![]() This footage is reminiscent of Coppola’s war scenes in Apocalypse Now, but the illusion is immediately shattered as the camera closes in and holds on the face of a murdered cow, blood slowly trickling down from her nostrils. The opening sequence offers a brief thrill which is immediately appropriated: helicopters whir in the air and soldiers shoot down terrified cows in a vast and lush field. The film’s subtitle, Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, reflects Olsson’s investment in making Fanon’s theory relevant and up-to-date. This has often proven to be one of the most violent episodes in post-colonial history, and Fanon is its most articulate philosopher. ![]() Olsson’s interest is in decolonisation – that short yet potent moment at the tail end of an anti-colonial war followed by the transfer of power when the new nation comes into being. I had the impression that we were being provided with a visual exegesis on Fanon’s famous, misunderstood, and over-read text about violence, and that the images, in fact, served to bolster, or rather, offer, a kind of choreography to the text. Relying yet again on possibly forgotten footage from Swedish archives, the film has been anchored in Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s controversial essay, Concerning Violence, from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. Through my reading of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Yewande Omotoso's Bom Boy (2011), and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), I hope to demonstrate that contemporary African literature is concerned with the formation of an identity that estranges the category of blackness from itself through its entanglement with a queer identity politics.Concerning Violence is a completely different beast. To demonstrate the ways in which a queer analysis of interracial romance might reimagine a raced identity politics, I analyse novels produced by members of the contemporary African diaspora, whose works deal with mixed race identity. ![]() ![]() New African writers take seriously what Fanon recognised as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," by emptying out the category of the nation and engaging with the intersections of a trans-national, trans-gender and trans-racial politics. The object of this thesis is to elucidate what possibilities for political solidarity are generated through the queered dynamic of interracial love, explored in the literature of the contemporary African diaspora. This is in part, I believe, one of the flaws of Fanon setting up the dynamic of racialised desire within cisgender, heteronormative models for potential interracial relationships - "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and "The Man of Colour and the White Woman." Hence, I consider what queering these relationships does to the way in which we read the political dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks, and whether or not this allays the allegory of revolutionary solidarity of the generic teleology of the heteronormative romance. Black Skin, White Masks it seems is deemed "not radical enough" because of what appears to be a problematic preoccupation with 'love and understanding.' In the following intervention, I argue that what makes this centrality of 'love and understanding' so unpalatable to radical activists is a misappropriation of Fanon's formulation of desire. ![]() As such the more troubling of Fanon's work, namely Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is often left un-interrogated, while The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is read like a manifesto for purposive change. In other words, the simplification of Fanonist rhetoric fails to deal with the "un-political" dimensions of Fanon. This means that centralising a Fanon within political discourse stands to reproduce the losses implicated in his mythification, rather than to recover new critical imports in his work. But the figure of Fanon often remains both abstract and plural within its articulations - interpretations of his body of work performing sometimes only partial allegiances to the whole. Throughout the recent iterations of student activism that have gripped South African universities, Frantz Fanon has been continuously disinterred. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |