Frantz Fanon in the Middle East

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In mid-September 2023, POMEPS Board members Laryssa Chomiak, Jillian Schwedler and Lisa Wedeen helped me to convene an extraordinary workshop at CEMAT (Tunis) about the Middle Eastern context and resonances of the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. More than a dozen scholars from the United States, Europe, the UK, North Africa, and East Africa came together to discuss Fanon — the very first POMEPS workshop dedicated to political theory, and another milestone in our efforts to promote transregional scholarship and engagement. Today, I’m delighted to publish the papers from that workshop in our open access journal: POMEPS Studies 53 Frantz Fanon in the Middle East (download free here). Below you can read my introduction in its entirety; I hope it inspires you to read the full collection. There is so much more to Fanon than the caricature which circulated after October 7 — and this collection digs deep into his psychiatric writings and practice, his thinking on racialization and race, the regional and global spread of his anticolonial writings, and more.

Frantz Fanon in the Middle East

Marc Lynch

As a Martiniquais-born, French colonial citizen, intellectual contributor to Algeria’s Revolution, and perhaps the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time, Franz Fanon’s writings have defined intellectual histories of decolonization in the global South and inspired national liberation and freedom movements to this day.  Scholars of the Middle East across a wide range of subfields and disciplines have over the last decade been rediscovering Fanon for insights into the social construction of race, psychoanalysis and the clinic, the possibilities of writing decolonial history, the failures of post-liberation revolutionary elites, and the limitations and necessities of decolonization. The growing academic literature on Fanon in the Middle East moved into the broader public arena last year, in part through reviews of Adam Shatz’s well-timed and beautifully written biography The Rebel’s Clinic, which read Fanon’s ideas through his biographical experience and psychological practice as well as his role in the Algerian war of national liberation.[1]  His views on violence in the context of decolonization struggles, which briefly became an object of great scrutiny in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, were only one part of the much broader multidimensional and sophisticated theoretical engagements with Fanon across Middle Eastern Studies.[2]

Inspired by the emergence over the previous decade of this diverse theoretical and historical literature on Fanon in the Middle East, POMEPS and the Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT)’s Laryssa Chomiak, along with Jillian Schwedler and Lisa Wedeen, convened a workshop on Fanon in late September 2023 – the first POMEPS workshop focused on political theory. The focus on Fanon furthermore continues our efforts at POMEPS to break down artificial barriers between the Middle East and Africa, and between Middle East Studies and the broader discipline.[3] The choice of location was intentional: much of Fanon’s revolutionary writing was done in Tunis, after he was deported from French Algeria for his work with the FLN, and he continues to be revered among Tunisian intellectuals and the broader public. While Fanon wrote for a global audience, he was firmly situated in a North African context and embodied the complex interactions between those countries both with France and with decolonizing Africa: Fanon’s work engages heavily with French philosophers, his career began in France, and his work for the FLN included both diplomatic missions to the Sahel and West Africa.  Discussing Fanon from the global south, as Muriam Haleh Davis reminds us, helps us to situate his thought in its full political context and to rescue his political thought from the particular concerns of American political theorists.[4]

There is an irony that for all the interest in Fanon among anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers across the global South, Fanon made curiously little impact in the Middle East in the early years.[5] Irene Gendzier engaged with Fanon in the pages of The Middle East Journal very early on, highlighting both his clinical practice and his revolutionary appeal, prompting a rebuttal from Charles Butterworth over the applicability of Fanon’s theories of violence from the Algerian context to Palestine and the broader Middle East.[6]  Edward Said drew on and engaged with Fanon in his critique of Oirentalism.[7] But that interest faded quickly, as Khalil Dahbi and Montassir Sakhi observe in this collection. As anticolonial struggles gave way to postcolonial authoritarian state-building, Fanon’s arguments about revolutionary failure (see Hanene Barouni in this collection) and the multiple levels of continuous decolonial work required for fundamental decolonization (see Arwa Awan in this collection) became less convenient to suspicious autocratic regimes. What’s more, the PLO’s move via the Oslo process from national liberation movement to Israel’s partner in management of the occupied Palestinian territories contributed to delegitimizing armed struggle as a form of political action – and, by proxy, the permissibility of invoking Fanon in at least the Palestinian context.

Several authors in this collection take up this question of Fanon’s limited impact on Arab political thought. Dahbi and Sakhi ask, “Why haven’t Arab intellectuals successfully integrated Fanon’s work as an integral part of their political tradition and intellectual heritage?”  In an earlier essay, Omnia Shakria observed that “the preface to the Arabic edition registers disagreements with Fanon’s conceptualization of the “national question,” arguing that the book was written first and foremost for Africa, albeit with wide-ranging resonances for the colonized Third World intellectual in search of the end of colonialism through violence and the pursuit of freedom and dignity.”[8] I suspect that the tensions between Nasser’s pan-Arabism and movements defined by pan-Africanism and the Global South may also have contributed to Fanon’s relegation, with Algeria (and its revolution’s most prominent theorist) defined as “African” and thus immaterial to the concerns of Nasserism or Ba’athism.

The neglect of Fanon in the Middle East should not be overstated. North African scholars, as Muriam Haleh Davis shows in this collection, engaged with Fanon at a much greater level than did their counterparts in the Levant and the Gulf.  Fatah and the Palestinian fedayeen saw the most value in Fanon, in line with their general immersion within global anti-colonial movements.[9] Lauan Al-Khazail in his contribution to this collection shows similar theoretical engagement with Fanon, in his case by the Lebanese Marxist author Mahdi Amil.[10] Rebecca Ruth Gould, in this collection, demonstrates the role Fanon played for Ali Shariati (whether or not they actually exchanged letters) as he grappled with the role of religion in revolutionary change in the Iranian context. More broadly, as several authors in this collection note, Fanon’s ideas were widely discussed in the transnationalized intellectual and political circles of the anticolonial Left.  Emma Stone Mackinnon observes: “Wretched in particular is written as something of a handbook for the anticolonial revolutionary movements of its moment. The national revolutionary organizations to which it was addressed were deeply interconnected, and those networks provided the material infrastructure to circulate ideas and texts. That infrastructure involved publishers and newsletters, actors moving through nodal cities like Tunis, Accra, and Dar es Saleem, and regular meetings in the form of contentious, heady conferences. This rich networking itself was a self-consciously political project, directly defiant of the very compartmentalization Fanon described.” Mackinnon describes Fanon’s thinking as ‘portable’ as he moved within and against the colonial world. Al-Khazail, in this collection, argues for ‘stretching’ Fanon’s insights beyond their original context in the same way that “Sara Salem points out how Fanon stretches established Marxist categories to “contextualize the specificity of capitalism in the colony without completely disregarding the assumptions underpinning Marxism.”[11]

The shifting political context in the Arab world, as well as changes in broader intellectual fashion, helps explain the regional renewal of interest in Fanon. Khalil Dahbi and Montassir Sakhi argued in this collection that the 2011 Arab uprisings in Morocco rescued Fanon’s thought from decades of neglect.[12] As Anna M. Agathangelou put it in an early article applying Fanon’s thought to the uprisings, “engaging with Fanon allows us to understand the key postcolonial predicaments such as the leadership of revolution as well as the national bourgeoisie.”[13] Fanon, from this perspective, helps to explain both the drivers of the uprisings and the failures of many revolutionary elites.  Brahim El-Guabli and Jill Jarvis recently observed that “Frantz Fanon famously analysed the spatial and epistemological regime under colonial occupation, diagnosed the bodily inscription of colonising violence in the very muscles of the colonised, and identified the fundamental instability of colonial force. He also reckoned presciently – on his own deathbed, at the cusp of Algeria’s hard-won independence – with the violence of nationalisms to come. That is, Fanon articulated the task of a decolonisation he would not live to see, and warned that when the national bourgeois took up the relay baton of power, colonial force could simply reorganise itself so that the new army and police become agents of state terror.”[14]  Hanene Barouni in this collection draws on Fanon to analyze the failures of revolutionary elites, showing how his analysis of African anti-colonial struggles helps to explain the inability of Arab revolutionaries to transcend the limitations built into their structural positions – an argument Sara Salem, in particular, has developed in relation to the broader conditions of postcolonial Arab authoritarianism through the development of dependent bourgeois elites and Jasmine Gani has taken up in the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.[15]

The collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has also played a key role in the renewed interest in Fanon. Nearly two decades ago, Irene Gendzier articulated a common sense view: “who can pore over Fanon’s arguments about colonizer and colonized without thinking of Palestine and Iraq?”[16] Many scholars have followed that line of thought. The parallels between French and Israeli settler colonialism, the intimacy of the violence, the intractability of the competing nationalist claims, the racialization of the colonized – all of these point towards the applicability of Fanonian thought. But at the same time, as Somdeep Sen has argued in an important book on Palestine which draws heavily on Fanon, the dominance of Israeli narratives and liberal norms of conflict resolution have often marginalized or even ostracized Fanonian approaches to the possibilities and necessities of violence in the Palestinian case, even when they are broadly accepted in other contexts.  That marginalization and its implications is itself a question, not an axiomatic truth: “If an armed struggle is commonly perceived as a necessary response to oppression and as a means of possibly unmaking the condition of suffering for the marginalized in general and the colonized in particular, it is not surprising that voices from within Hamas routinely deem its armed resistance as the appropriate response to Israeli rule… for Fanon, violence was central to the (re-)invention of the decolonized subject en route to liberation.”[17]  The ethical, political and analytical difficulties of thinking violence in this way can be seen in Matthew Abraham’s 2013 attempt to read Hamas suicide bombing through a Fanonian lens as clearly as in the more recent polemics.[18]

An alternative way of reading Palestine through Fanon is through the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe, who famously viewed the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “the most accomplished form of necropower.”[19]  The defining feature here is not Palestinian violence alone but the realities of decades of Israeli violence, domination, and control over the land and people, down to the morbidity of allowing just enough calories into Gaza to keep people alive but weak.  He reads Fanon through the specificity of the colonial and anticolonial moment: “the irrepressible and relentless pursuit of freedom requires us to mobilize all life reserves. It drew the colonized into a fight to the death – a fight they were called upon to assume as their duty and that could not be delegated to others.” Mbembe’s reading of Algeria intentionally echoes the experience of Palestine: “France attempted, in Algeria, to conduct ‘a total onslaught’ which provoked in return a response that was just as total on the part of the Algerian resistance. Following his experience of the war, Fanon was convinced that colonialism was a necropolitical force animated at its core by a genocidal drive.”

Mbembe, like multiple contributors to this collection, sees Fanon’s call to violence through a clinical lens: “in Fanon violence is both a political and a clinical concept. It is as much the clinical manifestation of a political ‘disease’ as an act of ‘re-symbolisation’, which allows for the possibility of reciprocity and hence for relative equality in the face of the supreme arbiter which is death. Thus, by choosing violence rather than being subjected to it, the colonised subject is able to restore the self.”[20] Violence here refers to more than the physical act. Mbembe uses “the language of ‘work’ – ‘violent praxis’, as a ‘response to the initial violence of the settler’” – a charge taken up by Arwa Awan in this collection.  But, critically, these concepts are ‘portable’, in Mackinnon’s sense:  for instance, Yasser Munif has recently interpreted the Syrian uprising through the lens of Fanon’s analysis of anticolonial movements, while applying Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to the regime’s violent response. [21] Nouri Gana and Heike Härtung recently noted that “Although Fanon’s understanding of the transformative power of violence is perhaps best read in its particular historical context, it also gestures toward the creative possibilities of narrative violence.”[22]  Misreading violence, they argue, means that “the historical roots of violence are obfuscated; the anger and apprehension that stir, as we write, at the heart of many Palestinians and Iraqis, and which are excited by diurnal occupation and humiliation, are carefully displaced into psychic and moral loci, structural, evil, or diseased inclinations toward violence.”

Ghina Abi Ghannam, in this collection, places the systematic misreading of violence at the center of the failings of mainstream social psychology, drawing correlations between Fanon’s denunciations of the Algiers School’s racialized assumptions about the innate violence of Algerian Muslims to broader trends in the discipline. “The transformational instrumentality of violence for Fanon is not solely situated in its promise to spatially dismantle the material conditions surrounding the individual, but as one that is, organically and additionally, psychological. For to him, the spatial “Manichean structure” of colonial domination- the structure of one compartment ruling over the other -is replicated inwards, within the psychology of the colonized. Consequentially, the spatial revolutionary action seeking to threaten this Manichean world is simultaneously reproduced in an internal revolutionary struggle that takes place in the consciousness of the colonized.”

Another key theme of this collection is to take up the mantle of recent scholarship which focuses less on Wretched and more on Fanon’s earlier texts such as Black Skin/White Masks, his clinical writings and lectures, and his writings on the Algerian revolution. Lisa Wedeen, in her opening comments to the workshop, found herself drawn to Black Skin/White Masks for anticipating the move towards theorizing the social construction of racialization.  So too did many of the contributors to this volume. In my own work on racialization, I have found Fanon’s emphasis on the psychological dimension as grounded within a broader societal context useful as a corrective both to overly abstract analyes of ‘othering’ and to an exclusive emphasis on skin color; these forms of racialization can be seen in contexts such as Turkey’s Kurds and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as powerfully as in the race relations of the West. As Emma Mackinnon asks in this collection, “Is there a divide between the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks and the Fanon of Wretched of the Earth – written so far apart, temporally and geographically? Is, say, the man narrating through his own tears at the end of the famous fifth chapter of Black Skin the same as the author invoking the need to “set afoot a new man” and begin a new history of humanity in the conclusion of Wretched? Reading these together requires we reconcile a certain pessimism about one’s current condition with a determined hopefulness for change.”  The authors in this collection offer multiple paths toward balancing such imperatives.

The papers in this collection also reflect a recent turn towards focus on Fanon’s role as a psychiatric practitioner.[23]  The publication of a vast trove of his case files has invited scholars to explore the connections between his medical practice and his political thought, uncovering a remarkable new vein of praxis. As Robyn Marasco notes in this volume: “With more than two-thirds of his casework now available in the recently published volume, Alienation and Freedom, which also includes transcripts from his Tunis lectures, scholars are rediscovering Fanon’s clinic and relating to it in new ways.”   This wealth of new sources allows Andrea Cassatella to dig deeply into Fanon’s pyschiatric method and its connections with his political thought. Wael Garnaoui uses his own psychiatric training and experience to read the experience of young Tunisians seeking to migrate through the lens of Fanon’s psychiatric thought, equating current visa practices with the Algiers School which Fanon so bitterly criticized and enduring colonial racial practices. Marasco explores themes of abandonment in Fanon’s writing in part by engaging with this wealth of new casework material.

This collection offers an introduction to the rich new scholarship on Fanon in Middle East Studies, and points the way towards a multitude of productive avenues of research and theoretical engagement.  It is important to not lose the urgency and universality of Fanon’s writing and message in Wretched of the Earth in these theoretical reflections, or to neuter the true radicalism of his search for genuine decolonization.  Taking stock of the broader context of Fanon’s theoretical development, including his psychiatric writings and practice, enriches our understanding of his relevance to today’s challenges – and helps put Middle East Studies into ever closer dialogue with broader trends in political theory and postcolonial studies.

References

[1] Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).

[2] For a sample, seeEli Lake, “Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization” 31 October 2023 The Free Press

Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization

; Sam Klug, “Who’s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?” Boston Review 27 March 2024 https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/whos-afraid-of-frantz-fanon/; Gal Beckerman, “The Patron Saint of Political Violence,” The Atlantic 28 March 2024 https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/ ; Hamid Dabashi, “How critics are twisting Frantz Fanon’s legacy,” Middle East Eye 5 March 2024 https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-critics-are-twisting-frantz-fanons-legacy; Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies,” London Review of Books 2 November 2023 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies;

[3] Hisham Aidi, Marc Lynch and Zachariah Mampilly, “Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divides” POMEPS Studies 2020

[4] Muriam Haleh Davis, “The US Academy and the Provinicalization of Fanon,” LA Review of Books, 9 November 2022, available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-us-academy-and-the-provincialization-of-fanon/

[5] Jeannie Morefield, Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).

[6] Charles Butterworth and Irene Gendzier, “Frantz Fanon and the Justice of Violence: An Essay on Irene L. Gendzier’s “Frantz Fanon”: A Critical Study” Middle East Journal 28, 4 (1974): 451-8; Irene Gendzier, “Frantz Fanon: In Search of Justice,” Middle East Journal 20, 4 (1966): 534-44; Irene Gendzier, “Midnight Reflections on Some of the Work of Frantz Fanon,” Human Architecture 5 (2007): 25-32.

[7] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Jeannie Morefield, Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).

[8] Omnia El Shakry, “History Without Documents,” American Historical Review 120, 3 (2015): 920-34.

[9] Katlyn Quenzer, “Beyond Arab Nationalism? The PLO and its Intellectuals, 1967-1974,” Interventions 21, 5 (2019): 690-707; Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Oxford University Press 2020); Sattar Izwaini (2019) The Re-Presentation of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre in Arabic Translation, Interventions, 21:2, 151-171, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487328

[10] Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment

[11] Sara Salem, “Stretching Marxism in the Postcolonial World. Egyptian Decolonisation and the Contradictions of National Sovereignty,” Historical Materialism 27, no. 4 (2019): 6.

[12] Rachid Ouaissa, “Frantz Fanon: The Empowerment of the Periphery,” Middle East Topics and Arguments 5 (2015): 100-107.

[13] Anna M. Agathangelou, “The Living and Being of the Streets: Fanon and the Arab Uprisings,” Globalizations 9, 3 (2012): 451-466.

[14] Brahim El-Guabli and Jill Jarvis, “Violence and the politics of aesthetics: a postcolonial Maghreb without borders,” Journal of North African Studies 23, 1-2 (2018): 1-10.

[15] Sara Salem, “Fanon in the postcolonial Mediterranean: Sovereignty and agency in neoliberal Egypt,” Interventions 22, no.6 (2020): 722-40; Jasmine Gani, “Escaping the Nation in the Middle East: A Doomed Project? Fanonian Decolonization and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Interventions 21, no.5 (2019): 652-70.

[16] Gendzier, “Midnight Reflections”

[17] Somdeep Sen, Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)

[18] Matthew Abraham, “The Fanonian Specter in Palestine: Suicide Bombing and the Last Colonial War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, 1 (2013): 99-114

[19] Achilles Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019);  for discussion see Miriam Deprez, “Visual Necropolitics and Visual Violence: Theorizing Death, Sight, and Sovereign Control of Palestine,” International Political Sociology 17 (2023): 1-17.

[20] Achilles Mbembe, “Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon,” African Studies 71, no.1 (2012): 19-28.

[21] Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death (Pluto Press: 2020).

[22] Nouri Gana and Heike Härtung, “Introduction: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, no.1 (2008): 1-10.

[23] Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (New York: Routledge 2022).]