Fanon on Gaze and Voice in a Dying Colonialism

Abstract

The prayer with which Frantz Fanon ends Black Skin White Masks (“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”) begs the question of how the relation between how these two registers of experience – bodily and enunciative subjectivity – might be secured. This is a crucial question given the alienating force of the colonial gaze to which Fanon has been subjected, a gaze which results in the bodily schema being “thingified,” in mind and body inhabiting different worlds. What kind of decolonial object or activity is needed to hold together the existential registers of bodily, enunciative/subjective and social/communal experience for the colonized subject? Fanon himself seems to provide examples of such a decolonial object in two chapters from A Dying Colonialism, namely, the veil (in the chapter entitled “Algerian unveiled”) and the voice (in “This is the Voice of Fighting Algerian”). This article explores Fanon’s descriptions of the anti-colonial, re-humanizing potentiality of these objects. It offers an expansion on Fanon’s theorizing, via a brief foray into the psychoanalytic notion of the drive, and concludes with a series of speculations regards how a decolonial object provides “ontological resistance” to colonial subjugation.