In the first few months of the pandemic, cloistered on a hill in Maine and awaiting my first child’s birth, I read through a number of significant works by Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx authors in theory and theology. I was curious how “place” — as a theoretical category and the fundamental matrix of real life and relationships — functioned in their work and imaginations. I wrote out a number of short essays summarizing what I saw in what I read. I’m not a trained academic and they are by no means perfect. But I share them here as part of my ongoing dialogue in the praxis for liberation. Thank you for being part of this community and conversation!
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Frantz Fanon is globally recognized as an intellectual father of postcolonial and decolonial thought. Born in Martinique and educated as a psychoanalyst in Paris, he spent much of his life committed to African liberation movements, particularly in Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from France.
Homi K. Bhabha writes that Fanon’s text Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before his death, finds continued resonance beyond the immediate circumstance on which he drew “not because the text prophetically transcends its own time, but because of the peculiarly grounded, historical stance it takes toward the future.” Fanon wrote within “the spatial imagination that seems to come so naturally to geopolitical thinking of a progressive, postcolonial cast of mind: margin and metropole, center and periphery, the global and the local, the nation and the world.” Highly attuned to the spatial operations of empire, his analyses of colonialism construct a dialectic between the segregated spaces of whiteness and the significance of the land to native peoples. So it is precisely how attuned to a particular place Fanon’s work is that generates its transcendent power.
Fanon believed that “by penetrating its geographical configuration and classification we shall be able to delineate the backbone on which the decolonized society is organized.” Fanon goes on to lay bare the ordering of resources, bodies, cultures, the pace of time, desires and senses of self that are placially organized by the colonial regime:
“The ‘native’ sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other , but not in the service of a higher unity….The colonist’s sector is built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonist’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the seas, but then you can never get close enough…The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. The colonist’s sector is a white folks’ sector, a sector of foreigners. The colonized’s sector, or at least the ‘native’ quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.” (emphasis mine)
These arrangements are explicitly racialized. Race functions as the organizing principle in colonial space and the political economic built to advance its goals:
“The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”
In defiance of the placial amnesia and physical capture imposed by imperial space-time, the colonized are grounded in reality through their bodies and relationships with the land. Embodiment, for Fanon, appears at the subconscious and unconscious level as the will to resist.
“The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dream of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing.” (emphasis mine)
Oppression disrupts the capacity for a healthy, embodied, collective sense of self. Fanon sounds remarkably like Thurman when he writes on the psychological trauma of the colonized who must continually ask “‘Who am I in reality?” when living under a regime which denies their alterity. In a passage that could describe efforts of the United States to “kill the Indian, save the man” through its system of Indian boarding schools, Fanon describes the efforts of colonial empires to stamp out the last vestiges indigeneity and why such efforts are bound to fail:
“When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technology, etc. But what we should never forget is that the immense majority of colonized peoples are impervious to such issues. For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. (emphasis original)
Culture is continually cultivated by the land which provides the physical and spiritual sustenance of the colonized community. The land is specific. It is the place to which a people’s ancestors belong. However, in a controversial and debated move, Fanon turns to the building of nationalism, grounded in land, across the developing world as a means to create a third pole of power outside the binary rulers of the Cold War geopolitics in which his struggle for decolonization took place.
Violence is everywhere in colonial space, but its true origins and operations are the inversion of the colonists’s perspective. While the colonist fears and avoids the sectors left over for the colonized, policing them aggressively for the sake of “safety,” the colonized know that their reality was birthed and sustained by the colonizer’s violence. The relationship is violent from the “first confrontation…and their cohabitation—or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer—continued at the point of the bayonet” (emphasis mine).
Colonial spaces are demarcated “by the barracks and the police stations” through which sanctioned state violence upholds the unjust social order. It is through looking unblinkingly into the face of this original and sustained act of violence (colonization) that Fanon sanctions the turn to violence for decolonization by the abused. He sees no moral equivalence between the abuser’s violence and the violence of the battered lashing out for freedom to end the source of their abuse once and for all. Surely any Christian commitment which purports to nonviolence must look as unblinkingly and enter a solidarity which suffers as greatly as Fanon modeled.