“Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us. Anger does not in itself produce political programs for change, but it is perhaps the most basic political emotion. Without it, there is no hope,” (Macey 2000, 503).

The past decade has seen an increase in both popular and scholarly interest in the work of Frantz Fanon. What has brought about this revival in interest in Fanon, who is now discussed at numerous conferences and colloquia and whose work is increasingly featured in both academic and media literature? What are the conditions of our contemporary moment that compel some of us to turn towards Fanon and revisit his now classic texts, from Wretched of the Earth to Black Skin, White Masks? And just as importantly, how are misreadings of Fanon’s work contributing to the dilution of the revolutionary nationalist potential inherent in most of his writing? Two examples of seminal works that have been recently published include Lewis Gordon’s What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought and David Macey’s Fanon: A Biography. These works look at Fanon through the events that happened in his life to understand the ways in which he viewed and analyzed social reality. Just as important, although seldom referenced, is work by Neil Lazarus (1999, 2011) and Benita Parry (2004). Lazarus’ chapter on Fanon in his excellent work, The Postcolonial Unconscious and Parry’s analysis of Fanon’s work in her book Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique constitute important interventions in the way Fanon has been misread by multiple scholars.

Our contemporary moment is characterized by the constant drive towards capitalist accumulation through an increasing process of neoliberalization in the current setting of late capital.[1] This material reality, that is universal but that has a multitude of particularities across the globe, conditions the social categories that produce experience, from class, race, and gender, to (dis)ability and sexuality. However, this has come alongside a tendency within academia to shy away from discussing this very material reality. This is largely due to the turn away from Marxism, as well as to the popularity of both postcolonial and postmodern approaches. The role of the neoliberal university is also important to note, as it pushes for more specialization, more profit, and therefore less critique and less radical thinking. This tendency has meant that although important events such as the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have been interpreted through numerous lenses, what is absent is usually analysis employing a lens that engages the global capitalist system and that analyzes social justice with particular attention to neoliberalism and neocolonialism.

This hesitance within academia when it comes to a discussion of neocolonialism (especially through a Marxist lens) is what has driven me towards Fanon as an important scholar within the long tradition of anti-colonial scholarship. It is unfortunate that it has often been scholars who identify as postcolonialists who have rejected the concept of neocolonialism and posited that global relations in our current moment are nuanced and complex, and that we should be wary of repositing a binary of East and West. Here Derrida’s argument that binary oppositions are a violent hierarchy that must first be inverted before they can be decimated is useful, as it shows the need to use binaries solely in order to invert them—without this inversion, they cannot be done away with (Parry 2004, 16). Moreover, as both Benita Parry (2004) and Neil Lazarus (2011) have deftly argued, calls for “complexity” and “nuance” can often serve power by softening the critical edge of critique and should thus be approached with caution. Fanon’s work can certainly be seen as falling within the so-called “trap” of reproducing binaries. He has touched on questions of race, capitalism, nationalism, and neocolonialism, through an analysis that clearly articulates the power relation between the West and the colonial (and neocolonial) world. His background in psychiatry has meant that he often highlighted the psycho-social effects of colonialism and racial domination, even while noting the economic and political processes underlying this domination. Indeed in his work we see the intersecting of these various structures, all through the lens of his involvement in the Algerian war of independence, of which he was a part. His work often relies on psychoanalytical assumptions, although, as Gordon points out, for Fanon the psychoanalytical emphasis is on the racial rather than the sexual.

It seems clear to those of us working within a Marxist framework that many of the problems Fanon addressed in the 1950s and 1960s continue to reproduce themselves in the contemporary moment, albeit at times expressing themselves differently. Indeed the Arab uprisings are a testament to this; would it be possible to argue that neocolonialism, capitalism, and nationalism are not part of the story? (That said, apparently it is indeed possible, judging by the state of Middle East studies today.) Thus it is clear that Fanon remains relevant. The question, then, is: which Fanon? In this article I want to discuss two readings of Fanon’s work that approach him from divergent perspectives and yet still maintain his revolutionary potential. The first is Lewis Gordon’s forthcoming book on Fanon entitled What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought, which highlights the analyses of racial domination present in Fanon’s work. The second is Neil Lazarus’ chapter on Fanon in The Postcolonial Unconscious and his chapter on Fanon in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World and Benita Parry’s discussion of Fanon in her book Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique, which focuses on the question of nationalism. These two sets of texts highlight the way in which Fanon can be read differently according to where emphasis is put, and yet still be acknowledged as an anti-colonialist revolutionary thinker whose work remains relevant today.

Lewis Gordon and the question of race

Lewis Gordon begins his book What Fanon Said with a superb introduction that clearly articulates the role of race in how Fanon has been received. He writes,

We should step outside of the tendency to reduce the thought of African intellectuals to the thinkers they study. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was able to comment on black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor without becoming ‘Césairian,’ ‘Fanonian,’ or ‘Senghorian’; Simon de Beauvoir could comment on the work of Richard Wright without becoming ‘Wrightian’; Max Weber could comment on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois without becoming ‘Du Boisian.’ Why then is there a different story when black authors comment on their (white) European counterparts? Standard scholarship has explored whether Du Bois is Herderian, Hegelian, Marxian, or Weberian; whether Senghor is Heideggerian; and whether Fanon is every one of the Europeans on whom he has commented – Adlerian, Bergsonian, Freudian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Lacanian, Marxian, Merleau-Pontian, and Sartrean, to name several (2015, 18).

This is related to the tendency to reduce black intellectuals to their biographies; or, in other words, to assume that white intellectuals produce ideas and theory, while black intellectuals relate experiences. The point here is not to simply say Sartre is Fanonian or de Beauvoir Wrightian; the point is to emphasize that the opposite is always the case: that black intellectuals are always read and understood through white intellectuals. Thus from the outset Gordon is setting the stage for the centrality of race in his book. Indeed the first few chapters focus explicitly on the ways in which Fanon discussed race, particularly from a psychological perspective. Fanon’s first brutal experience with racism in France—when a French child told his mother he was afraid when he saw Fanon—plays a central role here, as does Fanon’s analysis of interracial relationships. It is clear that Gordon has a soft spot for Fanon’s work and that he sees its continuing relevance today: there are multiple points throughout the book where he points out how Fanon’s analysis of the Martinique or Algeria of the early twentieth century continues to be relevant today.

Gordon also produces a very nuanced analysis of Fanon’s gender politics, which have been subject to much heated debate.[2] Fanon has been attacked by many white feminists (and non-white feminists working within the liberal tradition) for his comments on Mayotte Capécia’s Je Suis Martiniquaise. These feminists saw Fanon’s analysis of Capécia’s inferiority complex as sexist and dismissed his work in its entirety based on that reading. I would posit that Fanon’s reading of this particular work is not sexist but rather shows the reality of how race and gender intersect to produce complicated forms of desire. Here Capécia’s desire for white men—and white men alone—is seen as a desire to be white, to attain whiteness. It is clear for Fanon that this form of desire is therefore to be criticized. Fanon’s reading is in effect one that analyses gender through a critical race perspective and thus it is no surprise white feminists were uncomfortable with it. While Gordon dismisses claims that Fanon’s reading of Capécia was sexist, he does, however, critique Fanon for his “epistemic sexism.” Here he argues that Fanon’s work is clearly indebted to Simone de Beauvoir, and that despite this he did not cite her or mention her influence in any form. Gordon writes, “I cannot excuse Fanon’s failure to articulate his indebtedness to de Beauvoir…it is clear de Beauvoir not only offered much intellectual sustenance to Fanon’s thought but also that he was well aware of at least her two major contributions at the time of writing Black Skin White Masks. Her presence at the level of ideas but exclusion at that of citation is a form of epistemic sexism,” (Ibid, 58). Thus Gordon condemns readings of Fanon that posit his sexism and dismiss him based on that and yet simultaneously notes that there are traces of sexism in Fanon’s work. In addition, it is useful to note the problematic way in which Fanon at times discussed Algerian women, repositing a Western separation between the public and private sphere and over-emphasizing the role of the veil.

Nevertheless, it is clear, as Gordon demonstrates, that Fanon’s theoretical analysis of the position of Algerian women within the battle for independence is correct. Gordon writes: “Whether Fanon’s portrayal of the facts are accurate does not affect the main point of his analysis: how could liberating Algerian women be taken seriously when the approach to doing so is to impose a structure that makes the women (1) subordinate to all French and other European peoples and (2) only of value to the extent to which their plight could be used to maintain subordination of Algerian men and women,” (Ibid, 150). Fanon’s analysis of the relationship between the French settler-colonizers and Algerian women is a heavily psychoanalytic one, where he posits that white French settlers dreamed of ripping the veils off Algerian women and penetrating them—in other words, deflowering the country (Ibid). What is notable here is the way in which Algerian women are part and parcel of the Algerian revolution, as Fanon himself constantly pointed out. Gordon writes that this shows how these women’s fight for the freedom as women is an outgrowth of struggles against colonization and slavery, a point that has been made by both Assia Djebar in the Algerian context and Angela Davis in the American one (Ibid, 155). This is not to say that women only fought for independence and not for gender justice or an end to patriarchy, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which these various struggles are interconnected.

The unwillingness on the part of many feminists to engage with Fanon should be seen as a missed opportunity to enrich the field of postcolonial feminism. Fanon’s analysis of capitalism, class relations, neocolonialism and nationalism can greatly enhance the work of feminists working in contexts that were formerly colonized. In an excellent article, Ashley Bohrer points out that many anti-imperialist Marxist feminists in particular have used Fanon to discuss colonialism and neocolonialism, noting in particular Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. By looking at the ways in which Fanon influenced these two feminists—who are indeed central to Marxist feminism—Bohrer shows “how his thought is foundational for a contemporary Marxist analysis of capitalist patriarchy,” (2015, 379). Fanon argues that colonialism should, above all, be analyzed from the perspective of economics: “The colonized world is one structured by economic violence, and in particular, the violent and coercive appropriation of the labour of the oppressed,” (Ibid, 380). This economic exploitation is internalized by the colonized through complex webs of socialization. Thus cultural imperialism is part and parcel of economic imperialism.

While Fanon has rarely been labeled a Marxist, it is clear from the above passage that his work contains important analyses of colonial capitalism. I argue that Fanon’s call to “stretch Marxism” should be seen as a useful for feminists working in the Global South because it calls for both a centering of Marxism while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which capitalism conditions life in the colonies (as opposed to the métropoles). In other words, I believe “stretching Marxism” here can be seen as a means of dislodging Eurocentric Marxist accounts that do not consider colonialism as central to capitalist accumulation and that do not account for how capitalism in the postcolony (Mbembé 2001) is different. Here Bohrer’s point that Fanon’s analysis had a lasting effect on Italian Marxist feminism shows the importance of his materialist critiques of capitalism. Silvia Federici, for example, arguably one of the most important feminists today, cites Fanon as one of her major influences alongside Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank. Marxist feminists have long critiqued Marx’s exclusion of the social reproduction carried out by women in the home; feminists such as Federici and Dalla Costa also noted the exclusion of the distinctive form of labour carried out in the colonies (a point that had previously been made by Rosa Luxemburg). Alongside critiques by Marxists from the Global South that center colonialism within capitalist accumulation, it is clear that Marxism can and should be stretched. This is precisely why I believe Fanon remains an important inspiration for feminists working in the Global South: his work on capitalism and colonialism, both at the level of materiality and ideas, is now more crucial than ever in light of the continued dominance of liberal feminism globally.

Lazarus, Parry, and the “Postcolonial” Fanon

So how has Fanon been read by postcolonial theorists, whose work is focused on the Global South? Here the readings have been less than promising. Neil Lazarus begins his chapter in The Postcolonial Unconscious by pointing out that Fanon is an exception among anti-colonial writers writing during the era of decolonization because of the extent to which he has been engaged with by postcolonial scholars. This engagement, however, has often meant a specific kind of reading of his work that has turned it into a “post”-theoretical discourse that addresses subject formation (2011, 122). How to account for this shift in the Fanon that propagated Third World nationalist anti-colonialism to the Fanon in the work of Homi Bhahba[3] and others who focused on the subject?[4] Lazarus writes, “The containment of the historic challenge from the ‘Third World’ that had been expressed in the struggle for decolonization in the post-1945 years must be seen in the light of the global reassertion and consolidation of what (Samir) Amin calls ‘the logic of unilateral capital’,” (Ibid, 124). The triumph of neoliberalism and reassertion of a neo-imperialist world order—with the US at its head—meant that a new reading of Fanon was needed: a ‘postcolonial’ Fanon; “…not only post-colonial, but also post-nationalist, post-liberationist, post-Marxist, and post-modern,” (Ibid). In other words, the opposite of the revolutionary Fanon that preceded this shift.

A second major difference between the first Fanon and the second is the focus on nationalism in the former and its conspicuous absence in the latter. Fanon was greatly influenced by the Algerian war for liberation. This meant that nationalist anti-colonialism, violence, class, ideology, and the ‘Third World’ in general were major themes in most of his work. This goes against the general tendency, however, to see nationalism as a deeply destructive force. As Benita Parry has noted, there is a tendency to disparage nationalist discourses of resistance within postcolonial studies (2012, 35). More than simply disparaging nationalism, Parry rightly points out that the field of postcolonialism often analyzes colonialism as a cultural event, mediated through texts, rather than focusing on the concrete, material, socio-economic and state-based processes that also made up colonialism. Indeed, reading Fanon, it is difficult to understand how he is been appropriated by a field so heavily influenced by postmodernism (postcolonialism) given his emphasis on precisely the material, the socio-economic, and the national.

Regarding nationalism, Lazarus writes: “Some contemporary theorists of ‘postcoloniality’ have attempted to build upon Fanon’s denunciation of bourgeois nationalism. Yet Fanon’s actual standpoint poses insuperable problems for them. One fundamental difficulty derives from the fact that far from representing an abstract repudiation of nationalism as such, Fanon’s critique of bourgeois nationalist ideology is itself delivered from an alternative nationalist standpoint,” (1999, 78). In other words, although many within postcolonial studies view nationalism as a thoroughly modern and negative force, Fanon instead saw it as a means to liberation while simultaneously warning us of the pitfalls of bourgeois nationalism. The national project could also become a socialist one, rather than a capitalist one. This emphasis on capitalism and imperialism further distinguishes Fanon from those within postcolonial studies who see Marxism as being of little use to contemporary analysis. What I find especially important here is that Fanon’s anti-colonialist nationalism allowed for a bridge to an internationalism that was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist in nature. This bridge is precisely what is missing in much of the work being done today.

I conclude with a quote from Lazarus about the importance of anti-colonialism: “It is important to try and keep alive the memory of the ‘revolutionary heroism’ that was everywhere in evidence in the struggle for national liberation. Even more important is to insist that the concrete achievements of this struggle are still intact and continue to provide a vital resource for present-day social and cultural practice. It is not only that the lives of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world were changed decisively by the experience of anti-colonial struggle. It is also that these changes are irreversible. No matter how great have been the defeats that have had to be endured since decolonization, the perduring solidaristic significance of the anti-colonial struggle has not been erased,” (1999, 120-121). This quote, as well as Lazarus’ and Parry’s readings of Fanon, show that for them his greatest contribution has been to the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the Algerian war of independence. This is the frame they read him through, and to do this they have engaged in much-needed critiques of postcolonial attempts to sanitize Fanon and render him part of a postmodern canon that is often severely lacking in material analysis. For Lewis Gordon, Fanon’s greatest contribution appears to be his work on race and the ways in which the world is structured by anti-Black racism. Moreover, where Gordon emphasizes the centrality of Fanon for scholars and activists fighting against anti-Black racism, David Macey instead emphasizes that Fanon’s allegiance, first and foremost, was to the Algerian war of independence. Thus we see here three slightly different framings of Fanon: one where Fanon is an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist revolutionary, one where Fanon is a global anti-Black racism scholar; and one where Fanon is above all an Algerian revolutionary. This is not to say that all of these writers do not acknowledge the many dimensions of Fanon’s work. Parry and Lazarus write about Fanon’s views on race and his deep commitment to the Algerian struggle; and Gordon affirms the centrality of Algeria for Fanon as well as his clear materialist critiques of the global system. The point is simply that each writer places the emphasis somewhere else; each reads Fanon through a different lens.

Some may argue that this ability to read Fanon in such diverse ways is a benefit; but this would fall into the liberal trap of seeing pluralism as constructive. Indeed as I have shown, Lazarus’ and Parry’s demonstration of how postcolonialists such as Bhabha have mis-read Fanon shows the dangers of accepting all readings as equally valid. Looking back at Fanon’s work, it is clear that there are central themes that cannot be ignored: his anti-racism, his nationalism, his class analysis, and, above all, his incessant call to others to fight against oppression.

The post Reading and Mis-Reading Frantz Fanon appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

What postcolonial response can be made of the terrorist attacks on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which led to the brutal massacre of most its editorial board? On January 7, two gunmen entered Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th district of Paris, killing – amongst others – leading cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski. The gunmen are believed to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great in Arabic) and also “the Prophet is avenged”, in reference to a series of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. The gunmen were later identified as the Kouachi brothers, two Muslim French citizens of Algerian descent who received weapon training in Yemen, as part of the Islamist terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Evidence also indicates that Amedy Coulibaly, who two days later killed four hostages at a Jewish kosher grocery in Porte-de-Vincennes in the 12th district, was connected to the Kouachi brothers. In a short video posted posthumously, Coulibaly claims to have belonged to another armed group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

All in all, the Charlie Hebdo shootings killed twelve, including three police officers. The three terrorists were hunted and ultimately gunned down by a police raid following a double hostage crisis, taking place simultaneously in two different Paris locations. The media’s sensationalist coverage of the event contributed to relaying and intensifying the post-traumatic shock that many French people felt in the aftermath. On January 11, about 2 million people, including more than 40 world leaders, marched in the streets of Paris to show solidarity with the dead cartoonists and support freedom of speech and of the press. The irony of political leaders being present at the march from countries like Egypt, Turkey or Israel, with dubious records with regards to freedom of speech and freedom tout court, was not lost on many people. The slogan, “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) became the rallying cry of an otherwise largely silent crowd, still mourning and still struck by the significance of what had happened. People felt that something of the French spirit of irreverence had died in the attacks. Whether or not we liked Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper was the symbol of an epoch that seems by now definitely gone.

Charlie Hebdo first appeared in 1970 in the wake of May 1968, and as a successor to the Hara-Kiri magazine, banned for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle. The newspaper’s left-leaning, anti-clerical and anti-militarist stance led its cartoonists to lampoon all forms of authority, both secular and non-secular, such as patriarchy. Its sexually explicit content, crude language and caricature of the “beauf” (French equivalent of the redneck) served to break many taboos in a still largely rural, superstitious and bigoted country. Charlie Hebdo’s impertinence espoused to perfection one of the revolutionary slogans of May 68: “Il est interdit d’interdire” (it is forbidden to forbid). After ceasing publication in the 1980s, the newspaper resumed its weekly edition. Since then, Charlie Hebdo has been involved in over 50 legal trials, most of them stemming from complaints from the far right, mainstream media, and the Catholic Church. In most cases, it won. Since 2006 and the controversy over the caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo has routinely denied being an Islamophobic, racist newspaper. The firing of leading cartoonist Siné in 2008 over allegations of anti-Semitism, the arson against the newspaper’s offices in 2011, and the terrorist attacks earlier this month however show that while Charlie Hebdo may have remained true to its libertarian credo, French society, on the other hand, had changed – not necessarily for the better.

Being French, I find myself deeply conflicted when it comes to defending Charlie. France does not forbid blasphemy and there exists a long and proud secular tradition of both religious and political satire, dating at least as far back as the French Revolution. This is not to deny the specifically postcolonial context in which arose the Charlie controversy, which pushed me to put my thoughts down on paper in what will hopefully trigger further debate on the Left. The story begins in the 1950s with anticolonial liberation struggles, particularly in Algeria. The current 5^th French Republic was born as a result of the Algerian war of independence, which caused the collapse of the 4^th Republic. These struggles were largely secular, inspired by pan-Arabic nationalism, third worldism, or communism. With the failure of these secular ideologies to prove inspiring alternatives to capitalism, religious ideology – “the opium of the people”, to use a consecrated Marxist formula – came to fill a political vacuum in an epoch described as “postrevolutionary” by some (Dirlik 1997). As one French journalist added in The Guardian after the attacks, “the chaos that emerged during and after independence wars (for which the west clearly has responsibility) provided an excellent opportunity for fanatics who had deeply resented the evolution of their countries, to return to prominence with a vengeance.”

Arab-Muslims who migrated to France from the 1960s onwards came for different reasons: to flee religious fundamentalism, to flee poverty, or because they saw France as the country of liberté, égalité, fraternité. This is, though, where I believe another story begins. Second and third generation Arab-Muslims were born in France yet grew up in a context of mass unemployment, racial discrimination and the rise of ethnico-religious communalism. The 2005 French Riots were a symptom of the rapid ghettoization of the now largely racialized banlieues (concomitant with the rise of the far right), and which a film like La Haine (Hatred) had predicted ten years earlier. In many ways, the Riots were a turning point: considered to be the biggest upheaval since May 1968, it also led the French government to re-institute Martial Law. Tellingly, the last time this had happened was during the Algerian War. The birth in 2006 of the decolonial political party Les Indigènes de la République, comprised of public intellectuals, academics and community activists from a variety of backgrounds, came to fill a much-needed space on the Left. Their diagnosis has been that the French Left – to which Charlie belongs – remains complicit with the perpetration of an apartheid-like situation within a neo-colonial France.

This is a reality that segments of the Left, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, have chosen to insist on in their quasi-unilateral condemnation of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial line as Islamophobic. Some went as far as to suggest that any left-wing organization worthy of the name should try its best to ban Charlie Hebdo (by legal means that is!)[1]. In doing so, these organizations have joined in the chorus of denunciation and anger on the part of Muslims across the globe who protested against the publication of another caricature of the Prophet by Charlie Hebdo on the front cover of their newest issue following the attacks. The independent newspaper chose to print an exceptional 7 million copies instead of the usual 60 thousand, and the issue was distributed in more than 20 countries as well as translated into Spanish, Italian, English, Turkish and Arabic. It is significant, however, that many Anglo-Saxon media channels chose to censor the issue in order not to shock the Muslim community. Many leftist critiques of Charlie have thus raised the following concerns, which, being well acquainted with the satirical newspaper, I will not attempt to refute: that Charlie conspicuously ignored the context of growing Islamophobia in the West; that it applied a double-standard, in particular since the arrival of editor-in-chief Philippe Val, when it came to the caricaturing of Jews; that poking fun at Christianity, being the dominant religion in France, is not the same as mocking a religiously oppressed minority such as Muslims.

Here, I would like to raise a few concerns of mine, for whether we like it or not, Charlie was and still is very much part of a certain – libertarian, anarchist, and anti-clerical – spirit of the Left. Should we rush to “call out” (interpellate, in Louis Althusser’s terminology) Charlie as Islamophobic, with the risk that it muffles in turn our critique of the failures of political Islam over the last 40 years to deliver its promises of prosperity, equality and freedom? We have seen in France and elsewhere the ways in which calling out someone as anti-Semitic has in effect served to stifle any critique of Israel’s apartheid regime with regards to the Palestinians. Should we also not pause a minute on the fact that Jihadists chose to target a left-leaning newspaper rather than, say, far-right Marine LePen’s National Front headquarters? This alone should alert us to the profoundly reactionary political climate in which we live. The rise of religious fundamentalism is, besides, not only true of the Middle East and Islam, but of proto-fascist “Hindutva” India and of Jewish Zionism, or, closer to Europe, of a crisis-ridden country such as Greece where the Orthodox Church – in collusion with neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn – have in some places replaced the State following the collapse of the welfare system. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, should we not further reflect on the “re-presentational” politics of a satirical newspaper like Charlie, instead of condemning it and effectively brushing off some thorny questions? Indeed, the urge to retain the exclusivity over the (non) representation of the deeply symbolic figure of Muhammad, which remains a contentious issue even within Islam, appears to me as a self-essentializing gesture that mirrors the West’s Orientalist imaginary. In effect, what it does is to further entrap Islam into a false image of itself as religious, dogmatic, or backward.

For French Muslims, whose condition is in some ways akin to Black Americans in the United States given their long standing marginalization, there now is little choice other than to either become radicalized or to remain “moderate Muslims” – the French equivalent of the “good nigger”. Yet the case of the Kouachi brothers, who hardly spoke Arabic and had only recently embraced the Jihad, makes a mockery of the figure of the “essentialist terrorist” (Said 1988, 49) depicted in the media. As Edward Said once remarked, “the most striking thing about ‘terrorism’ […] is its isolation from any explanation or mitigating circumstances, and its isolation as well from representations of most other dysfunctions, symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world” (47). Mostly occluded by the media, the Kouachi brothers’ background growing up in a Paris ghetto, with a suicidal mother and an absent father, or Amedy Coulibaly’s incarceration in the squalors of the French jail system, show terrorism cannot be explained away as an irrational act of barbarism (i.e. etymologically what is foreign and “Other”). This is not to say the latter were mere “victims of the system” either. Instead, they appear as rational subjects with specific demands of their own to be reckoned with: explicitly, as was stated by the terrorists themselves, that France ought to stop its politics of military intervention and killing of Muslims overseas; and, implicitly, that it should “listen” to the French banlieues’ many frustrations. As Gayatri Spivak argued, “suicide resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through” (2012, 385).

Keeping this context in mind, one of the postcolonial’s hallmarks (especially of a certain diasporic, discursive and privileged kind), has been its celebration of mockery, irony and derision, seen as subversive and transgressive. As postcolonial literary scholar Sneja Gunew has written,

[Minorities] are not permitted irony or other heterogeneities of language and are bounded simply by the linear or one-dimensional constraints, the necessity to ‘speak clearly’ or risk suffering the burden of being translated, spoken for, represented in its double sense. (1994, 94)

Perhaps the question, then, is not whether we deem Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures offensive, as for many they surely are – but rather who speaks, and who is spoken for. Gayatri Spivak’s useful distinction between political representation as vertretung (“stepping in someone’s place”) and between artistic re-presentation as darstellung (“placing there”) in her renowned essay Can the Subaltern Speak? suggests that representing is both “proxy and portrait ” (1988, 276). Hence, one ought to speculate upon the complicity between “speaking for” and “portraying” (1988, 277). When a small group of armed terrorists self appointed to speak on behalf of oppressed Muslims, Charlie affirmed its right to re-present, and mock, Muslims, while other parts of the (mainly white, secularist) Left now seek to defend the latter, after having dismissed Islamophobia as a valid category for many years[2]. In absolute terms, however, no representation seems more legitimate than the other, for in every circumstance, the subaltern cannot speak – that is, Muslims are prevented from speaking for themselves. Those Spivak calls “benevolent imperialists” include both the Liberal as well as the radical-Marxist western Left, whose discourse always runs the risk of falling back into essentialism (strategic or not), becoming yet another case of “epistemic violence”. “If,” for Spivak, “in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (1988, 287) This was true in France, which for instance, banned the wearing of “ostensible religious signs” in public schools in 2004, and “face covering” in public spaces in 2010. Muslim women, clearly the ones targeted although the law does not explicitly say so, were hardly or not consulted at all.

It is no surprise that award winning literary author Salman Rushdie has come out in defense of Charlie Hebdo following an invitation at the University of Vermont on January 14. While being “postcolonial” in that he is from a postcolonial culture (India), Rushdie has always been a staunch advocate of upsetting the status quo, and known for challenging Islam in particular. Rushdie was also accused of blasphemy and of abusing freedom of speech with the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), and was forced to live under the menace of a fatwa for many years. I believe Rushdie’s privileged cosmopolitan positioning is what in part allowed him, with sufficient detachment, to “ab-use” his Indian origin as a means of describing the dangers of cultural anomie and alienation in a postcolonial, multicultural England through his two characters Chamcha and Farishta. While Rusdie survived a death sentence by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, others, like his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, were murdered. Burnings of the book took place across the globe, and, as with Charlie Hebdo, many on the Left were quick to blame Rushdie, although the latter always claimed his book had, in the end, little to do with Islam – and even less with Islamophobia. What was judged wrong with Rushdie’s novel is its non-literal (i.e., both fictive and fictitious), ambivalent (able to be interpreted in two ways) and parodic reading of Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, in-between the profane and the sacred, and through Rushdie’s use of magic realism.

Similarly, we may argue how Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad caricatures constitute a détournement (hijacking) of the religious signifier of the Prophet onto secularized terrain, as a tangible Being part of the social superstructure and the realm of ideology, rather than/while being simultaneously, a frozen artifact of “third world difference”. For Chandra Mohanty, this is how the third world difference reads itself/is read: “religious (read not progressive), family-oriented (read traditional), legal minors (read they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their- rights), illiterate (read ignorant), domestic (read backward), and sometimes revolutionary (read their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they must-fight!)” (1991, 72). When in 2006, Charlie reproduced caricatures of Muhammad from a Danish far-right newspaper (one of which shows the Prophet with a bomb on his head), or when in 2011, a crying Muhammad is portrayed saying “it’s hard to be loved by morons”, along with the heading, “swamped by integrists”, what in effect takes place is an act of glissement (sliding-effect) of language, in-between dire (“to say”, i.e. speech) and vouloir dire (“to mean”, i.e. intentionality). Language, as Deconstruction theorist Jacques Derrida has observed, is, from the moment we speak, always-already made “Other”/altered: “This structure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, is not only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the peculiarity and property of language.” (Derrida 1998, 25)

The hermeneutic surrounding caricatures (from Latin caricare, ‘load, exaggerate’) reveals the fundamental undecidability of the signifying system and opens up meaning to excess, contingency, indeterminacy: to portray Muhammad is blasphemous; to portray Muhammad with a bomb suggests that all Muslims are terrorists and it is therefore racist/Islamophobic; to portray the Prophet in this way works as a means of denouncing religious extremism. This multiplicity of perspectives ultimately invalidates each of them, failing to reach consensus or unanimity – which is what a polemical, satirical newspaper like Charlie does[3]. The editors of Charlie constantly deployed their right to “err” (from Latin errare, to stray, to wander), to demystification, to laughing at as well as (sometimes) laughing with. Charlie Hebdo has kept reaffirming its right to be wrong, pace a section of the Left that has long disavowed the newspaper, pace terrorist threats, pace political correctness. In the last Charlie cover following the attacks, a crying Muhammad is seen with a “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) placard around his neck saying “tout est pardonné” (all is forgiven) – yet again a highly ambiguous message that resists interpellation.

Charlie Hebdo’s self-proclaimed laïcard (secularist) militancy was itself sometimes dogmatic, if not problematic in a country where secularism has become the trumpeted cause of far-right organizations such as Riposte Laïque or of the French State’s attempt at suppressing culturo-religious difference. Again, I do not wish to refute any of the following leftist critiques of secularism: that the French Republican version of laïcité (i.e, the separation of Church and State in all matters of public affairs) is, in practice, being selectively applied; that the State is partial to Catholics, with direct State financing of private Catholic schools for instance; that secularism ought to exclusively apply to State representatives (Law of 1905), rather than to its (recalcitrant Muslim) citizens as well, as is now the case since 2004 and the ban of the Muslim headscarf (the hijab, or foulard in French) in public schools, or the Burqa ban in public spaces. But I believe Charlie – perhaps against its own will – nonetheless helped “enable…a sense of history and of human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various idols venerated by culture” (Said 1983, 290). Said’s understanding of the secular speaks against over-simplification of secularism as inherently progressive, and religion as backward, or vice versa. As the latter wrote in The Text, The World, and the Critic,

One scholar understands the religion in secular terms but misses what in Islam still gives its adherents genuine nourishment. The other sees it in religious terms but largely ignores the secular differences that exist within the variegated Islamic world. (276)

This double, non-Manichean articulation must be sustained for Arab-Muslim subalternity to one day be able to represent itself, in France, but also elsewhere in Europe, where the main threat that we now face is not “Islam”, but fascism. Unless the Left starts mobilizing to put an end to the many “Wars on Error” of this world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Mali, where French neo-imperialism has had a heavy responsibility in the spreading of confessional wars and Islamist fundamentalism, Kurtz’s famous exclamation in the face of the monstrosities of the Belgian colonial Congo in Joseph Conrad’s classic (post)colonial novel Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”) will keep piercing through the historical chamber of yet another neocolonial apostrophe: “The terror! The terror!” Terror, as that which is produced by fear of the unseen/unknown (as opposed to the graphic horror of a dead corpse), may strike anywhere and at any time, in turn rendering counter-terror measures meaningless – though not harmless. The imposition in schools of a one-minute silence in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, along with the criminalizing of any dissenting voice, will only serve to further repress citizens’ liberties – particularly those whose voice is already muzzled – and curtail their right to civil disobedience.

To conclude, let me quote Jacques Derrida, who in his “terror speech” following September 11, reminds us of what makes European historical contribution unique. Far from being Eurocentric, Derrida, if only because of his Jewish Algerian background, was well aware that the secularist ideals of the Enlightenment are built upon the systematic, enduring dispossession of the colonized. An impossible double bind, as Spivak would have it, which the revolutionary Left would be wrong to forsake on the pretense that such a problematic exclusively belongs to the Liberal heritage, like the abstract of “freedom of speech”:

In the long and patient deconstruction required for the transformation to come, the experience Europe inaugurated at the time of the Enlightenment (Lumières, Aufklärung, Illuminismo) in the relationship between the political and the theological or, rather, the religious, though still uneven, unfulfilled, relative, and complex, will have left in European political space absolutely original marks with regard to religious doctrine (notice I’m not saying with regard to religion or faith but with regard to the authority of religious doctrine over the political). Such marks can be found neither in the Arab world nor in the Muslim world, nor in the Far East, nor even, and here’s the most sensitive point, in American democracy, in what in fact governs not the principles but the predominant reality of American political culture.

The post Defending Charlie Hebdo? Secularism, Islam and the War on Error appeared first on The Postcolonialist.