![]() ![]() Through my reading of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Yewande Omotoso's Bom Boy (2011), and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), I hope to demonstrate that contemporary African literature is concerned with the formation of an identity that estranges the category of blackness from itself through its entanglement with a queer identity politics. To demonstrate the ways in which a queer analysis of interracial romance might reimagine a raced identity politics, I analyse novels produced by members of the contemporary African diaspora, whose works deal with mixed race identity. New African writers take seriously what Fanon recognised as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," by emptying out the category of the nation and engaging with the intersections of a trans-national, trans-gender and trans-racial politics. The object of this thesis is to elucidate what possibilities for political solidarity are generated through the queered dynamic of interracial love, explored in the literature of the contemporary African diaspora. 1 Such an ontological theory gives rise to accounts of both individual and social development. This is in part, I believe, one of the flaws of Fanon setting up the dynamic of racialised desire within cisgender, heteronormative models for potential interracial relationships - "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and "The Man of Colour and the White Woman." Hence, I consider what queering these relationships does to the way in which we read the political dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks, and whether or not this allays the allegory of revolutionary solidarity of the generic teleology of the heteronormative romance. Freud’s claim is perhaps so unpopular because it implies that psychoanalysis is in possession of what I’d like to call an ontological account of the subject, that is, a theory of the fundamental nature of subjectivity. Black Skin, White Masks it seems is deemed "not radical enough" because of what appears to be a problematic preoccupation with 'love and understanding.' In the following intervention, I argue that what makes this centrality of 'love and understanding' so unpalatable to radical activists is a misappropriation of Fanon's formulation of desire. As such the more troubling of Fanon's work, namely Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is often left un-interrogated, while The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is read like a manifesto for purposive change. In other words, the simplification of Fanonist rhetoric fails to deal with the "un-political" dimensions of Fanon. This means that centralising a Fanon within political discourse stands to reproduce the losses implicated in his mythification, rather than to recover new critical imports in his work. But the figure of Fanon often remains both abstract and plural within its articulations - interpretations of his body of work performing sometimes only partial allegiances to the whole. ![]() The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.Throughout the recent iterations of student activism that have gripped South African universities, Frantz Fanon has been continuously disinterred. Fanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emergingnations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of postindependence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. Author(s): Frantz Fanon Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface by)Ī distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.
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