1a. Like Du Bois, de Beauvoir, and other theorists before him, writing in the 19
ID: 3457859 • Letter: 1
Question
1a. Like Du Bois, de Beauvoir, and other theorists before him, writing in the 1960s Fanon is struck by the power of binary categories in shaping lived experience. What for Fanon are the “two dimensions of the colonized? Explain.
1b. "When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known" (Fanon p. 398).
Explanation / Answer
1 a.
In his fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks entitled "The Lived Experience of the Black Man," Frantz Fanon recounts his journey as an educated black man who hopes to discover "a world we could build together" as he travels from the colonies to the metropolis.
During his trip, Fanon discovers the colonization of his selfhood.
This results from the "deep-rooted myth" that fetishizes race and excludes the colonized from membership within the human race by segregating the black natives from the white colonizers and confining the colonized to the status of an animal.
In Fanon's racialized division between colonizers and colonized resonates Karl Marx's dichotomy between capitalists and workers.
As Marx explains, this capitalist distinction is symptomatic of the "mysterious character of the commodity-form," which is created by the ostensible detachment of the value produced by the laboring process.
This value is perceived as an inherent attribute of the commodity, which generates the expression of capitalism's social relations through the money- form and facilitates the exploitation of the workers by their capitalist oppressors.
Frantz Fanon on the Language of the Colonized
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.
That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man's comprehension of the dimension of the other.
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro.
That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question. No one would dream of doubting that its major artery is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to prove that the
Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man.
To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization.
Since the situation is not one-way only, the statement of it should reflect the fact.
.The problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter--that is, he will come closer to being a real human being--in direct ration to his mastery of the French language.
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality--finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.
The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
1b.
Falcons answer is incredulity. How is it possible that he , the subject of discrimination, is the one who is hated? He writes ,
What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I was resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.
It is here that fanon epitomizes the moment of refusal that is the hallmark of the misinterpellated subjects. Fanon was seeking recognition.
Yet when he received the call - in this case not “Hey, you there!” but “look, a negro! ” and not by an officer of the law but by a white child.
It had the opposite of effect securing or establishing his subjectivity.
Rather than being destroyed or reduced by that experience, fanon resolves to remain in the contradiction that is produced from such moments of subjectivization.
In this way it could be said that fanon is holding onto the only thing that could be said to be authentically his: the self cancelling position of the misinterpellation itself.
Rather than asserting his ‘true’ self . Fanon must in effect produce and create a self in response to the self that has been imposed unpon him, the one that blocks any actual form of recognition .
It suggests a mode of counterrecognition that usurps the power and authority of the caller and takes that power and task for the subject.
Falcon in a sense accepts the challenge of the call as if to say “ I am not why you say i am but i will take your false forms of recognition and turn it into something of my own choosing or making”
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