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5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb and accessible contribution to Fanon scholarship, September 12, 2003
With the publication of Nigel Gibson's 'Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination' we now have a third good book on Fanon to go with Lewis Gordon's 1995 'Fanon and the Crisis of European Man' and Ato Sekyi-Otu's 1996 'Fanon's Dialectic of Experience'.
Gibson's prose is elegant and clear and his book is, by far, the best introduction to Fanon's life and work. But it does much more than this. Gibson explains Fanon's theorization of racism and anti-racism through existential and pyschoanalytic theory, his exploration of the promises and dangers of both Negritude and nationalist resistance to colonialism and his thinking about intellectuals, nationalism and humanism. In each case Gibson is able to draw on an understated but expert knowledge of the philosophical and historical contexts in which Fanon wrote as well as the realities of contemporary Africa. The key idea that runs throughout the book is that of the dialectic. Gibson argues, persuasively, that there is an `unstable, critical, and creative element' at the heart of Fanon's thought that seeks to move through apparently `absolute, irreconcilable contradictions' by working in a critical and actional mode for reciprocal and critical agency in the `fluctuating movement' of the objectified towards humanity. This kind of analysis is what we would expect from any responsible engagement with Fanon's work and Gibson develops it very well. But he goes further and makes an original and significant contribution to thinking about Fanon by showing that for Fanon this kind of progress requires the development of a fighting culture.
Gibson works with this idea throughout his book but deals with it most explicitly in a chapter on Fanon's theorization of the lived experience of resistance in the Algerian revolution. Gibson shows that for Fanon military strategies must be subordinated to the political task of bringing into being a `whole universe of resistances'. In Mexico the Zapatista army uses its guns only to create the space for politics and in Durban the movements against disconnections and evictions use their legal arsenal in the same way. In each case the refusal of an elite politics is premised on the desire to develop radically democratic alternatives that are just too large, too multiple and too immediate to be co-opted or mediated. Gibson goes on to show that for Fanon this process requires a constant defense of imagination and creation of the spaces and attitudes necessary for self-creating cultural regeneration. Gibson also explores, in illuminating depth, how Fanon sees the openness, fluidity and instability of this kind of social movement as the key to transcending the Manichean binaries of both colonialism and many responses to it. So for example if colonialism employs its medical technologies in its project of domination the colonized will often develop a deep suspicion of these technologies. But when, in Fanon's words, the doctor is `sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the mechatas, living the drama of the people' then, in Gibson's words `lived experience...liberates and transgresses the restrictive physical and mental boundaries of the colonial...order.'
State seeks to mobilize particular nationalist discourses to produce good citizens - citizens who only take what they can afford and are obedient and docile in the face of the systematic and often violent exclusion of the poor from the means to life. Citizens, who, in other words, wait patiently for things to get better while they get worse. The World Bank, and its academics, journalists and NGOs, seek to mobilize a universalizing set of discourses to produce The Poor - a universal category of people
whose material circumstances are a consequence of the venality of other poor people, inefficiencies on the part of the state and the delusion that they are victims of larger structural forces. Overcoming this delusion and developing entrepreneurship and survivalist organizations that offer mutual support are presented as the only grounds for hope. As these ideological pincers close more tightly the courage and imagination recommended by Fanon and very eloquently explored by Nigel Gibson become ever more necessary and generative.
Nigel Gibson has made a superb and accessible contribution to the study of Fanon. There is no better introductory text and this book is also essential reading for the serious Fanon scholar. But don't let that rare achievement fool you into assuming that the rest of the titles in Polity's Key Contemporary Thinkers series are of equal value. Valerie Kennedy's book on Edward Said is miserably and irredeemably stunted. So it goes.
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