The Wretched of the Earth was never the straightforwardly anti-Western tract some have since cracked it up to be. It certainly provided a brutal critique of French and European colonialism. But what tends to be forgotten is that it mounted its critique in the name of Europe’s intellectual ideals.
Indeed, Fanon had not really abandoned the core ideas of Black Skin, White Masks at all. He had deepened and enriched them.
In his earlier work, there is a remarkable section on ‘The black man and Hegel’. Based on Alexandre Kojève’s hugely influential 1930s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, this section focuses on what makes man human – namely his desire for the desire of another. Man is human, writes Fanon, to the extent he seeks not just to satisfy some immediate need, but also to impose on another a certain sense of himself – as superior, as worthy of being esteemed. The extent, that is, he seeks to affirm himself in the eyes of the other. This tends to be referred to as the struggle for recognition.
Famously, Kojève focuses on the so-called master-slave dialectic, in which the slave, through a long, complex process, fights to be recognised by the master as human. Through this struggle, the slave affirms his freedom, proves himself capable of autonomy. He wins his recognition, while the now ex-master himself finally has another worthy of granting him the recognition he also desires.
But in the colonial context of France, argues Fanon, the struggle for recognition has not really taken place. Masters may have ’emancipated’ slaves. But it is formal recognition, without struggle. The black person has not proven his freedom. He has not affirmed it in a life-risking fight, a struggle for recognition, with the former master. Fanon concludes that too many do not know the price of freedom because they have not fought for it. Meanwhile, the former masters don’t really really recognise the formally emancipated as free, regarding him instead with indifference or ‘paternalistic curiosity’.
Fanon is spoiling for a fight. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of that which it proves – namely, his freedom, his humanity. ‘I am fighting for the birth of a human world’, he writes, ‘in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions’.
The struggle for recognition in Black Skin, White Masks becomes armed resistance to French colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth. That’s why Fanon focusses so much on what looks like the transformative, ‘world-shaking’ power of violent struggle. Because as he still sees it, it is through the struggle that those fighting for independence prove their freedom, affirm it in the world and in the eyes of their colonial opponents. The violent struggle transforms ‘spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors’. Into people becoming and proving that they’re free.
Despite its popularity among identitarian leftists, The Wretched of the Earth retains in large part Fanon’s belief in a future free of racial categorisation and identity politicking. A future of ‘reciprocal recognitions’ of others’ freedom, others’ humanity. Indeed, its concluding chapter is replete in calls to ‘humanity’, and hopes for a ‘new history’, for ‘new men’. ‘What we want to do is go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men’. He was always concerned with human liberation, not racial assertion.
But this today appears to be a forgotten legacy. On what would have been his 100th birthday, Fanon is arguably more famous than ever. The Wretched of the Earth is now a must-have for every privileged BLM-supporting, Keffiyeh-wearing dullard going. His thought has been boiled down to memeable units, and circulated online by the anti-Israel set. And yet for all his cultish fame, Fanon’s key beliefs and ideas continue to be ignored.
The Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe, said of Fanon that he envisioned ‘a world finally freed from the burden of race, a world that everyone has the right to inherit’ (1). In these divided, identitarian times, it is a world that seems further away than ever. Fanon, as flawed a thinker as he was, can still point us in a more genuinely progressive direction.
Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.
(1) Cited in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Shatz, Apollo, 2024.
