salary of two hundred Egyptian pounds during that year and insisted that on the last day of each month I should stand in line with the other employees, sign the book (for tax purposes I was called “Edward Wadie”), and get my salary in cash. Invariably when I came home he would very courteously ask me for the money back, saying that it was a matter of “cash flow,” and that I could have whatever money I needed. “Just ask,” he said. And of course I dutifully did, ever in bondage to him. (p. 288-9)

Said elsewhere in the book recalls how when young he used to accompany his father to work in one or another of his chauffeur-driven American cars. Early in the ride, his father displayed a “domestic mood” and even a smile, but gradually changed in manner until completely transformed into his businessman self by the time they arrived at the store:

By the time we reached …, he was closed to me completely, and would not answer my questions or acknowledge my presence: he was transformed into the formidable boss of his business, a figure I came to dislike and fear because he seemed like a larger and more impersonal version of the man who supervised my life. (p. 23)

Said recalls how when disciplined by his teachers in colonial schools in Egypt, his parents whom he dearly loved and (in case of his father) also feared, automatically sided with his teachers and blamed him for not being well-mannered and obedient. Throughout his memoir, Said continually confronts a self in him that was treated as being disabled (1999, p. 52), ashamed of his body (p. 63), fearful (p. 66), timid (p. 3), infirm and sinful (p. 87), having a self displaying a lack of concentration (p. 172) and self-confidence (p. 46). These were results of an upbringing under a loving but strict parental discipline that sought to impose a “Victorian design” (p. 79) on Said as the oldest and the only male child of the family. The father, a self-made, well-to-do, in Said’s term “comprador,” Arab businessman proud of identification with the Western (and especially American) ways, was a mediating force for the transmission of an imposed colonial identity on Said. Much of his early education in British colonial schools was also conducive of a mode of disciplining—at times physically punishing, violent, and sadistic (p. 83)—that experientially introduced the nature of colonial and racial oppression to the unsuspecting young Said:

Who was this ugly brute to beat me so humiliatingly? And why did I allow myself to be so powerless, so “weak”… I knew neither his first name nor anything else about him except that he embodied my first public experience of an impersonal “discipline.” When the incident was brought to my parents’ notice by one of the teachers, my father said to me, “You see, you see how naughty you’re becoming. When will you learn?” and there was not in their tone the slightest objection to the indecency of the punishment. … So I became delinquent, the “Edward” of punishable offenses, laziness, littering, who was regularly expected to be caught in some specific unlicensed act and punished by being given detentions or, as I grew older, a violent slap by a teacher. GPS gave me my first experience of an organized system set up as a colonial business by the British. The atmosphere was one of unquestioning assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and students alike. The school was not interesting as a place of learning but it gave me my first extended contact with colonial authority in the sheer Englishness of its teachers and many of its students. (1999, p. 42)

In contrast, Anzaldúa’s experience of colonial and racial oppression is very much tied to her experience as a mestiza woman. “For women,” she writes, “the conquest has always been about what happens to their children and about what happens to their bodies because the first thing the conquistadores did was rape the Indian women and create the mestizo race” (Keating, 2000, p. 181). The historical identity of dualism, and the lifelong project Anzaldúa set herself in overcoming it, is strangely also expressed in her name:

So that’s when I decided that my task was making face, making heart, making soul, and that it would be a way of connecting. Then my last name, Anzaldúa, is Basque. “An” means “over,” or “heaven”; “zal” means “under,” or “hell”; and “dua” means “the fusion of the two.” So I got my task in this lifetime from my name. (Keating, 2000, p. 37)

… I began to think “Yes, I’m a Chicana but that’s not all I am. Yes, I’m a woman but that’s not all I am. Yes, I’m a dyke but that doesn’t define all of me. Yes, I come from working class origins, but I’m no longer working class. Yes, I come from mestizaje, but which parts of that mestizaje get privileged? Only the Spanish, not the Indian or black.” I started to think in terms of mestiza consciousness. What happens to people like me who are in between all of these different categories? What does that do to one’s concept of nationalism, of race, ethnicity, and even gender? I was trying to articulate and create a theory of a Borderlands existence. … (Ibid, p. 215)

For Anzaldúa, there will be no end to oppression so long as dualistic thinking, feeling, and acting compartmentalize the geography of selves populating our inner and global landscapes. For her, the Manichean dualisms shaping our lives, within and without, are the enemy:

The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movements away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 79)

The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (Ibid, p. 80)

V. Conclusion

Fanon’s major contributions to the study of racism and colonialism and the fight against them have been those of identification of and struggles against the subtler, especially inter/intrapersonal psychological, forms of violence—Said’s and Anzaldúa’s work further furnishing deeper and subtler insights into the subject. Based on their own autobiographical and reflective writings, I argued above that what especially reinforced the highly visible and committed public discourses and struggles of these three public intellectuals were their sensitivity to deeply troubling and much subtler personal experiences of racism and colonialism each had endured in their lives, involving becoming aware of and experiencing an alienated/ing multiply-selved landscape within that accommodated both victimhood and perpetration of racial and colonial identities and practices in oneself. Paradoxically, what made them such visible public intellectuals of protest may have been their sensitivity and openness to question their most private and personal social realities within.

It is one thing to witness and be a victim of racial prejudice and colonial oppression in and by others, and another to realize that one and one’s loved ones have been turned into perpetrators of or accomplices in the same, at times against oneself. I think it is this, much more subtly violent and painful, experience that sheds light on the explosive nature of these intellectuals’ public commitments to human emancipation from racial and colonial oppression. The study again points to what has been proposed (Tamdgidi 2004a, 2004b, 2007a, 2008, forthcoming (a), forthcoming (b)) as a need to move beyond Newtonian and in favor of quantum sociological imaginations whereby the atomic individual units of sociological analysis and practice are problematized and transcended in favor of recognizing the strange, sub-atomic and quantum, realities of personal and broader social lives in terms of relationalities of intra/inter/extrapersonal selfhoods.

Such a re-imagined sociological imagination resting on decolonized, non-dualistic philosophical foundations may more effectively accommodate the subtler realization that one may be at the same time not only an oppressor and an oppressed vis-à-vis others, but also an oppressor of oneself—an awakening that is indispensable for pursuing what Fanon called the “total liberation” of humanity. This brings us back to not only the theoretical but also the practical significance of cultivating our sociological imaginations of racism and colonialism. For it is our ever keener abilities to notice and act upon the subtler forms of colonialism and racism in our everyday lives, here and now, within and interpersonal, that may help foresee and perhaps prevent the need for confronting and engaging with the cruder and dualistic, what Fanon termed “Manichean,” modes of violent struggles against injustice and oppression.

A question one may find intriguing in light of the foregoing study is to ask whether social class is a better predictor of ambivalence towards structures of domination than race, or gender.⁷ Exploring closely the private lives and reflections of the three public intellectuals, one may wonder how one can easily attribute one or another of the three factors to each of these intellectuals individually. Said was highly aware of the extent to which the internalized selves of his mother, father, uncle, and teachers shaped his biographical trajectory; Fanon’s writings and reflections are highly populated with multiplicities of class, racial, and gendered voices of those he encountered in his short life; and Anzaldúa is clearly cognizant of how her mom’s voice, neoconservative thoughts, morality voices populate her inner world, against which she had to constantly wage battles.

Within a quantum sociological framework where human agencies are associated not with presumed atomic “individuals” but sub-atomic selves, class, race, or gender attributes influencing the behaviors of public intellectuals would need to be studied in the context of the realities of their multiple selfhoods. Here, multiple class or racial (or gender) tendencies may be observed to be populating each “individual” and thereby their behavior may be considered not as a unitary but as an ensemble of diverse self agencies that may often co-exist and engage in conflict with one another. Here, then, the question of predictability may best be give way to that of ambivalence as being central to the practice of research, transitioning from considerations for the predictability of ambivalence to a research interest in the ambivalence and uncertainty of predictability, treating life-courses as open-ended challenges in creative identity making, than ones bound by social grounding. What appears as “predictable” would then be interpreted as the realization of one among many trajectories that could have alternatively happened in the intellectual’s life-course. This turning the question around upon itself may perhaps be another illustration of the difference it makes to include ourselves in our study, and to reflexively become our own audiences within.

Fanon may have found it inescapable to be drawn into the battle of Algiers. But the ultimate and still enduring battles Fanon, Said, and Anzaldúa fought, and those confronting us today, take place, reflexively, in the tortured geographies of our racialized and colonized everyday, intra-, inter-, and extrapersonal selves—where all it takes for one to heal is to reach out to touch an “other,” to overcome the alienating dualism blocking an adequate understanding of our selves that just happen to reside across multiple bodies. “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” (Fanon 1967, p. 231).

I think such subtler ‘battles of Algiers’, still being waged everyday/everynight within us all, more powerfully capture the heart of Fanon’s idea of total liberation.

Acknowledgments: I thank Lewis R. Gordon and (the late) Marnia Lazreg for their kind encouragements and very thoughtful feedbacks on an earlier version of this paper. Any shortcomings are mine, of course. I also appreciate the helpful comments offered by Elizabeth A. Hoppe and Tracey Nicholls, the editors of the collection in which a later version of the above was published as cited at the beginning of this post.

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