Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial experience has widely influenced educational theory and practice. Yet, despite much focus on the gendered and sexed dynamics of racialization processes, and their applications to the dynamics in particular of teaching and learning, surprisingly little attention has been given to how these intersect both with generational relations and the models of children/childhood on which his account relies. In this paper, Fanon's representations of childhood across all his texts are analyzed and evaluated. It is argued that attending to the diversities and instabilities of these representations not only strengthens critical engagement with Fanon's ideas conceptually, methodologically and in terms of pedagogical process, but also prompts reassessment of their contemporary relevance for, and corresponding challenges to, current pedagogical and political practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Child as method
• colonialism
• racialization
• gender
• decolonization
• educational theory

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped make this paper what it is. My thanks in particular to: Ian Parker, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and the University of Reading Circle group, Daniela Caselli and Jackie Stacey for their support, and the anonymous reviewers and editorial team for their enthusiastic commitment to publishing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I discuss later Vergès’ (1997) psychobiographical analysis of why Algeria rather than Martinique became Fanon's primary arena for political struggle.

2. The four texts Fanon authored are: Black Skin, White Masks (1952/1970), A Dying Colonialism (1959/1965), Wretched of the Earth (1961/1963), which were all published in his lifetime, while a posthumous collection of his political writings was published in 1964 (translated in 1967) entitled Toward the African revolution: political essays.

3. Indeed Weiler (1996, p. 359) suggests that Friere was inspired by Fanon.

4. Elsewhere I discuss “child as educator” (Burman, 2013).

5. While I recognise that current accounts distinguish between “emotion” and “affect”, in particular mobilising the latter to bring in less cognitive and material features, in line with Fanon's own writing which both argues for and offers in its practice a synthesis across the material-political-subjective-embodied, I retain both terms for ease of reading and to avoid anachronism.

6. Macey makes much of the ways commentators fail to acknowledge or address Fanon's Martinican background, and its significance for understanding his engagement in Algeria, highlighting the “eradication of the specifically French and Martinican dimensions of Fanon's colonial experience” (2012, p. 28).

7. As Macey (2012, p. 33) notes: “One could read Le Monde or any other French newspaper for a long time without realizing that Martinique is in France. Inclusion goes hand in hand with exclusion.”

8. As an account of the psychological development of an imposed black identity, alongside claims of elucidating subconscious and unconscious features of the black/colonized psyche, it is not surprising that Fanon mobilises a psychoanalytic frame. See Burman (2015a) for a detailed discussion of Fanon's relationship to and use of Lacanian ideas, including the “mirror stage”.

9. “Specialists in basic education for underdeveloped countries or technicians for the advancement of retarded societies would do well to understand the sterile and harmful character of any endeavour which illuminates preferentially a given element of the colonized society. Even within the framework of a newly independent nation, one cannot attack this or that segment of the cultural whole without endangering the work undertaken (leaving aside the question of the native's psychological balance). More precisely, the phenomena of counter-acculturation must be understood as the organic impossibility of a culture to modify any one of its customs without at the same time re-evaluating its deepest values, its most stable models. To speak of counter-acculturation in a colonial situation is an absurdity. The phenomena of resistance observed in the colonized must be related to an attitude to a cultural, hence national, origination” (Algeria Unveiled, pp. 41–42).

10. Macey (2010, 2012) claims there are many inaccuracies within Charles Markmann's first translation of the English edition, which he also argues (Macey, 2012) have contributed to particular Americanized readings of Fanon which have occluded the significance of his French and Martinican backgrounds.

11. The French word “négre” is not equivalent to the (American) English “negro”, and is (even) more insulting (Macey, 2012).

12. Macey sets the scene in a park, while Markmann's (and also Hage's, 2010) narrative marks the setting as in a train. (Fanon's text mentioned both.)

13. As a notable example: “For Fanon, a psychoanalytic understanding of racism hinges on a close analysis of the realm of sexuality. This is particularly true of black–white relations since blacks are persistently attributed with a hypersexuality. Why is it sexuality which forms a major arena for the articulation of racism? From a psychoanalytic point of view, sexuality is the realm where fear and desire find their most intimate connection, where notions of otherness and the exotic/erotic are often conflated. Whether heterosexual or homosexual, sexuality is generally thought to be indissociable from the effects of polarization and differentiation, often linking them to structures of power and domination” (Doane, 1999, p. 451).

14. Moreover, this presence also precisely wards off the encounter as primarily constituted by, but also recapitulating, the erotically charged positioning between the white woman and the black man. Much can and has been said about all this (e.g. Doane, 1999), as also equally the absence of subject position accorded black women (Bergner, 1995).

15. This includes the complex “both–and” of being subjected to the universalized and transhistorical black experience, and also divorced from it – as the particularized, exoticized and discretionary exception from the racist rule : “When people like me they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way I am locked into the infernal circle” (BSWM, pp. 82--83).

16. Indeed, “child” fails to appear in the Index of Black Skins, White Masks, nor in Macey's (2012) biography, or Silverman's (2005) collection. (The translations of Fanon's Wretched and A Dying Colonialism do not have Indexes.) Nor does ‘child’ appear in the many collections that reprint and discuss this iconic encounter (e.g. Evans and Hall, 1999).

17. Adequate consideration of the significance of the use of the definite article “the” rather than “a” in Fanon's description merits another paper, but clearly at the very least its use emphasises the child's importance, i.e. the importance of this, specific, child. The question then arises of whether this could be any child, or has been singled out as an exception rather than prototype.

18. “For the Martinican Fanon, the experience of coming under the white gaze reproduces the primal experience of the island's history: slavery and a colonization so brutal as to be a form of trauma or even annihilation” (Macey, 2012, p. 166).

19. This is not to accord such “empirical” children privileged ontological status (since all textual representations should be read as equivalent) but rather to reflect Fanon's own depiction. See Lesnik-Oberstein's (2010) critique of the ways even resolutely antihumanist accounts, such as Edelman (2004), fall foul of this error.

20. Which Macey (2012) attributes to Sartre's Preface rather than Fanon's text in WE.

21. Earlier cultural studies reception of Fanon's writings tended to overlook his medical/psychiatric/therapy background: c.f. the biographical gloss provided in the influential 1999 Visual Culture reader (p. xi) “He remained in France after the war to study essays and plays and while there wrote his most influential statement of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)”. His work is, however, also discussed within specifically psychiatric literatures, especially as he also wrote important critiques of French colonial psychiatry and its demeaning depictions of “native” mental illness (see Keller, 2007; Menozzi, 2015; Murard, 2008; Razanajao, Postel, & Allen, 1996).

22. However, I want to keep some distance from Stockton's (2009) “child queered by color” which, in my view, takes a worryingly assimilative approach that not only reinstates identity politics but also its prime problem of hierarchies of oppression, by subordinating racism to a general and diluted notion of “queer”.

23. “Apocalyptic” is Fanon's description of the Swedish journalist's report of a seven-year-old child who had survived terrible atrocities demanding revenge for the death of his parents he quotes in the Preface to DC.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erica Burman

Erica Burman is Professor of Education, at the Manchester Institute of Education, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK, and Visiting Professor at University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor, Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway. She co-founded the Discourse Unit (www.discourseunit.com), a transinstitutional, transdisciplinary network researching the reproduction and transformation of language and subjectivity. Erica works on critical developmental and educational psychology, feminist theory, childhood studies, and conceptualizing and challenging state and interpersonal violence in relation to minoritized women and children (see [email protected] and www.ericaburman.com). She is the author of Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Routledge, 2008, 3rd ed.), Developments: Child, Image, Nation (Routledge, 2008), and is a co-editor of the SAGE Encyclopaedia of Childhood and Childhood Studies (forthcoming).