Sartre and Fanon: On Men and Women, and Gender and Race Intersection as They Relate to French Colonial Resistance

Transcription

1 DOI /s z GSTF Journal of General Philosophy (JPhilo) Vol.2 No.1, March 2015 Sartre and Fanon: On Men and Women, and Gender and Race Intersection as They Relate to French Colonial Resistance Nathalie Nya Received 6 Jan 2015 Accepted 5 Feb 2015 Denean Sharpley-Whiting) can show us how their work may at times include the situation of women. Although I am more critical of their theories, the goal of this paper is to extend the theories of Sartre and Fanon so that they can become more inclusive to the situation of women whether colonized or colonizers. What I add to this Post/Colonial discussion, is the analysis that French colonial resistance is rarely a topic that can be discussed outside questions concerning the issue of gender differences. Abstract In this paper, the author presents Fanon s analysis of decolonization in order to present an explicit conception of resistance based upon Fanon s concept of decolonization, which is aligned with the lived experience of the colonized: their racial, sociopolitical, and economic condition as well as their existential condition. The author contrasts Fanon s analysis with Sartre s critique of colonialism as it appears in The Critique. Ultimately, through the presentation of Sartre s and Fanon s theories, the author attempts to show a feminist analysis of French colonial resistance as a criticism of Sartre s and Fanon s theories and of the analysis their male contemporaries within the field of Post/Colonial Theories. II. Keywords colonialism, decolonization, race, gender, class, resistance, colonized, colonizer I. To Joseph S. Catalano, Sartre s main purpose in developing the concept of seriality in The Critique is to describe unorganized class existence.[1, p. 144] We should not conceive of our membership in society as analogous to the way the numbers one, two, three, and so on, belong to the class of cardinal numbers. Rather, it is analogous to the way the numbers first, second, third, and so on, belong to the class of ordinal numbers. [1, p. 144] Sartre s concept then, defines a set of human order. Also, David Detmer explains, the concept of seriality refers to a collective of people who each have the same individual purpose, but who do not share a common purpose. [2, p. 201] The concept of seriality refers to a collective of people who may individually desire the same thing but not in the same manner or for the same objective. For example, Sartre draws on the case of people waiting at the bus stop to show how his concept of seriality operates within his analysis on the collective.[2, p. 201] INTRODUCTION In this paper, I present Fanon s analysis of decolonization in order to present an explicit conception of resistance based upon Fanon s concept of decolonization, which is aligned with the lived experience of the colonized: their racial, sociopolitical, and economic condition, as well as their existential condition. I contrast Fanon s analysis with Sartre s critique of colonialism as it appears in The Critique. Through The Critique, I examine what I call Sartre s material conception of resistance, which uses the racial facts of colonized existence as a means to describe the political and economic inequality of the colonized, and as a means of justifying resistance against colonialism. Through Fanon s writings, I examine what I call a phenomelogical conception of resistance that uses the racism experienced by the colonized to describe how the colonized live, feel and think about their own colonial existences and to conceive of the initiative process of decolonization. I attempt to place in relation the self and society within Fanon s conception of resistance, and I examine the relation between the condition of colonized women and Fanon s analysis on resistance in Algeria. Moreover, I examine the role of women in Sartre s analysis on resistance in order to show what Sartre s analysis could contribute to the issue of the gender dynamics in colonial France. Through the distinction that I make between Sartre s and Fanon s conception of resistance, I argue a more nuanced approach to the theories of Sartre (such as it has been shown by Iris Young) and Fanon (such as it has been shown by T. DOI: / _ SARTRE S CONCEPTION OF RESISTANCE The people in question are a collection or queue of people waiting for a bus in front of the church at the Place SaintGermain in Paris.[3, p. 256] To Sartre, people waiting at the bus stop reflect the relationship of seriality among them.[3, p. 256] Above all, Sartre says, these individuals form a group to the extent that they have a common interest, so that, though separated as organic individuals, they share a structure of their practico-inert being, and it unites them from outside. They are all, or nearly all, workers, and regular users of the bus services; they know the time-table and frequency of the buses; and consequently they all wait for the same bus: say, the [3, pp ] Detmer explains that Sartre introduces the concept of practico-inert in order to explain the way 61

2 history, while it is the product of the actions of free beings, conditions and limits future human choices.[2, p. 191] From then on, Sartre, uses the concept of practico-inert in order to refer to the tendency of human creations, or even of natural objects that human beings have worked on and altered, to restrict our freedom in the future. [2, p. 191] Through Detmer s explanation then, we gather that Sartre uses the example of people waiting for a bus in order to show how the common actions of these people shows the relation between human freedom and praxis; praxis that reflects actions made in view of a common aim.[3, p. 547] Sartre notes that these people s acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act. From this point of view, the group is not structured; it is a gathering and the number of individuals in its contingent. [3, p. 262] Whether taken qualitatively or quantitatively, people at the bus stop can be perceived as random numbers in a sequence -- where the people closer to the bus door have a greater chance to get on the bus, while people farther behind have a lesser chance. In effect, Sartre continues, everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is himself. In the series, however, everyone becomes himself (as Other than self) in so far as he is other than himself, and so, in so far as the Others are other than him. There can be no concept of a series, for every member is serial by virtue of his place in the order, and therefore by virtue of his alterity in so far as it is posited as irreducible.[3, p. 262] Within the specific case of a group of people waiting for a bus in the Place Saint-Germain, Sartre claims that the alterity of each potential bus passenger, the differences in age, sex, class and social milieu, [3, p. 256] non-differentiate them as a mass. To Sartre, these people, within the ordinariness of everyday life, portray a section of the residents of a big city, Paris, in so far as they are united though not integrated through work, through struggle or through any other activity in an organized group common to them all. [3, p. 256] Expressing the seriality of people reflects Sartre s attempt to show the non-differentiation among potential public transportation passengers in the sense that any of these people waiting for a bus has the possibility to get a seat in the bus despite the scarcity or limits of seats in each bus that stops in front of the church at the Place Saint-Germain.[3, p. 263] Despite the fact that there are not enough places for everyone, [3, p. 260] everyone has a chance to get a seat. To Sartre, the travelers waiting for the bus take tickets indicating the order of their arrival. This means that they accept the impossibility of deciding which individuals are dispensable in terms of the intrinsic qualities of the individual. [3, p. 261] For the series of people waiting for the bus, the fact that the number of their tickets indicates the order of their arrival, an order which only increases their individual chances of getting a seat in the bus, shows that who these people are individually does not guarantee them a seat in the bus. The series of people waiting for a bus alludes to both the anonymity and interchangeability of each bus passenger. William L. McBride claims that what is most important for Sartre in his example is the individuals interchangeability, the context of each passenger s alterity and the passengers roles as ordinal units.[4, p. 138] Within this collective, who each of the passengers is does not matter and the order in which they arrived, while it increases the chances of which passengers will have a seat in the bus, could have been different. Thus despite each passenger s alterity, the differences in age, sex, class and social milieu, [3, p. 256] each passenger could be put into the place of another. And in my own words and according to Sartre, the seriality of people at the bus stop does not cause any instances of discrimination against women, the old versus the young and, the rich versus the poor. They all have a chance to a seat in the bus. As Arthur explains in Unfinished Projects, it is unsurprising, given the time of the Critique s composition in the late 1950 s, that Sartre turned to colonialism to illustrate in concrete terms how these mediations actually work on the level of practice. 1 Sartre saw that the concepts of seriality and practico-inert with which he described the collection or queue of people waiting for a bus, for example, were fit to describe the material environment of the collection of people within the system of colonialism. However, to Arthur, the place of colonialism in The Critique is not the central concern of the work, and that examples taken from class struggle generally and the French Revolution in particular play a more important role. 2 Arthur says this in contrast to the analysis of Robert J. C. Young who may have overemphasized the place of colonialism in The Critique.[5, p. 47] To Arthur, colonialism presents to Sartre the most extreme example through which his ideas converge. 3 Arthur makes sure to note that much of what is expressed about colonialism in the Critique had, however, clearly been brewing for some time. The outline for Sartre s understanding of colonialism in Algeria was already on display in his 1956 essay, Colonialism Is a System. Sartre added to this analysis and fleshed out its philosophical foundations, but he did not amend it. 4 Writing The Critique during the later stage of the Algerian Independence enabled Sartre to become more and more convinced of the systematic nature of violence and counter-violence that he saw in colonial relations. 5 The context of the later stage of the Algerian war then enabled Sartre to conceive of the ways in which the system of colonialism could be subject to resistance. So, in Colonialism is a System, Sartre described the context of colonialism and in The Critique, he added to this analysis the 1 Paige Arthur, Unfinished Project: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. (London: Verso, 2010), Ibid. 3 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, Ibid., Ibid. 62

3 ways in which the system could be literally abolished. Ultimately with his analysis of colonialism in The Critique, Sartre aimed to show that no change could occur within the condition of the colonized without the destruction of the colonial apparatus.[3, p. 302] Sartre s conception of resistance developed through his analysis on colonialism then, is based upon his analysis on the evolution of violence within the system.[3, p. 720] As Arthur notes, Sartre s analysis of colonialism revolves around two axes: (1) the practico-inert structures created by colonizer and colonized alike that serve to regulate the exploitative historical relationship between them, often (or even typically) reinforcing it; (2) the praxes that creates bonds of alterity and/or reciprocity, depending on the situation, among the colonizers (the settlers) and among the colonized (the natives), whereby Sartre examines the division of settlers and natives into perceivable groups of humans and subhumans; the settlers racism; the participation of the natives in their own oppression; feelings of inferiority among the native population; and also the capacity for genuine group actions ( counter-violence ) on the part of the natives. 6 Reciprocity, which is to Sartre the permanent structure of every object, is lived relations whose content is determined in a given society, as things in advance, by collective praxis, and which are conditioned by materiality and capable of being modified only by action[3, p. 109] and is initially posited as human freedom by praxis itself.[3, p. 110] The analysis of Sartre on colonialism then, is made to show how the reciprocal relationship between the colonized and the colonizers, which is based on the ways the violence of the colonizers exploits the colonized and dissolves the identity of the colonized into their racial alterity, a dissolution that results in the colonized s attempts to counter the violence of the colonizers with equal violence.[3, p. 733] Through the context of colonialism, Sartre shows that the violence of the queue of people in the colonial system reflects the manner in which serial violence dissolves, like seriality, into minimal violence as a primary determination of praxis. [3, p. 732] The system of colonialism portrays the degeneration of violence from within the actions of both the colonizers and the colonized. The degeneration of violence shows a deteriorating condition that reflects the practice of violence and of oppression in the system. Inert violence, as frequentative and as the dated connection between colonialists and colonized, is recognized as sovereignty inside repressive practice; and the latter, legitimated by the need to defend the Others, gives violenceprocess its first statute of operation. But, to conclude, if violence becomes a praxis of oppression, this is because it always was one. 7 Thus the rule of colonialism is based on violence. 6 Arthur, Unfinished Projects, Ibid. For the purpose of justifying the use of violence by the Algerians in particular, Sartre develops his analysis of resistance through the material condition of the colonized. Sartre begins by explaining the context that led to the use of violence on the part of the Algerians. The Algerian rebellion, Sartre says, through being desperate violence, was simply an adoption of the despair from which the colonialists maintained the natives; its violence was simply a negation of the impossible, and the impossibility of life was the immediate result of oppression. Algerians had to live, because colonialists needed a sub-proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because wages had to be as close as possible to zero. 8 The material circumstances of the Algerians, Sartre claims, is what resulted in the use of violence on the part of the Algerians. The Algerians were made to work for wages that were lower than the wages of the average French worker and were never enough for the Algerians own subsistence. As Catalano observes from analyzing Sartre s claims, although a handful of Muslims may be educated, the aim of colonialism is generally to keep those colonized from entering into the society of the occupying country. The goal is cheap labor, and this goal requires the daily practice of keeping the Muslim on a subhuman level. 9 From this we gather that the Algerian rebellion is based upon the fact that the economic conditions of the mass Algerian population erode any attempts on the part of Europeans to emancipate the Algerians. The violence of the rebel, Sartre continues to explain, was the violence of the colonialist; there was never any other. The struggle between the oppressed and oppressors ultimately became the reciprocal interiorisation of a single oppression. [ ] And against his own violence as Other, he created a counter-violence which was simply his own oppression become repressive, that is to say, reactualised and trying to transcend the violence of the Other, in other words his own violence in the Other. We have thus shown, in the simple example of colonisation, that the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, as a double reciprocal praxis, which ensured at least until the insurrectional phase the rigid development of the process of exploitation. 10 To Arthur, Sartre defined violence broadly it can refer both to individual acts and to long-term processes. 11 Arthur explains that Sartre saw the reciprocal praxis of violence as a dialectic of violence produced as a practical relation between free, situated organisms. 12 The acts of violence on the part of the colonized then, being a reality created precisely because of the 8 Ibid., Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Volume 1. Theory of Practical Ensembles, Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Ibid., Arthur, Unfinished Projects,

4 violent actions of the colonizers; exploitation, racism, lack of political rights and debauchery, reflect the ways the reciprocal praxis of violence or this dialectic of violence, willfully made both the colonized and the colonizers the object of violence. To this analysis and following Sartre, Catalano adds that colonialism is violence not only as praxis but as process.[1, p. 241] It is process because it arose from a network of earlier violence and continued into a network of new violence. It is a praxis because violent people used habitualized violence to establish a new violent network. 13 As Sartre claims then, the development of the network of new violence created through the mass participation of the Algerians in the violence of colonialism deserves the name of praxis-process. [3, p. 725] The violence relation between the oppressed and the oppressing groups, always the conditioned conditions of serialities of series,[3, p. 729] ensures the functioning of the system of colonialism by participating in the innovation and maintenance of violence within the system. III. and class intersectional analysis in Sartre s The Critique, and I explain in this section the way Sartre conceives of a material conception of resistance that is solely based on the racial and class alterities the colonizers have imposed on the condition of the colonized. I claim that through his analysis on racial and class alterities, Sartre is mostly able to discuss the situation of male colonized and colonizers. What I say here is most apparent in Sartre s description of the actions of the sons of both the colonized and the colonizers. Thus I claim that if you leave out the intersection of gender to the topics of race and class, you may omit to discuss the situation of women. Specifically, Sartre says, the son of the colonialist and the son of the Muslim are both the children of the objective violence which defines the system itself as a practico-inert hell. [3, p. 718] By emphasizing the place of the sons of the colonized and colonizers in the colonial system, Sartre shows that while he may want to analyze the relation within the queue of people in the system of colonialism, his analysis of the series of violence within the system may not take into account the use of violence by the daughter of a colonialist and the daughter of the Muslim, for example. By emphasizing the place of the sons of the colonized and colonizers in the colonial system, Sartre shows how his treatment of gender within the colonial system is from a masculine point of view.[6, p. 241] By claiming that the series of violence within the colonial system is solely based upon the subjectivities of the male members of the colonial system, Sartre neglects to show how the gender differences between male and female subjects of the colonial system, can create different series of violence that not only perpetuates but also innovates the violence of the system. From this perspective, I argue Sartre s analysis of colonialism and the way to abolish colonialism is gender insensitive. In Sartre s analysis of colonial violence and how such violence can mutate into a tool of resistance against the system, the relation within the queue of people in the colonial system is based on the series of racial and class alterities between the colonized and colonizers; it is an analysis that leaves aside the role of gender alterity within the series of colonial violence. Sartre then describes a colonial context that does not explicitly take into account the ways in which the seriality of gender participates in creating a queue of people within the colonial system. THE CRITIQUE AND GENDER As Sonia Kruks observes, the objective of The Critique is to elaborate a theory of class, which unlike Marx s theory of class, would privilege differences while still exploring the possibility of a project of worldwide human emancipation.[6, p. 240] Yet to Kruks, to emphasize Sartre s sensitivity to difference is not, however, to deny that the Critique is still deeply flawed by sexism it is! [6, p. 240] To Kruks then, Sartre s project in The Critique does not register to the ways gender creates class differences within the condition of humans. In other words and from my own reading, the human differences created through the intersection of gender, class and even race are included in the analysis of Sartre. For this reason and in relation to Kruks observation, Sartre leaves out the human conditions of White women. And to add to Kruks observation, I claim that Sartre leaves out the human condition of women of color in particular. This is important to note because had Sartre conceived of the context of gender within his analysis of seriality and of the queue of people waiting at the bus, for example, he may have been able to conceive of how the inclusion of women at the bus stop would have changed the serial order of people waiting at the bus stop. A young man would have given his front seat in the bus to a White woman, for example, (thus changing Sartre s process of claiming that the order of arrival at the bus stop determined your right to a sit in the bus) while the same young man may have denied the same seat to an aged or old woman of color. What I mean to say is, given the acts of common courtesy and chivalry White men expressed towards White women in particular during the era of Sartre, it can be imagined that a White woman arriving in tenth place could have been given the first seat in the bus. I acknowledge the lack of gender, race 13 In the article, Gender as Seriality, Iris Young attempts to recuperate Sartre s project in order to identify how, despite the sexist connotations of Sartre s analysis, his theory of seriality can apply to social contexts that attend to the gender alterity of different levels of social collectives.[7, p. 728] Applying the concept of seriality to gender, Young explains, makes theoretical sense out of saying that women is a reasonable social category expressing a certain kind of social unity. At the same time, conceptualizing gender as a serial collectivity avoids the problems that emerge from saying that women are a single group, [7, p. 728] whereby we can speak of women in terms of their individual racial, gender, sexual, Ibid. 64

5 abled and disabled differences. To Young, what Sartre s theory of seriality can bring to the conception of the category of women, is that it can emphasize the differences among the collectivities of women without essentializing women strictly in terms of their gender alterity. So from Young s perspective and in relation to my analysis, the gender analysis created through the queue of people that acknowledges the involvement of colonized women and women colonizers within the violent series of colonialism would be different from the kind of gender analysis created through the queue of people that acknowledges the involvement of colonized men and colonized women within the violent series of colonialism. From Young s attempts to appropriate Sartre s theory for the purpose of conceptualizing the category of women through concept of gender, we gather, gender, like class, is a vast, multifaceted, layered, complex, and overlapping set of structures and objects. Women are the individuals who are positioned as feminine by the activities surrounding those structures and objects. 14 In constructing a material conception of resistance, Sartre failed to take into account the ways gender differences structured the violence of colonialism. Sartre neglected to acknowledge the way the structure of gender positioned women to the series of violence within the system of colonialism. To Sartre, then, race and class and rather not gender structure the process and praxis of resistance within the colonial system. From this perspective, I claim that Sartre s material conception of resistance uses the racial facts of colonized existence as a means to describe the political and economic inequality, and as a means of justifying resistance against the Western system of oppression. While I have argued that Sartre s analysis on colonialism leaves out the question of gender differences, his theory of colonialism is nevertheless somewhat all encompassing. It gives an account of colonialism as a system coupled with two groups of people; the colonized and colonizer, who are entangled in a Manichean dialectic. IV. examining the ways in which the revolution changed the lives and attitude of the Algerian population. In his article, Jammin the Airwaves and Tuning into the Revolution: The Dialectics of the Radio in L An V de la revolution algeriénne, Gibson explains that the purpose of Fanon s analysis of the ways the revolution changed the lives and attitude of the Algerian population shows how the colonized created a turning point within the Manichaean complex of the colonial situation. Supporting the analysis of Fanon expressed in Black Skin, White Masks,15 Gibson claims, Colonial society presents itself as a Manichaean one. The colonizer is represented as everything good, human, and living; the colonized as bad, brutish, and inert. It is a society of total separation, not one in the service of a higher synthesis. In this situation, the colonized inhabits a zone of nonbeing. [10, p. 273] The Manichaean complex of the colonial situation then, divides the colonizers and the colonized into caricatures of good versus evil; caricatures that have a real effect in the colonial, because they grant an ontological status to the colonizers while they negate the existence and lives of the colonized. Through the experience of the revolution, Gibson adds, the colonized s Manichean consciousness breaks down and is sublated by what Fanon calls a radical mutation in consciousness. One example of this process is the changing attitudes to the radio. [ ] In terms of the dialectic, we can see how the radio, which was totally rejected by the colonized during the colonial period, is taken over by them and used as a weapon in the struggle for liberation. In short, it undergoes a dialectical development and becomes the mediation in the development of a national consciousness. [10, p. 274] Alluding to the analytic division that Fanon makes between the situation of the colonized Algerian before and then after the start of the revolution, Gibson notes how the revolution changed the consciousness of the colonized by referring to what Fanon says about the Algerian s change of attitude to the radio; a change of attitude that shows the way the mass population of Algeria first came to view the radio as a propaganda tool in the hands of French authorities and then as a tool that could be of use to the ways the resistance or the FLN presented their side of the story to the Algerian population. By figuring out how the radio could be useful to them, the Algerians acquired a sense of agency that altered their attitude about the ways the radio could be used as a nonoppressive tool for the resistance. Prior to the resistance, the FANON S CONCEPTION OF RESISTANCE While Fanon may have misinterpreted and overestimated the freedom and liberation of Algerian women during and then after the Algerian war of Independence, Fanon, unlike Sartre, made sure to at least include the ways in which the participation of women in the Algerian war influenced the structure of resistance in Algeria. In the context of the Algerian revolution, Nigel Gibson notes, Fanon does not address action in general terms but instead locates a specific revolutionary subject, willing to risk life and work for the cause of liberation. [8, p. 40] In other words, the notion of resistance within Fanon s writing on Algeria shows that the concept of resistance could not be developed without [9, pp ] In these pages from the chapter on Mayotte Capécia, Fanon claims that the actions of the colonized, in this case, the actions of a female colonized subject, reflects a consciousness that is based on a genuinely Manichean concept of the world. In view of this conception of the world, Fanon then attempts to show the reason why Capécia favors the good (male) colonizer over the bad (male) colonized, a favoritism that shows her position on the white versus the black division of the world. Ibid. 65

6 of women (in general). To Gibson, the Manichean complex of the colonial apparatus made men out of colonizers and women out of the colonized.[10, pp ] Beginning with the problematic assumption that the colonizers were only European men and not also European women, I argue Gibson s analysis of the context of the Manichean complex is literally based in terms of man-man colonizers and colonized man-women instead of also being based on the ontological status of man-women colonizers and colonized womenwomen. This is a long way of saying that Gibson s analysis of the Manichean complex of colonial apparatus does not address how the powers of the colonizers privileged the actions and lives European women and how the annihilated existence of the colonized negated the actions and lives of Arab women. radio created a reality in colonial Algeria whereby French values were emphasized over Arabs ones, values that negated the existence and lives of Arabs in the colony. The radical mutation of the native s consciousness that had brought about a complete change in attitude toward the radio, was, Fanon argued, not a back and forth or an ambivalence but rather a dialectical progression. This dialectical progression was not a synthesis but a radical change in valence. [10, p. 281] In using and in conceiving of the radio as a tool of resistance, the Algerians, the mass population and members of FLN included, developed an unexpected connection with the radio whereby the Algerians used the radio not to advance the goals of the colonizers but rather to the disadvantages of the colonial apparatus. In other words, during the resistance, the radio in the hands of the Algerians referenced more to the actions and lives of the Algerians than to those of Europeans. The radio then became a technique that could be said to no longer be only in the hands and at the will of the occupiers. In Gibson s analysis of how the radio was made of use by the resistance and thereby contributed to reviving the actions and lives of the colonized, he failed to account for the passages where Fanon mentioned the changes in the gender dynamics surrounding the act of listening to the radio, before and after the resistance. Contemporary commentators such as Jonathan Kahana[11, pp ] and Ian Baucom[12, pp ] have, like Gibson, also taken an interest in Fanon s analysis of the radio in colonial Algeria. Yet, these commentators, like Gibson, have failed to explicitly acknowledge what Fanon notes as the changes in the gender dynamics and, racial and sexual intersection, surrounding the act of listening to the radio, before and after the resistance. What I have observed here allows me to claim that while Fanon took up the challenge of including the colonial condition of women in his analysis of political resistance, Fanon s male contemporary commentators have, for the most part, opted to omit the condition of colonized women from their analysis of resistance and of the dialectical relation between the colonized and the colonizer. From the writings of Gibson, for example, the presence and participation of colonized women and women colonizers within the colonial system are not explicitly acknowledged as a subject of post/colonial discourse. In view of the undifferentiated gender analyses presented by Gibson, Kahana and Baucom, for example, on Fanon s analysis of the radio, I re-examine Fanon s analysis of the radio as it relates to the gender dynamics within the context of the Algerian resistance. And on this subject, this is what I contribute to the Post-colonial literature. Making note of the effects of the Manichean complex on the colonial situation in Algeria before the Algerian war, Gibson claims, before the rebellion, being and nothingness operated along color lines. This was not an ontological absolute but a definite social and psychological reality, which characterized two species of men and women: the colonizer and the colonized. In this situation, the colonizer is the unceasing cause and absolute beginning and the colonized is nothing, literally nihilated. Colonialism represented the cessation of history for the colonized and, in short, the veritable death of the dialectic. [10, pp ] Through the analysis of Fanon, Gibson explains that prior to the revolution, the colonized felt that they were reduced to the status of non-being; an ontological way of being that fundamentally negated the value in the actions and existence of the colonized. Such an ontological status then made the actions and lives of the colonized unequal to and unrecognizable in relation to the actions and lives of the colonizers. From Gibson s reading of Fanon then, we gain the understanding that the purpose of the resistance in Algeria was created as an Independence War movement that revived the dialectic between the colonized and colonizers such that the colonial self-determination of Europeans could be reciprocated with the equal anti-colonial self-determination of the Arabs. Within the context of colonialism, Gibson explains, there is no objective truth. There is no neutral standpoint; everything is touched by the colonial system. In the colonial set-up the whole idea of what is truth is Manichaean. For the native, saying no to the French yes can be the only truth. [10, p. 275] The end of colonialism in Algeria made possible through the War Independence reflected the absolute no to French authorities attempt to affirm their will in Algeria. V. FANON AND GENDER Specifically, as Frantz Fanon notes in the second chapter of A Dying Colonialism, when commercial radio appeared in Algeria in the early 1940s as a source of mass communication, it created rivalries among the population by dividing the population in terms of race, class, and political status, thus dividing the French and the Algerians and even causing divisions among the Algerians themselves.[13, p. 69] Moreover, in examining the ontological status of the colonized prior to the Algerian war, Gibson problematically conflated the colonized s state of non-being to the condition 66

7 Initially, commercial radio broadcasts under Radio-Alger were created in French, by the French, and were sometimes transmitted from France.[13, p. 69] Investigating the role of language incorporated in the programming alludes to the discourse on language presented by Fanon in Black Skin White Masks, whereby the sense of power and desire built within our discourse on language reflects the privileges and prejudices of Western institutions.[9, pp ] Accordingly, the information coming from Radio-Alger represented the interests and sensibilities of the French empire and, therefore, made it easier for the French in Algeria to follow the broadcasts.[13, p. 71] In other words, listening to information coming from the French radio was less difficult for the French in Algeria than for the Arab and Berber Algerians.[13, p. 69] Among Algerians, radio was regarded as a status symbol that required fluency in standard French and French culture to listen to and enjoy the programming. Given that among the Algerian population the better-off, educated Algerians were more likely to be schooled in French and in French institutions, radio became an item primarily available to the better-off, educated Algerians.[13, p. 69] Yet, the hundreds of Algerian families whose standard of living was sufficient to enable them to acquire a radio did not acquire one.[13, p. 69] To Fanon, while there was no systematic rejection of the radio by these Algerian families, a reason that members of these families gave to sociologists reflected the reality that the topics broadcasted over the French radio were not aligned with the gender hierarchy and sexual politics of the Algerian family.[13, p. 70] The members of these Algerian families claimed that the topics broadcast over the French radio were in conflict with the traditions of respectability established within Arab families.[13, p. 70] Specifically, the Algerians rather frequently gave the following answer to sociologists, traditions of respectability are so important for us and are so hierarchical, that it is practically impossible for us to listen to radio programs in the family. The sex allusions, or even the clownish situations meant to make people laugh, which are broadcast over the radio cause an unendurable strain in a family listening to these programs. [13, p. 70] In his analysis of the family featured in the chapter, the Algerian Family, the section on the father and daughter shows that within the Algerian family, the male and female subjects occupy separate spaces. The daughter, learning about the higher value of the man from the position and the habits of the mother in the family, is aware that she has less privilege than the father, the brother and the husband.[14, pp ] Within the context of the Algerian family, the female subject as a girl learns from male subjects, and from other female subjects that she cannot always do what the male subject does, be where the male subject is and also hears what the male subject hears.[13, pp. 70, 106] The gender dynamics within the family reflects a patriarchal hierarchical order, an order that could be disrupted by the introduction of the radio in the family. The answers that the Algerians gave to sociologists suggested that they, as Arab, could not, like Europeans, listen to the radio as a family in mixed gender company. As Fanon notes, the possibility of the daughter, mother and even younger son, 16 eventuality of laughing in the presence of the head of the family or the elder brother, of listening in common to amorous words or terms of levity, obviously acts as a deterrent to the distribution of radios in Algerian native society. [13, p. 70] The topics broadcast on the French radio then were not adapted to the many moral taboos [13, p. 70] that characterized the Algerian family in the 1940s. Moreover, Fanon made sure to note that it is with reference to this first rationalization that we must understand the habit formed by the official Radio Broadcasting Services in Algeria of announcing the programs that can be listened to in common and those in the course of which the traditional forms of sociability might be too severely strained. [13, p. 70] The rationale that the Algerians, while it alluded to the issues relating to the traditions of respectability and the gender dynamics within the patrilineal hierarchy of the Algerian family, should be used as the first reason why the hundreds of Algerian families whose standard of living was sufficient to enable them to acquire a radio did not acquire one. The radio then was first not adopted by these Algerian families because they saw the technical instrument as a colonial tool that would continue to impose French European norms of conducts on the Algerian male and female members of the family. Then, Fanon made sure to note the manner in which the context of the Algerian liberation war brings another dimension to radio as a technical instrument. Fanon begins this segment of his analysis by stating the following, on the basis of this analysis, techniques of approach could be proposed. Among others, the staggering of broadcasts addressed to the family as a whole, to male groups, to female groups, etc. As we describe the radical transformations that have occurred in this realm, in connection with the national war, we shall see how artificial such a sociological approach is, what a mass of errors it contains. [13, pp ] From this perspective, Fanon alludes to the reality that Algerians stand as a family against the inclusion of the radio within their patrilineal hierarchical family organization did not reflect a fundamental order within the Algerian family but rather reflected an objective family order, organized by the head of the family, against the even further colonialization of the Arab family. Prior to the Algerian war in 1954 and the foundation of the FLN by Arab men such as Mohamed Boudiaf and Saadi 16 [13, p. 110] In the section, The Brothers, from the chapter, The Algerian Family, Fanon make sure to note that precisely because the eldest brother is the father s designated successor, the other members of the family very quickly adopt a respectful and deferential attitude toward him. For example, the eldest brother s sibling cannot exchange frivolous jokes with him. 67

8 Yacef, the economically better off Algerian families as well as the mass population of Algerians did not see value in owning a radio, precisely because they saw the radio as a piece of French presence, [13, p. 72] in colonial Algeria. The radio, Fanon continues, as a symbol of French presence, as a material representation of the colonial configuration, is characterized by an extremely important negative valence. [13, p. 73] The radio or French radio in particular, created a bond within the colonial system that the Algerians did not want to be willfully connected to. But in 1955, the mass population became conscious of the reality that the acquisition of a radio set in Algeria, represented the sole means of obtaining news of the Revolution from non-french sources. [13, p. 82] Fanon then explains the social and political occurrences that made the Algerian population change their minds about the radio and which in turn built an unexpected connection between the Algerians and the technical instrument whereby, having a radio meant paying one s taxes to the nation, buying the right of entry into the struggle of an assembled people. [13, p. 84] As Fanon primarily attempts to show, the changes in the actions and attitude of the colonized does not reflect a sudden alteration in the consciousness of the colonized but rather reflect a progressive and/or digressive alteration in the consciousness of the colonized that can be traced as a process from within the timeline of modern slavery and colonialism. In view of this, Fanon traces the positive effects that the Algerian population acquired from listening to the radio to the year 1945, when the Algerian population received support and sympathy from the men and women in America, Europe, and Africa, [13, p. 74] for being the victims of the Sétif and of Guelma uprising[13, p. 74] which begin on the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied countries of World War II, on May 8, when French authorities begin to shoot local demonstrators. Moreover, the reality that Algerians could listen to radio shows broadcasted from national broadcasting stations in liberated Arab countries, in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, also influenced the change in the Algerians connection to the radio.[13, p. 74] Fanon notes that after , the number of radios grew, but at a moderate rate. Even then, the Algerian when he turned on his radio was interested exclusively in foreign and Arab broadcasts. [13, p. 74] The Algerian then chose to listen to foreign and Arab broadcasts precisely because French radio broadcasting did not provide the Algerians with a perspective on the French colonial situation and international news that reflected their situation and worldviews.[13, p. 76] When the Algerian independence war started in 1954, the Algerian, Fanon claims, found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news. [13, pp ] The resistance, during the first months of the war, attempted to organize their own news distribution system.[13, p. 76] However, the press organizations in support of the resistance became subject to censorship.[13, p. 77] From then on, the acquisition of a radio set in Algeria, represented the sole means of obtaining news of the Revolution from non-french sources. [13, p. 82] Resistance made known to the Algerian population that they had their own broadcasting radio show, the Voice of Algeria.[13, p. 82] In the market or shop, trade in used receiver sets began.[13, p. 83] By 1956, when the majority of Algerians began to purchase a radio set, Fanon records, traditional resistances broke down and one could see in a douar groups of families in which fathers, mothers, daughters, elbow to elbow, would scrutinize the radio dial waiting for the Voice of Algeria. Suddenly [ ], the Algerian family discovered itself to be immune to the off-color jokes and the libidinous references that the announcer occasionally let drop. [13, p. Fanon] The present context in which Algerian families listened to the radio as a whole then suggests that the radio during the revolution became a source of protection to the integrity of Algerian families. Algerian families attempt to acquire protection from the radio reveals a connection with the radio that may have not been possible when the Algerians were introduced to the radio before the revolution as a byproduct of French values. Prior to the revolution, the radio was a technical instrument that Algerian families members felt that they had to be protected from. As Anne McClintock notes of Fanon s analysis of the colonized family, refusing, however, to collude with the notion of the familial metaphor as natural and normative, Fanon instead understands it as a cultural projection ( the characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment ) that has very different consequences for families placed discrepantly within the colonial hierarchy. [14, p. 283] From Fanon s analysis then, we acquire the sense that the colonial situation influences the order and the integrity of colonized families not as a natural but rather as a cultural construction structured in confirmation of social and political oppression. Furthermore, paying attention to the relation and positions of members of families different sexes as they listened to the radio, Fanon explains that after the revolution, Algerian families began to listen to the radio in mixed company.[13, p. 83] From Fanon s explanation in the chapter, This is the Voice of Algeria, we can only assume that Algerian daughters and mothers were allowed to listen to the radio with men because the head of the family, the father or the eldest brother, permitted them to. But from Fanon s analysis in the chapter, The Algerian Family, we can come to see that the participation of Algerian wives, mothers and daughters in the resistance enabled these women to ask men to listen to the radio with them.[13, pp ] After the FLN decided to allow women to participate in the resistance, the female cells of the F.L.N. received mass memberships. [13, p. 108] The participation of women in the resistance enabled these women to become active members within the struggle. Aware that his daughter could be a member of the FLN, 68

9 the father himself no longer had any choice. His old fear of dishonor had become altogether absurd in the light of the immense tragedy being experienced by the people. [ ] There was no time to lose. So the girl would go up into the maquis, alone with men. For months and months, the parents would be without news of a girl of eighteen who would sleep in the forests or in the grottoes, who would roam the djebel dressed as a man, with a gun in her hands. The father s attitude toward the girls remaining at home or toward any other women met in the street inevitably underwent a radical change. And the girl who had not gone into the maquis, who was not actively engaged, became aware of the important role played by women in the revolutionary struggle. [13, p. 109] From this we gather that because of the participation of some female members of Algerian families, the female members who stayed home and were not at the war resistance front, experienced better treatments from the male members of their families, from their fathers in particular. Yet, to Fanon, the differences in treatments that the female members of Algerian families received from their male counterparts during the resistance, did not just reflect men s changes in attitude towards women, but rather reflected the status of freedom and liberation of women in the Algerian society. Observing the changes in the father s attitude towards the girls, that is to say, observing that to the father girls may no longer be always one notch behind the boy, [13, p. 105] Fanon claims that after the resistance, the men s words were no longer law. The women were no longer silent. Algerian society in the fight for liberation, in the sacrifices that it was willing to make in order to liberate itself from colonialism, renewed itself and developed new values governing sexual relations. The women ceased to be a complement for man. [13, p. 109] The participation of some Algerian women in the war resistance front enabled Algerian women as a group to exert a greater sense of agency, which in turn enabled these women to become guerilla fighters, speaking in front of men and listening to the radio together with their father. The resistance then, gave new values to the gender dynamics and sexual relations among the male and female members of the Algerian family. Although criticized by Rabaka as being another feminist who presents a destructive criticism against Fanon for writing about women,[15, pp ] McClintock s Fanon and Gender Agency, presents a compelling analysis of the limits of Fanon s analysis of the agency of colonized women during colonial Algeria. In support of McClintock s position, which, at least to my reading, both justifiably praises and criticizes the analysis of Fanon on women, I claim the following: While what I call Fanon s phenomelogical conception of political resistance is exemplary as it attempts to address the question of gender difference between colonized men and colonized women within the colonial context of Algeria in particular,[13, p. 283] the place of women seems to be fundamental within Fanon s analysis of the naturalness of nationalism as a domestic genealogy, [14, p. 284] yet his work as whole fails to show how the situation of women that was accordingly taken as the theme of action, [14, p. 289] can inform the dialectic or more precisely the process through which man can acquire a new skin; 17 a new skin that as Bernasconi emphasizes, requires the disappearance of colonialism, of the subject condition of people as colonizer and colonized, the disappearance of racism, if not as a shedding of skin, at least as a shedding of what skin color has come to mean in a world defined by colonialism.[18, p. 113] Contrary to Rabaka s reading of Fanon, I do not see with enough evidence how, in the writings of Fanon, the process of decolonialization creates from within the situation of colonized women, a new [wo]men, women who are simultaneously struggling to topple sexism, racism, colonialism and capitalism. [15, pp ] According to McClintock specifically, in his analysis of the structure of the Algerian society, Fanon s insight, here is that the dynamics of colonial power are fundamentally, though not solely, the dynamics of gender: It is the situation of women that was accordingly taken as the theme of action. Yet, in his work as whole, Fanon fails to bring these insights into theoretical focus. [14, p. 289] It is not clear how the context of gender dynamics in Fanon s analysis of colonialism informs his theoretical concern with the dialectic process of resistance. What McClintock says here relates to her argument on the limits of Fanon s analysis on the agency of colonized women in the following way: women s agency for Fanon is thus agency by designation. It makes its appearance not as a direct political relation to the revolution but as a mediated domestic relation to a man. [ ] Women s first relation to the revolution is constituted as a domestic one. [14, p. 291] In view of my analysis on the radio, to Fanon more precisely, what some colonized Algerian women did as members of the war resistance front, was less important than the ways that these women s actions in the resistance affected their lives and other women s lives in their homes, with their fathers, brothers and husbands. I argue recognizing these Algerian women less as guerilla fighters but more as mothers, wives and daughters, Fanon actually asserts that the participation of women in the resistance created better domestic lives for male and female members of Algerian 17 [16, p. 305], [17, p. 239] I am obliged to quote the original version as well as the English translation of Fanon s text precisely of because the last sentence of Les Damnés de la Terre is different than the English translation of the sentence in The wretched of the earth Frantz Fanon. In the original version, Fanon says that in order to attempt to put on foot (to let stand) a new man, a new skin must be made and a new thought must be developed for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, his comrades. In other words, Pour L Europe, pour nous-mêmes et pour l humanité, camarades, it faut faire peau neuve, développer une pensée neuve, tenter de metter sur pied un homme neuf. 69