Debates on Race and Language: Frantz Fanon

Debates on Race and Language Frantz FanonIn no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognised Negro civilisation rationalise and assess this statement by Fanon at the end of barren Skin, vacuous MasksIntroductionWe understand the human organisms, ourselves, and opposite hoi polloi through language (Foucault, 1977). For Foucault everything in life is determined by what he calls deal, that is to say what we say nigh a sketch. pastce, the language that we use defines how we see the world and how we view early(a) people. Foucault (1977) further substantiates that language is controlled by those who hold precedent in company. This authority that every wholeness elses use of language is determined by what those I power collect to say well-nigh a subject. Nowadays many an(prenominal) a(prenominal) writers maintain that the societal and linguistic construct of race has had a powerful way out on the consciousness of both wispy and white people. L anguage is real because it is inevitable acted upon (what Bordieu describes as a speech act) the language that spoke of one race as inferior to a nonher became a justification for enslaving those people designated as inferior. Discourses of race and unfavorable position were central to the success of the modern-dayist project as vague people were seen as treacherous to the central narrative of western personhood, that is to say they were divers(prenominal) from what was elevated as the white norm (Fanon 1986).Frantz Fanon was a French essayist and author whose main concern was decolonisation and what he, and many early(a) thinkers have seen as the psychopathology of colonialism. He died in 1961 at the age of 36 yet his mold continues to be highly influential, especially in the fields of cultural studies and race and ethnicity. He wrote most of his dissemble while he lived in North Africa, by contrast, Black Skin, clean-living Masks was written while he was even-tempered l iving in France. For many he is seen as the ingenious thinker on decolonisation in the twentieth century. His flirt has had far reaching implications over the years on a number of liberationist movements which has led nigh people to regard him as an advocate of violence.1Beginning with an introduction to modernness this assignment will hold forth Fanons work and his statement in the context of this debate nigh language and the debate somewhat black come across and black identities which, Gilroy (1993) maintains send packing further be understood in terms of the storey of hard workerry. Fanon (1986) would however, hostility this nonion, he believes that if it were at all possible, then colonialism should be through away(p) with and wiped from the narration books, even though he recognises that this is not possible.The end of colonialism where countries were make great on the backs of hard workerry reissued white from black as though they were two completely distin guishable civilizations. The western world became that of the oppressor and the oppressed and Fanon sees the world in terms of this almost pathological relationship. Fanons work in Black Skin, unobjectionable Masks (Fanon, 1986 ed.) encapsulates the sense of division that is felt by both oppressed and oppressors, black and white. Such divisions are rooted in the period that sociologists and cultural theorists now speak of as modernity. contemporaneityThe intrusion of what is known as Modernity can be traced back to the discernment in the late 17th to early 19th century. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement and its primary concerns were the powers of clement reason, the inevitability of human progress, and the ability of intelligence to provide humanity with answers. Philosophers of this period were also interested in how experience was transmitted and how we came to know what we know.This period is renowned for the immense technological and social changes that were t aking place and which eventually led to a break with handed-down view of the social, of society, and of a persons place within that society. During this period there was an intense concentration on the individual, which prompted the philosopher Hegel to develop his vagary of the diachronic subject. This is the idea that peoples actions are what have made bill what it is. In recent years many theorists have reason outd that the subject referred unless to the white, western, middle class male (see Abbott and Wallace, 1997) and that women, children and other races were excluded from the whole project.This idea of modern society, coupled with the Enlightenment notion of human progress has been elusive for a number of reasons, not least because, as we are well aware, human beings do not alship canal act rationally, and in this sense modernity brought out the darker side of our human nature. The events of the twentieth century have make nothing to dispel this notion, in fact there are those who would argue that modern society is now at its most irrational. Modernity gave the world the nation state, the spread of capitalism and as we shall see, western cultural imperialism and colonization. Modernity produced the conditions for knuckle downry and its success was built upon the enslavement of people who were regarded as different from, and thus inferior to, white western males.Fanons ConcernsWestern history is not just a history of colonial oppression notwithstanding it is also a history of the struggles against such(prenominal) oppression. Western history is more or less the oppression of colonialism and the struggles against that oppression, which calls into bayion Enlightenment notions of the subject. These problems are examined by Fanon in Black Skin, purity Masks (1986) where he concentrates on black subjectivity and experience and with the problematic concept of western modernity. He was also concerned with the refutation of dualism, that philosophy apparent in the Enlightenment period which separated things into binary opposites such as male/female, white/black. Binary divisions not only separate genders and races, they objectify them because that which is other is defined only by the oppressor. Fanons other major concern was the dislocation that occurs when people are taken from their homelands and compel into a diasporic existence.2Fanon (1986) contends that the biggest weapon the colonisers had was their representation of those who were colonised, as different. This was done in such a way that they were no longer recognisable even to themselves. For Fanon being colonised estranges human beings from themselves so that they are no longer connected to their own human nature. He is concerned with the history as it is relates to the black experience although his work is sometimes disorganised and not continuously easy to follow. He writes round the black/white, self/other experience, and how colonialism consequents in an al ienation of the person. Fanon, is against ethnic and cultural absolutism, just could see no reconciliation between the races because the white colonisers will always be delay for the black mask to slip and reveal the whiteness beneath.SyncretismGilroy (1993) traces the mutual puzzle out of black and white culture in both America and Britain in an attempt to challenge notions of national and cultural purity and reveal a syncretism of the cultures. Decades before this and in his earlier work The Wretched of the Earth (1963) Fanon writes about syncretism as oppression where the black person assimilates the culture of the coloniser whether they manage it or not. He maintains that such syncretism is the colonisers way or reducing black people and thus he speaks of the settlers creation of the inseparable a concept which is evident in the discourses of modernity and its rational subject. This subject could only exist by excluding difference and otherness. Fanon (1986) maintains that the Negro is only agreeable on received termsWhat is often called the black soul is a white mans artefact . . . there is a quest for the Negro, the Negro is in demand, one cannot get along without him, he is needed, but only if he is made palatable in a certain way. (Fanon 1986, p. 114)In saying this Fanon rejects both narcissistic myths of Negritude (and) the White Cultural achievement (Bhabha, H. 1986ix) which is most obvious in linguistic terms. This cultural supremacy still operates today, in most countries in the world children will learn side in school, when the English go abroad many of them do not trouble to learn the language of the country they are visiting. People demand that English will be spoken because cultural hegemony has its base in language and this language signifies power. consequently the language carries with it the power and knowledge of the nation. vestibule (1992) argues that nationalism and the nation state are a direct issue of capitalism. When pe ople promote these things in a multi-cultural society it can result in people having a conf utilize sense of national identity. residence further maintains that identity and culture are closely linked. The cultural diaspora that was brought about by thrall has resulted in what Hall (1992) terms hybrid identities- an panorama which in some ways is expressed in Fanons idea of black skin and white masks. Fanon (1986) argues that race has been objectified through discourses of superiority and inferiority and has thus become a fixed category which he decries. What these discourses have done is to make of the black person a divided self, a person with a forked consciousness. This is a term first used by W De Bois, who defined double consciousness as a twoness-an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognised strivings, two contend ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (Dubois 2003 quoted in Sawyer, M 200586). This double con sciousness is demonstrate in the relationships involved in slavery. Slavery was an integral part of this double consiousness of which Du Bois wrote because it consciousness was central to Hegels master/slave idea, where the slave ashes a slave because they are dominated by a slave mentality.Following on from this line of thought was Richard Wright who believed that the Negro was a symbolization in the psychological, social and political systems of the West. The Negro spoken of in modernist discourse was once an African, along with the experiences of slavery this led black people to experience a sense of dislocation where they experienced what the philosopher Nietzsche once described as a frogs perspective because they looked up from beneath the fetter of their oppressors (Wright, 1956). The frogs perspective lay behind Wrights mind of double consciousness.Wrights work had a strong influence on the writings of Frantz Fanon. In Fanons work thisdouble consciousness or divided self is not restricted to the colonised, Fanon maintains that it is also a spot of the coloniser because colonialism affects the self-understanding of both the oppressed and their oppresors. In this he demonstrates the influence that Wright (1956) had on his work because Wright thought that mental illness could result from the relationship between master and slave, between the oppressed and the oppressor. Fanon believed that racial subjectivity was determined from away of the individual and so he sees neither a unitary black experience nor a unitary white experience. Fanon sees experience as contextual rather than historical, that is to say that the experience of the black person who remained in Africa would be very different from the black person who was made a slave white experience is affected in a similar way. Thus Fanon says that I do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined. I am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors (F anon, 1986230).ConclusionWhen Fanon says at the end of Black Skin, White Masks that In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognised Negro civilisation. He is arguing against the objectification of race and the language of inferiority and superiority that are associated with the term negro. His lifes work was dedicated to decolonisation of those areas that were still part of what had been called the British Empire. The negro was a function of the colonisers differentiation of the slave from the white owner. Thus Fanons statement acts as a repudiation fo slavery and colonisation. Furthermore Fanons argument is important to cultural analysis and to society at large. Talking about a separate negro civilization puts us in the position of being stuck in the binary categories of a black/white cultural analysis that is the heritage of modernity and its failures. What Fanon (1986) appears to be saying is that society and its analysis needs to go beyond ideas of nationalism and ethnic absolutism because these things paved the way for colonialism and slavery.Fanon (1986) recognises that we have to live with the hereditary pattern of colonialism and that things are not changed overnight. If we dispense with many of its ideas as Fanon appears to suggest then this raises the question of how we analyse race, nationalism, gender and ethnicity without the use of those categories? We have to have some way of speaking about the things that trouble our society and the best ways of dealing with them. Whatever we choose to say or feel about this as individuals the fact of the matter is that these categories are part of our consciousness and so are integral to our discourses on these subjects. Having said that, things are perhaps only this way because those who are not white, western, middle class males, will always be other because most of the power in the world is in the hands of this group their definitions of concepts still holds.BibliographyAbbo tt and Wallace 1997 A Feminist Introduction to Sociology London, Routledge.Bhabha, H. 1986 Foreward in Fanon, F. 1986 (1967) Black Skin, White Masks London, Pluto PressBourdieu, P. 1991 .Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press.Fanon, F 1963 The Wretched of the Earth New York Grove PressFanon, F. 1986 (1967) Black Skin, White Masks London, Pluto PressFoucault, M. 1977 Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison London, Allen passGilroy, P 1993 The Black Atlantic London, VersoHall, S. 1992 Our Mongrel Selves New statesman and Society, 19th June 1992Sawyer, M 2005 DuBois double consciousness versus Latin American exceptionalism JoeWright, R 1956 The Colour Curtain Dobson. London .Wright, R. 1979 Native Son Harmondsworth, Penguin11 http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon model2 The spread of groups of people (often against their wishes, and specifically black people and Jews) across different parts of the globe.