Frantz Fanon and the Violence of Colonialism

Josh Landy
Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

Frantz Fanon
National liberation. National renaissance. The restoration of nationhood to the people. Commonwealth.

Josh Landy
Frantz Fanon and the Violence of Colonialism.

Frantz Fanon
Whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Josh Landy
Should there be limits to violence in the service of liberation?

Ken Taylor
Is violence the only language colonial oppressors understand?

Monty Python
Shut up! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being repressed!

Ken Taylor
How did Frantz Fanon influence anti-colonial and national liberation movements around the world?

Nigel Gibson
He was the first within the revolutionary movement, within anti-colonial movement to raise these kinds of questions.

Josh Landy
Our guest is Nigel Gibson from Emerson College.

Nigel Gibson
He’s a philosopher and he raised these questions concretely. I think that’s why Fanons is still relevant.

Ken Taylor
Frantz Fanon—coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Must colonized people resort to violence to achieve liberation?

Josh Landy
Won’t violence just beget more violence?

Ken Taylor
Isn’t armed struggle sometimes the only available option?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except you intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where I teach philosophy, and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today it’s Frantz Fanon, violence, and the struggle against colonialists.

Ken Taylor
Now Fanon is not what you call a touchy feely philosopher, a judge in his most influential work, the wretched of the earth. He says this decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives for the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonist. That’s pretty strong stuff.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And he wasn’t kidding around. He also said that for the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.

Ken Taylor
Now I have to admit, I kind of much prefer Gandhi’s model of how to resist colonialism. I mean, Conte resisted colonialism intensely. But he didn’t let out the violence.

Josh Landy
Yeah, well, for no dismisses the idea of non violence. He says it’s just a creation of colonialism.

Ken Taylor
Yes. Yeah. From fans a little paradoxical to me. I mean, finances. Colonialism itself is a system of violence. So how can it possibly create the idea of non violence?

Josh Landy
Well, you got to think about it this way. There’s a moment in which the colonizers realized the jig is up. And at that moment, they co opted local elite. So the intellectuals, the priests, the preachers, the movers and shakers in the political class, those folks become so deeply colonized, they start collaborating with the colonizers to keep a lid on

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on, why would they do a thing like that? Well, because

Josh Landy
of conditioning, right? So those folks are conditioned by the colonizers to see revolution, as a threat, a threat to values like dignity, equality, individualism, reasonableness, well, wait, wait,

Ken Taylor
wait, wait a minute, folks are really important values, and they’re really well worth preserving the condition and I mean, those are important

Josh Landy
values spoken like another colonized intellectual. So what tell you reject the values of your white European colonizers create new values for yourself,

Ken Taylor
Josh Gee, thanks, dude. I love

Josh Landy
you, dude. I’m just, I’m just channeling

Ken Taylor
Okay, channel on help me see more of this. Okay, so

Josh Landy
here’s the idea. The colonizers get so deep into the conscience of the colonized, colonized elite in particular, that those elites come to endorse the alien values as if they were their own. That’s

Ken Taylor
alien. Equality and alien value. That’s a universal value.

Josh Landy
That’s exactly what the colonizers want you to believe. It’s true. It’s a lie. And once you swallow that lie, it’s easy to believe that nonviolent reform is the way forward

Ken Taylor
I still don’t get it. Why reject values like individualism or reasonable misery quality as alien lies I don’t get why why is that?

Josh Landy
Well, so for one thing, those who preach those ideas are hypocritical. I mean, that they’re claiming them for themselves, but completely denying them the cause.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I get that. So just be more consistent. Well, right. But there’s another

Josh Landy
thing and it’s even deeper problem. And that is that the colonizers are going to use those values as weapons to atomize, the colonized to divide the column

Ken Taylor
and look like I’m sorry, I prefer reformed to revolution.

Josh Landy
Of course, you do colonize deletes always do you get a seat at the table of reasonableness and become an Oh, so reasonable instrument of the colonized? Like Josh,

Ken Taylor
I own or you or anybody else can call me that colonize black guy all he wants. But you know, what, you still haven’t told me once about reform.

Josh Landy
Right? Okay. Well, I mean, the problem is that it changes nothing at a deep structural fundamental level, at least not for the mass. And that’s why on finance view, it’s always the masses who are the leading edge of revolution, not the CO opted elites.

Ken Taylor
So you’re telling me he really thinks that nonviolent reform, the kind of stuff we associate with Gandhi, or Martin Luther King is where sellouts who are blind to their own colonisation and complicit in not just their own oppression, but in the oppression of the masses they’re supposed to serve? He really thinks that that’s what he says. But doesn’t he see come on that nonviolent reform if it could be carried out, it actually promises the best of both worlds? It promises reconciliation between the colonizer and the colonized on on the basis that they’re sincere and working out on potentially shared values, and it promises old hat without bloodshed that’s much better

Josh Landy
now. So look at these two worlds, the world of colonized in the world the colonized, they’re completely incompatible. The only path to liberation for the colonized is to smash the colonial world.

Ken Taylor
Keep it what’s the argument for that

Josh Landy
argument? Colonists may offer high minded arguments and pretty speeches, but but finance is the When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machete.

Ken Taylor
What a downer dude and what a bleak picture.

Josh Landy
Well, colonizers may not like it but colonized people the world over have found it deeply inspiring. I

Ken Taylor
know that’s true. I know you’re right about that. And to give us a wider sample of the reception of this very challenging, provocative thinker, we sent a roving philosophical reporter, Liza veal to talk to scholars from across the academic disciplines to find out how they interpret fennel and his legacy. She files this report.

Louis Gordon
I don’t feel he’s misunderstood. I know he’s misunderstood. And deliberately so in many cases,

Aishwary Kumar
a lot of liberals when they read fan on think, Oh, he’s so constantly angry. I think he’s a man who deploys irony to the most devastating effect

Jane Gordon
in his energy and intellect for ferocious and he was really unforgiving of people who didn’t kind of rise to the occasion of giving the world everything they had.

Louis Gordon
He simultaneously wrote as a poet, and philosopher, a psychiatrist, and historian, sociologists, a political activists, a humanist, a lover, he wrote is all those things at once.

Nigel Gibson
Frantz Fanon grew up on a small Caribbean island under the control of a few French colonizers. He was a teenager when he voluntarily enlisted in the war against the Nazis. Jane Gordon teaches political science at the University of Connecticut,

Jane Gordon
you really believed when he enlisted. There, he was fighting for liberty and he was really moved by French Republican ideals.

Nigel Gibson
But on the frontlines, he found that to his white fellow soldiers, he was still merely a colonial subject.

Jane Gordon
She came back and said, You know, I was really fighting in a White Man’s War, where the people who were most directly implicated were ready to make the risks I was,

Nigel Gibson
in his writing phenomenal go on to challenge liberal European ideals and reveal how saturated they were with colonialism. He got a reputation for rejecting civilized democracy in favor of violent revolution. Louis Gordon, who teaches philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut says that’s the dismissive oversimplification.

Louis Gordon
The first thing to remember is Fanon was anti violence. In fact, he detested it. But he his position was that if you detest something, it doesn’t mean you sit passively on the side and let it happen.

Nigel Gibson
The French did not receive his ideas. Well,

Louis Gordon
it’s frightening to see people are colonized or degraded, stand up and say they’ll fight for their rights that’s treated in and of itself as violence.

Nigel Gibson
And on an interpersonal level among intellectuals Fanon was marginalized

Louis Gordon
the very idea of a black man saying, I’m your intellectual, equal, or in some cases, I mean, intellectual superior. I mean, finance equals where people like Sartre Merleau Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, those were his equals. And so the very idea that he will never stand prostrate in front of a white person. In other words, he never called called demurred. He never presented himself as small.

Nigel Gibson
But since his death, finance work has only grown in relevance, Aishwary Kumar, Professor of History at Stanford, says that in the aftermath of widespread decolonization around the world, people turn to Vietnam to investigate why

Aishwary Kumar
colonization did not actually make the Empire disappeared.

Nigel Gibson
Fanon wrote about the economic, cultural and psychological ways that colonization persists, even after the formal political power is gone.

Jane Gordon
When you structure an entire society around a certain set of political and social relations and economic relations. You can’t suddenly undo it.

Nigel Gibson
Jane Gordon from the University of Connecticut says, this time period and the question of what to do over persistent Empire revived heated debates over Fanon

Jane Gordon
because Fanon was one of the figures who gave the most compelling case for not only the viability of revolution, but the need for it. There was a lot of moves to try to discredit them. His critics argued revolution is a is a dead project is behind us. We can radically transform societies anymore.

Nigel Gibson
For a lot of people who study Fanon, there are limits to how far they’re willing to go with him. FrostWire Kumar, it’s phenomenal idea of cathartic violence, violence that psychologically liberates colonized people,

Aishwary Kumar
many of us have been uneasy about that one place, that that piece of targeted violence, or non wants us to go in order to be just simply free.

Nigel Gibson
Today, finance ideas about radical change and violence have a new relevance. Kumar points out that the Antifa movement with their embrace of violence against white supremacy and fascism asks many of the same questions that Fernanda for Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza veal.

Ken Taylor
Thanks, Eliza for that report. I’m Ken Taylor here with my Stanford colleague Josh Landy. And today we’re thinking about federal violence in the struggle against colonialism.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Nigel Gibson, Professor in the Institute for liberal arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, and co author of France funnel, psychiatry and politics. Nigel, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nigel Gibson
Thank you very much for having me.

Ken Taylor
So, Nigel, you grew up. I don’t want to diss the country of your origin, but is one of the world’s great colonial powers. So how did you first become interested in fan Oh, who is so intensely anti colonialist?

Nigel Gibson
I just graduated from the University of Aberystwyth in one of England’s first colonies, and a young anti apartheid activist. I came across this pamphlet by two Marxist humanist John Allen and Lou Turner called Franz Fanon, Soweto and American black thought. I was particularly interested in how Steve Biko in South Africa had had appropriated Fanon and thought about Fanon through his particular context, and I was interested in what might we might now call travelling theory, and how you could use theoreticians from different periods and different contexts. And at the same time thinking about the struggle in Northern Ireland during the high period of the troubles you might remember in 81, yeah, was the hunger strike. So it was all those events coinciding, I wasn’t at the time an academic I, and I was just a sort of young activist.

Josh Landy
Yeah. So I mean, you’re referring to the struggles that that were a mix of violence, not so you know, a hunger strike, but also terrorism. So what do you think we started out with Ken and I have a conversation a moment ago, about, you know, that line about cannonballs and bloody knives. So, so what’s what’s funnels actual position on balance sheet MEC trying to justify it, or is he just describing what happens? You know, whether justified or not,

Nigel Gibson
I think he’s doing both things. But he’s doing more than that. I think he’s trying to sort of understand violence. The first chapter in the Wretched of the Earth is called concerning violence or, or on violence, and he’s trying to figure out, you know, Cologne is not just the colonial context, which is incredibly violent, one of appropriation and, you know, occupation of land and people, but also he’s writing within the colonial war, the anti colonial war in Algeria, and also liberation movements in Africa. So he’s trying to figure out how, how can you move what is essentially a violent, the internalization of violence and violence itself being played out all the time in society one way or the other? How can you move that towards the source of that violence? Yeah, and I think as your regime, his

Josh Landy
diagnosis of the colonial violence is really powerful. But of course, a question that comes up a lot around for now is, is does he seems to be celebrating violence, even though he knows other options like the Gandhi option, are available? So he talks about, you know, the violence is investable, positive formative features that rids the colonizer inferiority complex and things like this. He seems to be celebrating. Yeah, that is anti colonial. Yeah, that

Ken Taylor
it’s a cathartic self. self actualization thing?

Nigel Gibson
Yes, he certainly is. But on the other hand, you have to read the whole book as well. Because where he says that, in the first chapter by the last chapter on colonial wars and mental disorders, you’re talking about violence as a problematic? That’s true. Other words, how do you build a new society on top of all this trauma and violence that’s occurred? So but again, it’s a kind of much more nuanced notion of violence, then what then one gets, if one just reads the first? Yeah,

Ken Taylor
I get I get that. I mean, he was a psychiatrist, and he treated people who were suffering from the trauma of violence, but I don’t quite know what he thought. I mean, I know that in the wretched of the earth, He says, the creation of a sort of non impetus for nonviolent in some kind of elites, within these colonial societies is just the creation of the colonial violence. But what does he think about people, you know, movements like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, and what does he think about those votes? And that kind of resistance movement?

Nigel Gibson
Yeah, I mean, that’s, I think it’s a very good question. But, again, the problem he’s facing in Algeria is is intransigence by the colonial authorities, terror, torture, incredible violence of occupied colonial Algeria. So I think it’s, you know, obviously King comes later. He doesn’t really say much about Gandhi and his critique of, of those who want to follow a known nonviolent path in Algeria, is essentially that they, he sees them as not really fundamentally undermining the colonial regime, but wanting to come to some agreement with it.

Ken Taylor
Right, exactly, exactly. And that’s out of their colonized consciousness and all that which we’re going to dig into a bit more. After a short break. You’re listening to philosophy Doug. Today we’re thinking about Frantz Fanon with Nigel Gibson from Emerson College.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’ll look at the consciousness of the colonized. It’s fun all right to dismiss European values as an alien presence foisted on the colonized. And if so, how can the colonize throw those values off and create new ones that are authentically their own

Ken Taylor
consciousness colonialization and the recreation of value plus your calls and emails when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
That was MCs allow a singer born in Senegal comparing the colonial oppression of Africans to modern day exploitation of the developing world. I’m Josh Landy, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And we’re asking about the postcolonial philosopher friends funnel. I guess it’s Nigel Gibson from Emerson College.

Josh Landy
So Nigel, let’s start this segment by digging deeper and something that Ken and I were talking about earlier, the notion of colonized consciousness, finance seems to think about colonialism, not just as a physical occupation of somebody else’s land, but also as a psychological like occupation of somebody else’s mind. So So what does that claim come to? How is that even possible?

Nigel Gibson
I mean, I think it’s possible because, well, for a number of reasons, one, there’s some consent among some colonized people to be colonized in the sense of that is the way of the world. And that one has to become, you know, to make it in the world is to take on the values of colonization. That’s really that’s really the the thesis of black skin white masks. So that’s the white mask

Josh Landy
that he’s referring to,

Ken Taylor
right. So the colonized elite, are you telling me that’s not something he thinks of as something done to them, but it’s something they in some sense, participate in and cooperate in do to themselves is that his view,

Nigel Gibson
and it’s a structure to it, it’s a society in which they live and grow up, and it’s the reality of, of, of life. And there’s also a consensual element to it, which is why he sees, you know, Black Skin, White Masks as part of the work of, of deconstructing that.

Ken Taylor
So tell me more about that. Because it that’s, that makes it sound like, I mean, it makes it sound different from slavery. I mean, I don’t I mean, I think I always tell students, I teach this course on self recognition. I always tell students, the worst kind of oppression is the oppression that blinds you from yourself. And it’s really hard to make somebody blind to their own possibilities. Right? The slavery may do that. But even the slaves have this kind of resistance. I mean, even you know, even in the boys is kind of talk of double consciousness, there’s always the interiority that won’t be fully colonized, that’s resist against the, how the other sees, I mean, is there nothing like that? I mean, always, or is a for known just saying black skin white man. Is it just saying no, you know, they don’t even have double consciousness. There’s no interiority struggling against the colonizer. Oh, what does he think about those kinds of issues?

Nigel Gibson
I think there’s more than double consciousness. If you look at the van onze biography, it gives you a sense of where he’s coming from. And he as a young man, at 17, he wanted to join the Free French, and fight against Nazism here. So so he very much saw himself as French, and imbibing its culture and values against Nazism, his experience of the Second World War, he realized that French civilization wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. And that black skin white masks is really about the confrontation of a black man arriving in Paris, and not being seen as French but being seen as black. So that creates like this kind of internal conflict, that that in a certain sense, moves away from a passive acceptance of colonialism to a reaction, the question then becomes, well, how do you react to it? You can react to it by in many different ways, as he tries to explain in black skin white masks, but many of them have failed somehow you have to destroy the internalization of the white master.

Josh Landy
Right. And that makes excellent sense. There’s also seems like it’s in keeping record keeping the Dubois notion double consciousness, the part where it gets interesting and potentially controversial, it seems to me is what can I were discussing earlier about, you know, how much of the ideology the belief systems you have to overthrow so these, you know, universal values or quote unquote, universal values like equality, this but I really think that the colonized have to overthrow that in order to be free of the psychological colonial yoke.

Nigel Gibson
I think phenomena is interestingly not a binary thinker in the sense that he’s very much influenced by Marx, Hegel, lecarre. Freud, you know, sought white men,

Ken Taylor
are there any other nygean influences to minimally, I

Nigel Gibson
would argue, but the thing is, in other words, he’s not saying I mean, he says at the end of Richard the earth, that all these tremendous values that, that in that are associated with European civilization that Europe’s failed. And it’s really our job talking to his comrades in, you know, then third world to develop a new humanism. So he’s not giving up universals. He’s not giving up notions of freedom and equality. He’s just basically arguing straightforwardly that that Europe’s fail on its mission.

Ken Taylor
So let me ask you about that. Josh said to me, when I pressed him on this point, he said, there’s two points right there there is, there is the hypocrisy of the European colonizers, right? They have all these values that they parade under, but they don’t. Right. But then he also said something about, which seems to be right, as a friend of mine reads it, the Europe has weaponized these, these, these values and, and uses them to atomize and divide. And he talks a lot about the divisions within colonized populations that are the result of like the weaponizing of these of these values, Rachel isms a good I like it. Yeah, but so, but I could use a perfectly good thing as a weapon to in the right circumstances. Is it the weaponization of these values? That’s a problem, or is it that the values themselves are intrinsically problematic? I, I mean, I asked you that just as a jury, I don’t have a view myself. So I just want you to enlighten me,

Nigel Gibson
I think in a certain way, the values are empty. It’s not simply hypocrisy. It’s also that, you know, they’ve raised these questions, but Europe has failed in the sense that that individualism is the most narrow kind of notion of individualism, fraternity as the most kind of narrow notion of fraternity. I mean, he wants all freedom is based on the expropriation of, you know, the colonized lands and so forth. So in other words, it’s, it’s a very narrow in particular idea, rather than what he would see as one opening up to really express human freedom. I

Ken Taylor
see. I gotcha. You’re listening to philosophy. Doug, we’re talking about Frantz Fanon. We’ve got a caller, Alicia from Berkeley on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Alicia.

Speaker 1
Thank you, I just want to remind us that we actually became a democracy by taking up arms against the English that our colonists and, you know, we didn’t seem to have any problem with that. And what I think is really interesting is that the instances when the colonize, becomes the colonizer, like, for instance, we didn’t have any trouble trying to colonize the Indians and we couldn’t do it, we kill them. And Israel right now is having no problem colonizing Palestine, if you can call it that. So I just wondered about how you see that dynamic?

Ken Taylor
Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not gonna answer that. Guys. I’m gonna ask Nigel that question. What do you think I don’t?

Nigel Gibson
Well, what do you know what the only time he mentions the US in the rest of the earth, he calls it a monster. I think it’s a very good point, the kind of transformation into opposite of a struggle for freedom into a new a new domination. And he’s very, he’s particularly concerned about this in the wretched of the earth, and he talks about the future of the post colonial nations, Rhian scribing, the racism, and the notions of hierarchy and dominance that they’ve all had that have been part of the colonial regime. Right. So he sees it as a real problem.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And also the violence when he talks in the wretched of the earth about the the dangerous potential for violence to continue after decolonization. So, so that’s a I think it’s he’s, I totally agree with you. He’s raised sophisticated and complex on this question of violence, he seems to see a positive side to it. Sometimes he I agree with you, he he thinks that taking up arms can also cause PTSD, not just to the victim of violence, but also to the perpetrator of violence. Yeah. And he thinks, gosh, if you get in this sort of train of violence, how do you get off? So? So how do you feel those things? I mean, what’s what do you think financial sees as the the solution? How do you take up violence in the right kind of way, such that you don’t get PTSD or minimal PTSD, and that it doesn’t just continue in this endless cycle?

Ken Taylor
And I want to add to that, then I don’t want to pile on to you, but it but I want to give you a second thing to think about that I think is deeply related to Josh. I mean, think about the creation of recreation of value if you’re to throw off all these sham values, right and violently in your use in this catharsis act of self declaration. Still you once you do that, you’re faced with the question, Who am I? And what do I believe? What do I value a house? And what’s the recipe for that? I mean, so it’s a whole it’s a whole complicated stew. I see the negative part but I don’t see the positive constructive part.

Nigel Gibson
I think you have to see the vial. As as political, revolutionary political violence, so it has to be framed, channeled, organized. That doesn’t mean that problems don’t emerge from that, as Josh was mentioning, from from the case studies in the fifth chapter, where he’s talking about militants that have a militant who had planted a bomb, who, who, on the anniversary of planting that bomb, has terrible sort of vertigo every single year worrying about who he might have blown up, so forth. So the political violence doesn’t end the issue. And he talks about having to bandage the wounds for many years to come. Yeah, he understands. But on the other hand, facing it fully having to see a kind of everyone involved in the development of the new society. So it’s not political party or an elite, or a small group, it has to be has to be very much opened up to the participation of everyone. And that’s what he also argues in the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness. So I think in those kinds of new relationships that are developing with the whole nation, involved in the most kind of democratic way, that in a certain sense, is the practice of, you know, of a new value. Yes, highly democratic, highly egalitarian, not worrying about you know, and of course, all this might be considered and dismisses, idealistic, but he sees it, it’s very, very practical. That, in fact, is the only practical solution.

Ken Taylor
So see, you are back to your he’s a double kind of guy. He’s a complicated kind of guy. Because you mentioned equality and democracy. Those are the things that Europe parades under, but they merely parade under, but then if you don’t just parade under them, but try to make them real. That’s an urgent thing of national life and really hard to pull off. And he sounds like you saying he recognizes how hard that is to pull off well. So this is a nuanced, sophisticated guy. But we got some more callers on the line. Arianna, from San Francisco.

Speaker 1
Thank you for taking my call. I have a comment about the cause of violence, revolution and terrorism. And also two remedies that I’d like you to hear about. The first thing is, is that when we engage in war and colonialism which America does, we’re demonstrating a form of pathological narcissism in which we express feelings of entitlement for other countries things. And some of these countries are the poorest in the world, we consign the people to the most desperate, anguished lives, and then they respond with terrorist acts or violence. And we wonder why that is. And then we over produce goods, and we undersell them, and we cannibalize the planet. Now, there are a couple ways of thinking about remedies. One would be to understand that everyone is our brother and sister. And that sharing could end war and terrorism, for example, there could be a World Food Bank, in which surplus goods could be located in one place, and could address the starving people in the world. And then the second thing is that war needs to be understood as a criminal act. And the spoils of war and the motivations of the wealthy, including when they prey on their own people like with a tax bill. Yeah, so most vulnerable people, that those wars need to be outlawed, and that there needs to be a section of the United Nations to uphold those laws. National

Ken Taylor
Ariana, I’m gonna I’m gonna let Nigel respect you you put a lot on the table. And thanks for putting so much on the table. I’m gonna let Nigel respond to whatever he wants to respond to in your on your comments.

Nigel Gibson
Thanks for that, Ariana, right. I tend to agree with what you’ve said. I just want to emphasize that for fun on. There’s real material. We’ve been talking about psychology and consciousness. But there’s also real material interests at stake. And we can’t kind of let go of that.

Ken Taylor
But I want to ask you something, though, because we read those passages from fennel. I know there’s lots of context with these two worlds. The colonial the world of the colonists and the World Congress just collide and are incompatible. That’s not a recipe for touchy feely, cosmopolitanism, that’s a recipe for there’s going to be a winner and a loser. You said Europe has failed. Can Europe in some arrangement coexists with the world that had colonized I mean, you can say get them out of there. But then unless they’re kind of roundly defeated, like the way the Nazis were roundly defeated, and and push back completely, right. I mean, is it like a clash of things that cannot be reconciled in some cosmopolitan order or or what?

Nigel Gibson
It can’t come together? As it is, so Europe needs to have a revolution as well. I mean, you know, I think that’s what Fanon is really saying, He’s saying, you know, the clash is between when he talks about the Manichaean ism of the colonial situation of the US, he talks about the rich colonial town and the poor, colonized town where there’s no shoes, there’s no light, people are kind of hemmed in, and so forth against this sort of riches of the colonial town. There, it’s a zero sum game one, one has to be removed. Well, so that’s the end of colonialism. So I think his argument about Europe is that Europe, you know, he sees the struggle against colonialism as aiding the liberation of Europe from its situation,

Ken Taylor
but Right, this sounds like I mean, we’ll get and we’ll talk more about his Marxism. But this sounds like a worldwide revolution kind of talk, right? We’re talking about not just the local battle against colonialism, but kind of a worldwide struggle that has to radically rewrite the world is, I mean, just tell me really briefly, am I hearing you rightly or wrongly?

Nigel Gibson
Well, I think the anti colonial struggle is global.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Okay, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re asking you about the life and thought of France from home with Nigel Gibson from Emerson College.

Josh Landy
In our final segment, we’ll talk about liberation identity and class. How does finance commitment to Marxism with its emphasis on class relate to his commitment to Black Liberation with its emphasis on race,

Ken Taylor
race, class and identity politics when Philosophy Talk continues?

Is violence really the only way to chase them crazy bald heads out of town? I’m Ken Taylor. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, our guest is Nigel Gibson, co author of France funnel psychiatry and politics

Ken Taylor
read from San Francisco’s on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk

Speaker 2
read. I guess my question falls in the category of the identity politics segment. About 40 years ago, I lived on the edge of the Castro, which at the same time I was reading from now on it seemed to me a lot of what’s for nonroad seem to be applied to the Castro it was like our colonized population living there. And since then, a lot has happened. Specifically gay marriage, the argument for which was based on equality. And so what we have now is a kind of a simulated male population would phenomenon I realized that I didn’t talk about sexual minorities. But what does your guest what would your guests say that phenomena our guests Fanon would say about this phenomenon, as it affects sexual minorities?

Ken Taylor
Good question. You gotta you gotta stop there. You gotta hypothesis Nigel. It’s like, yeah, become the bourgeoisie.

Nigel Gibson
Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think you could actually read his critique of the national bourgeoisie from the Wretched of the Earth, I mean, applying fan on, in other words, to that situation, and perhaps get some insight into that. Right.

Ken Taylor
But that suggests, I mean, so but that suggests me just playing with reads thought a little bit that suggests that maybe this becoming the colonized bourgeoisie is not a bad thing. I don’t think I don’t think gays regret going from an aggrieved minority, to a bourgeoisie with I mean, there might be some radical gays that says screw marriage, right? That’s the bourgeoisie institution.

Nigel Gibson
Yes. I mean, the question when you talk about gays, who are you talking about? Is this is this the majority of people? Are, is it a small number of, of middle class successful, gay people? It really sort of it narrows the question of gay liberation to one particular thing. I think that would be one of the issues to open up. That’s

Ken Taylor
like those colonized leads, right? They become like the bourgeoisie, and they leave behind the masses, and they think they’ve got it made, but they’re just an instrument. But I want to ask you another kind of question. So I think if funnel has some kind of committed Marxists, I think of Marxist is emphasizing class conflict over everything else. But I also know he was an advocate of black liberation in the end, in liberation of brown people around the world. Some people say there’s sometimes a conflict between an emphasis on say, racial struggle and class struggle. What did Fanon think about that? Did he see any conflict there?

Nigel Gibson
Now, that’s a great question because he not he doesn’t begin from that standpoint. He doesn’t begin although He’s certainly an avid reader of Marx and interested in Marx, I don’t think it’d be right to think of him as a Marxist. Really, he doesn’t begin from that particular point of view. And interestingly, in Black Skin, White Masks when he reacts to sorts reading of Negritude as a particular, in other words, black consciousness as a particular, and class as a, as a universal, he reacts quite strongly to it and says that, you know, that salt had betrayed. He certainly begins with an input, you know, in terms of his own interest. He begins with black consciousness, he begins with the importance of national consciousness, doesn’t mean he ends there, right? But he doesn’t have this kind of highly abstract notion of class, right? From where to begin with

Josh Landy
seems like he shares he shares an intuition Ralph Ellison, he says the same thing, invisible men. There’s this tension between a Marxist view on which race is just a kind of a subset of grass problems, and a more expansive view that says, No, you know, even if you were to have the revolution, these issues might well not go away. That’s

Nigel Gibson
exactly and I mean, and I think the thing that connect, I mean, it’s interesting, some early researchers from the 70s really made a connection between Marx’s early humanist essays like on alienation, and so forth, and spoke about Fanon in those terms that might be more fruitful than thinking about it in terms in sort of economic terms of class and class struggle.

Ken Taylor
One of the things that strikes me about for now, again, I’m only a I have read shallowly into phenol on occasion, and more deeply in preparation for this show. So, you know, I may have this completely wrong, but one of the things that strikes me is that he seems to believe, well, it seems to me that he thinks of colonialism as somehow part of the capitalist project, somehow. And then he also thinks that one of the things that the colonizers do is create, and then exploit class divisions within the colonized people. So this, this is this thing about the colonized elite, and who served the colonial regime. It’s separate from the peasants. He’s got all this stuff about the rural peasantry and, and the urban sort of quasi elite and cab drivers, the intellectuals of that and, and he seems to believe that somehow the colonizers are expert at both creating and exploiting these class divisions. That is a fair reading.

Nigel Gibson
Yes, I mean, I think that’s right. I mean, he he he, you know, though, there was an excellent essay, written again in the 70s, about how he read reappropriate smarters categories from the 18th Brumaire and applies them to a colonial situation. So you kind of get like a lump and Bush was the right to use those terms. And the peasantry takes the role of the revolutionary rather than the proletariat, who are this very small, privileged sect within the urban area. So he Anons mine, so he’s kind

Ken Taylor
of, I mean, I, I haven’t think of the Marxist movements or communist movements around the world anyway, has as devolving into what I think of as Vanguard ism, right? Some lead speaking for a mute class that cannot speak for itself, and somehow they’re supposed to be part of that mute class, but speak on behalf of that and all that stuff. And I always think Yeah, right. These hottie Vanguard’s turn out exploit, I say, the Soviet Union supposed to be a worker state, but what happened to the workers, the Vanguard said, Heck with the workers. That’s one reading of history. And and so it seems to me that he sort of like an anti Vanguard is, right, the Vanguard, the elite, they’re the prop, they’re part of the problem, right? And it’s always like the the peasant class that is the leading edge of a revolution, which sounds very non Marxist to me,

Josh Landy
and also paradoxical because he himself is an elite. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
What do you think of that? Well,

Nigel Gibson
I mean, that’s where the, you know, one of the problematics is, I think, the intellectuals, right, who are certainly part of the kind of middle class are an important factor, a very important factor in his narrative of how, you know, the revolution begins. Right? And it’s the kind of split off of more radical intellectuals in the urban areas who quote unquote, discover, you know, that the peasantry have actually never given up being revolutionary. So the intellectuals play a highly important role. So it’s not just simply, you know, spontaneous revolt of the peasantry, there isn’t the importance of organization. He says that in second chapter of the rich of the earth, in fact, you know, in a kind of Lenin his sense there needs to be an organization. Right. However, that is most certainly not the end point. But that sounds the the strategic point, right, not the end point.

Josh Landy
But that goes back something you were saying earlier that that clearly, the colonization of the mind isn’t all pervasive right Fanon himself was was radicalized and, and so it’s, it’s clearly possible it’s not that all of the intellectual class, you know, responds to the incentives of accepting the the ideology promulgated by the colonizer.

Nigel Gibson
Yes, absolutely. Because I mean black skin white masks is all about that in the sense of thinking about what what’s the wise fan on right writing this book, right? He thinks the book actually can aid desalination. If you think that then you obviously think that people that read it can be, you know, can be desalinated.

Ken Taylor
So I want to ask you one last question. I admire certain aspects of Finola rehmeyer, his sort of searing courage and fearlessness. But there is this thing that I think he’s one and played an important role in. Paul Ricoeur has this distinction between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutic, hermeneutics of faith, hermeneutics of suspicion is kind of what he he practices against European self defense is of things like equality and reasonableness and all that stuff. Because he says, Look, what really they’re getting at. I think of him as one of the major sources of this. I mean, there are lots of sources Freud and Nietzsche and Marx. But would you agree with me that one of his enduring legacies, in the humanities, especially as that we read all these texts, all these classical old texts with deep suspicion? Now, I think that’s a bad thing. You may think that’s a good thing.

Nigel Gibson
Well, I think it’s a good thing to read them through finance eyes.

Ken Taylor
Right? Do you agree with me that he’s one of the, you know, major movers and shakers have a what I call the hermeneutics of suspicion? Well, I suppose.

Nigel Gibson
I mean, obviously, he’s been dead over 50 years, but but the whole notion of decolonizing caught decolonizing thought decolonizing. The whole work of decolonization? Yes. I mean, that’s a work of suspicion in a certain sense.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Well, no, no, this has been a fascinating conversation. It’s helped to decolonize my mind, and it did it without violence. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. It’s

Nigel Gibson
been really thank you so much for having me on. Okay.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Nigel Gibson. He’s a professor in the Institute for liberal arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. He’s co author, a Frenchman on psychiatry and politics. So Josh, what are you thinking with, you’re either colonizing or decolonize, the colonized mind?

Josh Landy
My mind is least somewhat because, like I, you know, I’ve always been fascinated by Fanon. I’m more convinced than ever, that he’s offering a really powerful diagnosis of the psychological damage done by colonialism. And that’s something that, you know, just didn’t exist before final. I guess it still leaves me with an open question. How much of the Western frame of thinking do formerly colonized people need to overthrow me? Appiah has this lovely line? You know, it’s not universalism that people are really opposed to it’s the fate kind. It’s Western hegemony posing writers, right. So for me, that’s an open question. Maybe some of these values have to go but maybe not all?

Ken Taylor
Well, I think that’s a really interesting question. I mean, because and I don’t know that we got an answer from Nigel, I don’t know if there’s an answer. Inferno. I mean, once if you throw off the colonizers, through this violent act of catharsis and self blaming, you’re still faced with who am I? What am I be? What am I to do? How are we to organize ourselves? All you’ve gotten so far is not that but but that’s not a basis for a life in the world.

Josh Landy
You don’t reject the quality just because right? Well, because they

Ken Taylor
some people weaponize quality some people. Yeah. So I think these are really hard things. And I don’t know what the what the forward motion is. But you know what, I know one thing, this conversation goes forward. It goes forward at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is Coda toe, ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in that community by visiting our website clicking on a few buttons that’s at philosophy dog, dot o RG.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you send it to us at comments at philosophy talked, or G and we might feature it on the blog. Now here’s someone whose mind is so colonized, he can’t stop talking. It’s Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher,

Ian Shoales
even shows when I was in college in the 70s, Frantz Fanon was on every lefties reading list because he was kind of a dreamy guy, handsome soldier, revolutionary philosopher and a psychiatrist to plus he died young, the way we like him dead at 36. He was literally dying of leukemia, and he was last book, The Wretched of the Earth and jump on search, wrote an introduction to it, which helped with sales. A bit many people stopped reading the book after his introduction kind of misrepresented the book itself and as I can tell, Stripe seem to think that Fanon was given permission to use violence and not feel bad about him. Sorry, also seem to think that Fanon wrote the book not for the Western reader, but for the revolutionary oppressed in Algeria or wherever. It’s a kind of how to manual for venting rage. This meant that if a first world person read it, he could pretend he was oppressed, too, which meant permission for COVID young lefties to do whatever they felt like doing. This may or may not have led to a couple idiots from the Weather Underground blowing themselves up at the bombs. I’ll show the kidnapping of Patty Hearst maybe, which in turn led former police officers showing up at a house in Los Angeles to shooter dealt with a six person Symbionese Liberation Army. Close to 10,000 rounds of ammo were fired in a shootout. American exceptionalism at its finest house burned to the ground SLA dead no cops hurt. Oh, and there was the Branch Davidians I guess many dozens dead there and Waco lesson, probably not a good idea to fire automatic weapons police officers, it will not end well actually, that’s the conclusion of Fanon came to. He also noted that oppressor violence against the oppressed is what leads to violence by the oppressed against the oppressors. The trouble there, as we ourselves have seen, this leads the oppressor that is the media to conclude that the oppressed and oppressor are no different, therefore, there is no oppression. Also, the oppressor generally blames the oppressed for violence. Before the Civil War, rebellions by natural or John Brown were considered random acts of terror acts by unstable people. Black people were supposed to wait for the civil war so white people could free them officially, white people won’t like it, but they’ll do it and have heard of cruelty will be the legacy still in the 21st century. It’s ridiculous. The man is still coming down the people as Black Lives Matter has pointed out, this makes some white people so mad all lives matter. They murder between clenched teeth, kind of misses the point really stop shooting unarmed black men in the back at random traffic stops. Is that such an unreasonable demand. More recently, President Trump showed his gift for rising above an issue when he claimed that there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville, Virginia. Therefore, again, anti fascism and fascism are the same thing or at least equivalent. But I believe that violence begets violence, the violence of the colonizer absorbed by the colonized. That’s right. Cultural Appropriation which can lead to a new sense of self among the oppressed, a rising up a burning a cleansing a fire a catharsis, a New World Order once all the oppressors are gone or dead feeling that violence on both sides also leads to PTSD victims by all bitterness, regret endless rage, so many things to look forward to leaving us with the unanswered burning question. When is it okay to punch Nazis? Franz Fanon though should be living at this hour, I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K LW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin. The senior producer

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Collin Pete.

Ken Taylor
Support for philosophy comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University

Ken Taylor
or her other funders, not even when they’re true

Josh Landy
and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG where you can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening, and thank

Josh Landy
you for thinking. thought God gave us Marmolada there’s no moral order his parents this storm. There’s no moral order at all. There’s just this Can my violence conquer yours?