Abstract
While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria, comparatively less work has examined the shared perspectives on colonialism from which they both draw and where the discontinuities emerge. This paper explores the differences between these two thinkers, namely in their conceptualizing of the potential for a revolutionary consciousness to emerge from colonial populations during anticolonial actions. I argue in this article that where Bourdieu conceives of the horror of colonialism as a violent clash of cultures producing ‘hysteresis’ and a level of socio-political alienation from the most dispossessed sectors of society, Fanon conceives of a revolutionary consciousness emerging from the threat of racialized violence genocide and colonial subjection. Bourdieu however suggests that anticolonial revolutionary fervor cannot emerge from populations most dispossessed by the violence of colonization. While Bourdieu’s analysis drew solely from the Algerian case, Fanon recognized anticolonial struggle to be a fundamental type of revolution that could be theorized. In this, Fanon analyzed the Algerian revolution in the context of other anticolonial actions taking place across Africa and the world. Fanon thereby lays out a theory of the role of racism in structuring colonialism and fostering a revolutionary consciousness that is distinct. This cleavage of perspectives from two seemingly similarly inclined theorists emerges from a divergent view of the role of racism in dehumanizing and structuring colonial subjectivities and the effects of colonialism on those most aggrieved by it to spur political action.
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Notes
Recently new work in this area has been produced which provides in many cases the first English-language translation and investigation into Bourdieu’s early research in Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad. Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria. Edited by Paul A. Silverstein. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2020.
Conversations with his Italian publisher, where his works were bestsellers also reflects close attention to the intellectual and theoretical importance of his full corpus of writings (Fanon, 2018b).
It is important to note, as historians and social scientists of anticolonial action have shown us, colonial regimes were always resisted by those marked for colonization.
Fanon, in articulating a dialectic between colonizer and colonized as largely a black/white binary co-produced through violence and subjugation he is reticent to generalize this colonial subject formation beyond the spaces of actual European colonies. This becomes increasingly clear in his response to Richard Wright’s White Man Listen! Fanon is quick to point out the differences between westernized black experience and the black colonial experience.
“Now since he wants to denounce the misery of the African masses, their radical alienation, in all domains, by means of colonialism, and since he intends to sensitize the European to their absolute destitution, it is perforce from their everyday, down-to-earth lives that examples should have been sought; if he does not know this life, then why did he not give figures (in infant mortality, malnourishment, salaries) which are more convincing, more significant, than a poem? It is true that black writers and poets all endure their own suffering, that the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude, can be very painful; but this drama, which, after all, kills no one, is too particular to be representative: the misfortune of the colonized masses, exploited, subjugate, is first of a vital, material order; the spiritual rifts of the ‘elite’ are a luxury that they are unable to afford.”(Fanon, 2018b:639)
In this quote Fanon critiques the Wright’s lack of description of violence of westernized blacks which he argues makes his comparison or call for solidarity weak thus showing Fanon’s focus on the particularity of colonial experience.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the editors of Theory and Society and the anonymous reviewers who made this article much stronger than it would have otherwise been. My deepest thanks to Ricarda Hammer, Julian Go, Isaac Reed, Fiona Greenland, and Robbie Shilliam for their keen insights and generosity in thinking with me through the production of this article. This work was developed through productive conversation at the Social Science History Association Conference which offered me the opportunity to present an earlier version of this work and my thanks to William Sewell and Andreas Glaeser for their most helpful comments. In addition I wish to thank Patricia Ward, Dilan Eren, Tobias Watson, Elizabeth O’Brien, Durgesh Solanki, Jessica Samuel Meghan Tinsley and Zophia Edwards for their invaluable comments and thoughts on this work.
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This study was funded solely by research funds from the author’s own research account at Johns Hopkins University.
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White, A.I.R. Who can lead the revolution?: Re-thinking anticolonial revolutionary consciousness through Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu. Theor Soc 51, 457–485 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09454-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09454-0