Comparison and political strategy: Internationalism,colonial rule and urban research after Fanon

Abstract

Debates about comparative method have been at the forefront of English-language urban studies during the last two decades. In one sense, these debates simply derive from and help sustain the crucial labour process of urban research. In other respects, the rise of comparative method to foremost prominence has demonstrated theoretical differences in the field. The heat that some of these debates have occasionally generated (e.g. on scale, global cities, assemblage and planetary urbanisation) alerts us to the political stakes involved in comparison. These range from the micro-political dynamics of knowledge creation to various macrological considerations. In this paper, I deal not only with the political implications of comparative projects, I also raise the question: how do political strategies produce comparative perspectives? After a few observations about comparative debates in urban research and beyond, I zero in on Frantz Fanon’s tricontinental internationalism as a generator of a relational comparative outlook before discussing three intellectual engagements with Fanon’s legacy. These engagements are situated within the creole literary movement in Martinique, Indigenous radicalism in Canada and political anti-racism in mainland France. By highlighting the obstacles that stand in the way of translating Fanon’s internationalism, these engagements also underline the importance of understanding colonial rule and its legacies (including its urban dimension, which Fanon understood under the larger rubric of colonial compartmentalisation) in relationally comparative ways: historically and geographically distinct but inter-linked through broader processes, strategies and intellectual practices.

Introduction

Recent debates about Southern, Black, postcolonial, settler colonial and planetary urbanisation have put on the table crucial, and surely lasting propositions. Standing in a complex relation to contemporary dynamics of urbanisation, they have effectively recast global urban debates from the 1970s and 1980s. They insist that urban research decentre dominant social spaces and pay particular attention to developments beyond the Euro-American imperial heartlands to further a multipolar geography of urban theorising (Roy, 2009; Sheppard et al., 2015). In this context, considerations of everyday life have loomed large. In fact, research foci on everyday tactics of daily collective life (Simone, 2010, 2012) or mundane experiences of modernity (Robinson, 2006) frequently foreground dominated – Black, popular, subaltern or Indigenous – realities and aspirations. More specifically, there is an agreement not to treat regional zones of urban life and research in isolation from each other but to foreground processes and networks that connect them to each other: migratory, entrepreneurial and trading practices (Simone, 2010), spatially extensive logistical, extractive and agrarian processes, mobilities and physical-material flows (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Choplin, 2020; Cowen, 2014; Ghosh and Meer, 2021), spatial imaginaries and political traditions (McKittrick and Woods, 2007) and state intervention and policy linkages (McCann and Ward, 2011) within the South (Ong, 2007: 13–24) and between the South and North (Roy et al., 2015; Sheppard et al., 2020).

In recent urban debates, there has also been much emphasis on the relationship between comparative method, time and history. Few would question today that developmentalist or linear-progressivist conceptions of time risk fortifying Eurocentric ways of comparing social spaces that are situated at various points of the singular temporal axis called ‘Development’ (an expression of the tyranny of clock-time and a neocolonial version of earlier civilising missions). Attempting to ‘provincialise’ Eurocentric forms of comparison, urban researchers have re-joined other efforts (including historical materialist ones) to excavate the multi-temporal character of capitalism and modern life (Morfino and Thomas, 2017). Robinson (2006, 2013), for example, has mobilised Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary conception of now-time for comparative purposes. She brought Benjamin’s project into conversation with postcolonial debates to consider the experience of modernity in and through multiple cities from various parts of Europe to Africa, notably the Zambian copper belt. Her manoeuvre allows us to see that the spatialised temporal structure of modernity (a way of experiencing past and present in tension-ridden juxtaposition) makes comparison both possible and inevitable. This is because each urban configuration helps us grasp the relationship between the ‘here and there’ by understanding ‘the intertwining of now and then’ that come together in particular places and times (Robinson, 2013: 662). Treating cities as layered and fractured temporalities helps us grasp how places relate to other urban nodes in specific ways. As a particular spatialisation of time, each urban concentration is thus as coeval as nodes of modern life more generally: always contemporaneous with others in the capitalist world (Harootunian, 2000). In this coeval character lies the inherently comparative promise of urban research.

Heterodox in content and sensibility, comparative urban research still remains full of unresolved questions about, for example, the nature of the urban and its relationship to state and everyday life (Qian and An, 2021) as well as the meaning of geographical markers (South, North) and the place they occupy in today’s imperial world order (Lawhon and Trulove, 2020). In this paper, I am concerned with the political – powerful and disagreeable – character of comparative urban research. The heat that some comparative debates have generated in the last two decades (e.g. on scale, global cities, assemblage and planetary urbanisation) alerts us to the political stakes involved in comparison. These range from the micro-political dynamics of knowledge creation to macrological considerations of state and world order. In the following, I go beyond discussing the political implications of comparative research in general terms. I raise a more specific question: how do political strategies yield comparative perspectives?

I begin with a few comments on politics and relational comparison before highlighting how Frantz Fanon’s tricontinental internationalism generates a relational comparative outlook. Then, I briefly discuss three sets of intellectuals who have engaged Fanon’s legacy in their respective intellectual contexts: creole literature in Martinique, Indigenous radicalism in Canada and political anti-racism in mainland France. The purpose of discussing these authors is not to present an exhaustive portrait of the intellectual currents within which they swim (let alone to treat the broader realities these currents refract as case studies for a full-fledged comparative analysis). It is to connect larger political and intellectual currents to debates in comparative urban research in order to highlight the obstacles that stand in the way of translating Fanon’s internationalism and to stress the importance of understanding these obstacles by treating colonial rule and its legacies (including its urban dimension, which Fanon understood as a form of colonial compartmentalisation) in relationally comparative ways: historically and geographically distinct but inter-linked through broader processes and strategies. Focusing on intellectual practices of translating ideas and orientation makes eminent sense because these practices are themselves part of the processes and networks that make relational comparison both necessary and possible.

Comparison, urban research and political strategy

My starting point is to make what might be an obvious point: that comparison is not only a method of investigation but also a daily practice and a political necessity. Consider the following opportunistic ways of making comparisons to buttress conventional political positions in places influenced by US discourse like France and Canada (Kipfer, 2012). There, politicians, academics or journalists have cautioned against using certain terms (say, ‘race’, ‘ghetto’) and advancing certain courses of action (say, ‘affordable action’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘decolonisation’) because they are deemed to be imports ignorant of local realities and political cultures. In turn, others, and sometimes the same people, lambast the locals for refusing ‘best practices’ developed elsewhere, thus standing in the way of progress as expressed by markets, ‘smart’ technologies or human tolerance. These methodologically nationalist or liberal-cosmopolitan statements express the most well-known, ‘analytical’ and ‘encompassing’ approaches to comparative analysis (Tilly, 1984). The first, analytical form of comparison treats socio-spatial complexes as external to each other, bounded in seemingly self-evident ways by territorial nation-states, zones of civilisation or the genus loci in question. The second, encompassing type of comparison, starts with general processes (market exchange, putative human proclivities such as trade or mobility) that are said to precede and overwhelm historical and geographical specificities to the point where the latter are reduced to mere variations of these processes.

Political comparison is thus political not only because comparative methods have political ramifications. It is so also because political intervention necessarily generates comparative perspectives. Recently, the aforementioned analytical and encompassing perspectives have been identified as markers of two apparently antagonistic but actually interdependent political camps: ‘globalism’ and ‘national populism’ (Hart, 2020). How best to counter strategic forms of comparison that sustain these misleadingly spatialised political perspectives? Promising alternatives have been offered by proponents of incorporated (McMichael, 1990; Tomich, 1994, 2018) and relational comparison (Hart, 2018). They are both critics of analytical and encompassing comparison, and they both emerged from a determinate set of political sensibilities. Refusing to reify historico-geographical specificity as ‘comparative cases’ external to each other and their overarching contexts, they both draw on a particular reading of historical materialism and dialectical method so as to study how the part and the whole relate in a dynamic and mutually constituting fashion.

To highlight this dialectical relation between concrete and abstract, they both also draw on anticolonial theory, for example Aimé Césaire’s (Tomich) and Frantz Fanon’s (Hart). In so doing, they confront what in recent urban debates has not been done consistently: deal with the problem of totality as an open-ended ensemble of moving parts, which also co-constitute the whole (Goonewardena, 2018). At the same time, they differ in the relative emphasis they put on analysing the contours and determinants of the whole (world order, say) (Tomich, 2018) and the way in which they draw on theories of space for purposes of comparative method (Hart, 2018). Exponents of this debate are not primarily concerned with urban questions; yet they do insist on treating city–countryside linkages as comparatively distinct and historically malleable relations that are co-determined by broader, also evolving institutions and processes at the world scale. In fact, Hart (2018) has intervened in comparative urban debates to navigate a third path between advocates of postcolonial urban theory and proponents of planetary urbanisation.

Relational and incorporated forms of comparison posit that placed or scaled nodes of life embody relations, practices and processes that extend to international or global scales. They dovetail with left-wing internationalisms informed by anti-imperial, Marxist and feminist currents. As we have argued elsewhere with reference to Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, the practice of translating political strategies from context to context is in fact a relationally comparative method (Kipfer and Hart, 2013). In his work on Black internationalism and transnationally articulated anti-imperial and anti-fascist solidarity movements, Featherstone (2013) makes a similar point. He put his finger on the internationalist political geographies that most closely correspond to our relational comparativists. The internationalisms he discusses differ from methodologically nationalist or globalist articulations of internationalism (which often adopt a top-down perspective and tend to reify or submerge the national question). His internationalisms are not elitist but emerge from Southern, Black or subaltern spaces. And they treat the national scale not as a static, pre-existing thing but as dynamic reality that is permeated by broader forces and, in turn, may represent openings to wider (continental, world-wide, Black, Pan-African) projects of liberation (within which national and sub-national questions are important but dynamic component parts). In this expansive reading, internationalism opens to radical or subaltern forms of cosmopolitanism that are not to be confused with liberal cosmopolitanisms and the ‘class consciousness of frequent travellers’ they embody (Brennan, 1997). In a manner reminiscent of the proponents of relational and incorporated comparison, this internationalism generates a dialectical understanding of political practice as simultaneously placed and networked, embedded in the translocal lineages of resistance that emerge from within the tensions of imperial world order.

The stakes of comparison are thus political because political strategies open up to comparative visions. As with other geographical problems (like the idea of space and scale as social products), certain comparative methods in fact elaborate and theorise in explicit ways concerns that emerged first from spatial imaginaries associated with social struggle and political organising. In dialogue with those who have excavated the spatial imaginaries of political strategists in the Black Radical tradition (Tyner, 2006, 2007; Tyner and Kruse, 2004), my entry point to the relationship between comparison and political strategy is Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s anticolonial internationalism opens to twin comparative concerns: those about the differential nature of racialisation and those about anticolonial struggles and their comparatively varied effects on the formation of (post-)colonial and imperial historic blocs in the Caribbean, Algeria and West Africa by way of mainland France. While Fanon himself died too young to fully develop these comparative concerns, one can see their urgency whenever political and cultural currents emerge that challenge Fanonian insights, especially where Fanon’s ideas are directly used to inform political strategy. The examples we will touch upon in the following include key exponents from the creole cultural movement in the French Caribbean, Indigenous resurgence in Canada and political anti-racism in France. These exponents of anti-, post- or neo-Fanonian politico-cultural currents provide us with insights into the comparative specificities of colonial rule. They force us to do what others have also proposed: historicise the colonial relation and, where applicable, its postcolonial legacies (Coulthard, 2014; Mamdani, 1996).

Historicising and spatialising colonial rule and the colonial relation is crucial to understanding the comparative character of (the) urban question(s) as well. Of course, Fanon was neither an urban researcher nor a practicing urbanist. However, he did see urban questions as an important spatial dimension of the compartmentalised colonial world. He also considered urban struggles as moments in a wider dialectic of liberation centred, at least initially, in the countryside. In this broader context, the relationship between the native and European quarters in cities like Algiers was decisive for the late Fanon. Our discussion of Fanon in the next section will help us unpack crucial urban situations that concern other authors and intellectual currents that were in conversation with Fanon. According to these authors, these urban situations include, first, the relationship between the (in-)formalised ring of neighbourhoods around the historic centre of colonial Fort-de-France, Martinique (in writing by Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant); second, the Indigenous presence in settler cities, urbanising networks and other colonial landscapes in Canada (in the contributions of Glen Coulthard, Lee Maracle, Bonita Lawrence, Leanne Simpson and Audra Simpson); and third, the relationship between dominant social spaces (including Haussmannian beaux quartiers) and racialised subaltern social spaces (including the quartiers populaires in France, notably the Paris urban region (in the strategic thinking of Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja).

These urban situations integrate various types of centre–periphery relations. Unevenly racialised, they all condense broader, multi-scalar geographies. Ranging from the socio-spatial patterns of plantation slavery in the French Antilles, (settler) urbanisation in Algeria and Canada and the neocolonial aspects of urban policy in mainland France, these historical geographies include both concentrated and extended forms of urbanisation. In each context, these geographies are tied up with political counter-perspectives that developed in important respects in dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s political and strategic internationalism, which mediates the Martinican’s unparalleled partisan-universal intellectual outlook (Sekyi-Otu, 1996). A philosophical parallel to relational and incorporated comparison, a partisan-universal perspective considers the universal a result of a transformative dialectic emanating from and returning to particular, situated commitments and engagements.

Frantz Fanon, internationalism and the compartmentalisationof the world

It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives (Fanon, 2004: 180)

The history of left-wing internationalism is multiple (Anderson, 2002). While some internationalisms have been ‘at home’ in the imperial heartlands, others emerged from anticolonial and Black struggles for liberation (Gopal, 2019; Kelley, 1999). The first embedded the national question in communist or socialist Internationales; the second ended up articulating this question in tricontinental terms. The Soviet as well as Chinese and Cuban revolutions functioned as formative, if tension-ridden points of contact between the two traditions (Renault, 2017; Rodney, 2020). One of the architects of the tricontinental networks of the 1960s was Mehdi Ben Barka. Prior to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America in Havana in 1966 (which he was organising when he was kidnapped and murdered in October 1965), Ben Barka argued that the tricontinental project ‘represents revolutionary organisations’ that combine ‘the current emerging from the socialist October revolution’ with the currents of ‘revolutionary national liberation’ (Ben Barka, cited in Bouamama, 2016: 9; also Ben Barka, 1999, 2007). Building on a history of anti-imperial and anticolonial politics dating back to the 1920s, the tricontinental revolutionary networks that came together in Havana crystallised from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. In that period, the tensions among the participants at the more well-known as well as more moderate and more heavily governmental Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 intensified in the course of the Cold War, the Suez crisis, the Cuban revolution and armed liberation struggles in places like Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Bouamama, 2016; Prashad, 2007).

Frantz Fanon did not live to see the results of the organising efforts that generated the tricontinental anticolonial and anti-imperial meetings in the 1960s. But, as a crucial figure in the Black Atlantic and Pan-African networks (that came together at Congresses of Black Writers and Artists in Paris [1956] and Rome [1959]), as a participant in the Algerian war of independence, and as representative of the Algerian Liberation Front in Ghana, Fanon directly participated in the formation of tricontinental networks, and thus, the emergence of the Third World as a political project (Sauvy, 1952). In fact, I would suggest that Fanon’s life work as a whole embodies an emerging tricontinental perspective, within which an internationalist standpoint on national liberation ended up being decisive. Fanon’s first and perennial concern, the everyday problematic of racism as an embodied and spatially mediated experience, emerged from the way he himself navigated the relationship between the French Caribbean, colonial Africa and mainland France. Navigating these social spaces as a soldier, student, medical doctor and revolutionary, Fanon came to understand how the imperial state and counter-colonial practices combined to generate distinct forms of racialisation, positioning Black Antilleans in distinctive ways relative to North Africans, West Africans as well as people from Indochina (Fanon, 1967, 1988: 3–27). One can say that Fanon developed an analysis of differential racialisation (Pulido, 2006) and the comparative specificities of Black geographies (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019) by confronting the meaning of dehumanisation across the uneven terrain of the French empire (and its shifting relations with US imperialism). This confrontation was motivated by a lifelong search for ways of rebuilding human capacities, within which Fanon’s psychiatric practice in France, Algeria and Tunisia was a formative component part (Fanon, 2018).

Once embedded in the Algerian liberation struggle and the intra- and inter-imperial networks supporting it, Fanon’s incipient comparative sensibilities became more explicit and political (Fanon, 1965, 1988, 2004, 2015). They took on a historical materialist form, situating political strategy comparatively within the contradictions of particular colonial relations and specific pathways of anti- or postcolonial struggle. For him, Algeria provided the strategic entry point to understand the armed liberation struggle in relationship to West Africa and the Caribbean. In Fanon’s (2004) mind, the latter two regions served as a reminder of the dangers of false decolonisation, and thus a warning for his fellow Algerian revolutionaries (pp. 97–144). His hope that the 1959 revolt in Martinique (along with the Cuban revolution) might bring anticolonial revolution to the Caribbean, as well as his observations about the prospect of neocolonialism in West Africa, underscored the degree to which ‘national liberation in one country’ was unlikely to succeed. He insisted that national liberation was to be seen not as a closure, let alone a recuperation of pre-colonial pasts. It was a two-sided struggle against colonialism and aspects of dominated Indigenous societies (2015: 478) that would put ‘international consciousness’ ‘at the heart of national consciousness’ (2004: 180). This expansive internationalism and the dynamic ‘place’ of national liberation within it reveal a dialectical conception of the relationship between particularity and universality that is also crucial for advocates of relational and incorporated comparison. Philosophically speaking, Fanon’s internationalism dovetails with a partisan universalism, a situated way of articulating historical situations to wider horizons through open-ended political dynamics (Mallick, 2020; Sekyi-Otu, 1996).

Fanon thus considered national liberation in relation to a larger project of building a new, postcolonial, emancipatory and socialist world order. For him decolonisation meant not only the end of empire but also a radical transformation of life in colony and metropole alike (Gopal, 2021). He joined other anticolonial militants and Black radicals of the 20th century for whom the national question had to be embedded within a larger project of ‘world-making’ (Getachev, 2019). Fanon thus could not see national liberation as an end in itself or as a foregone conclusion. Claiming the national scale was not about mimicking the abstract territoriality of the colonial-capitalist state. It was also not an expression of a pre-existing people-nation, ethnos. In colonial contexts, national liberation had promise because it could concentrate on forging something new, a ‘nation to come’, as he said in his exchange with Ali Shariati (Fanon, 2015: 543). It is this very novelty that makes it possible to see national liberation as an opening to struggles for a new, genuinely postcolonial and postimperial world order. For Fanon, this order and the multiple struggles leading to it would be eminently Southern as well as Black radical, to speak in the language of today’s comparative debates. It would be centred outside the imperial heartlands and provide the foundation upon which to build new human futures, above all in former colonies (but, as a side effect, even amongst the former colonisers in Euro-America) (Fanon, 1988: 144). For Fanon, the prospect of new, potentially universal forms of humanism is thus made possible through a tricontinental revolution he considered in multi-scalar fashion. This revolution not only articulates the national and the world-wide relationally. It also considers the national as an avenue through which to transform colonial geographies from the body to the city–country relationship by way of spatial relations in the colonial city.

As these geopolitical reflections indicate, Fanon saw decolonisation as a fundamentally geographical as well as historical problem: the task of transforming compartmentalisation. To be clear, for Fanon, compartmentalisation was not reducible to geography. It was a concept to capture the harsh, and seemingly immovable form of social separation through which colonial relations achieve all their dehumanising and alienating brutality. And yet, the spatial dimensions of compartmentalisation are not merely metaphorical; spatial organisation in general and urban questions in particular do make a substantial difference to Fanon’s historical understanding of racism and colonialism (Kipfer, 2007; Kipfer, forthcoming: chapter 2; McKittrick, 2006). For example, Fanon discussed the urban dimensions of compartmentalisation in two distinct ways in order to understand how racial divides are entrenched – as well as undermined – by daily routines, state violence and imaginaries both dominant and subaltern. In Black Skin, White Masks, he discussed racialisation in phenomenological ways, as a spatial relation of domination between White and Black organised by bodily gestures, looks and seemingly spontaneous exclamations that echo racism in all its historical depths. Here, spatial compartmentalisation is not about residential segregation but segmented mobility. Discussed with reference to mainland France, where Fanon (1967) spent most of his time between the late 1940s and early 1950s, this way of compartmentalising urban space denotes forms of social separation and racialised social immobilisation (being ‘fixed’ or ‘walled in’) established by bodies that relate to each other in motion on sidewalks, in transit and in other forms of public space (pp. 116–117).

In his observations about the psychiatric hospital in Blida (Gibson and Beneduce, 2017: 143), gender and revolution in ‘Algeria Unveiled’, the famous chapter in A Dying Colonialism (1965: 23–67), and national liberation in The Wretched of the Earth (2004: 37–52), Fanon relates compartmentalisation to spatial segregation. He clarifies that the separation between European and native quarters furnishes the terrain that colonised people appropriate in daily life and anticolonial organisers confront in struggle. This second set of observations is informed also by Fanon’s knowledge of gendered and apartheid-like life in Algiers (‘where partition was a non-negotiable fact’ [Cherki, 2006: 40]) and two moments in the war of independence: the Battle of Algiers (defeated by the French in 1957) and the resurrection of the anticolonial struggle in Algeria’s major cities, including Algiers (in late 1960). On 11 December, 1960, inhabitants of Algiers (often led by women and young people) rose from the Casbah, the shantytowns and newly built apartment blocks to converge in the central city. They forced independence against De Gaulle’s neocolonial designs for Algeria and the settlers and military putschists of the Front de l’Algérie française, which defended French rule, period. This second uprising (a struggle of the peripheralised for centrality and power: the right to the city) furnished the immediate historical backdrop for Fanon, who completed The Wretched after these events, and was well informed about them (Rigouste, 2020a: 269–272). The urban question (a spatial form of struggle against compartmentalisation) thus re-joins Fanon’s conception of liberation as a wider spatio-temporal dialectic (Fanon, 2004: 80). It represents one moment in a political strategy to appropriate colonial-capitalist time-space for the twin purposes of world-wide liberation and everyday emancipation.

Fanon’s internationalism in the face of comparative de- and neocolonisation

What would Fanon have done today with the ideas that he had? What would he be doing in 1978? (James, 1979)

In a tribute to Frantz Fanon at the United Nations in 1978, CLR James answered his own question. ‘He would be in the Caribbean, where he was born, bringing the knowledge that he had had and giving to the people of his own country all that he had in him and all that he had learnt’ (James, 1979). James’s speculation is plausible. Fanon was long sceptical about political prospects in the French Antilles. He knew intimately how differential racialisation had helped turn the islands into recruiting grounds for the French imperial administration. Fanon also disagreed with Césaire’s project to fight against colonial inequalities within the French state (initially as a département in 1946) and Césaire’s consequent refusal to openly support the Algerian liberation struggle in the mid-1950s. And yet, despite these reservations, Fanon (1988) thought that the conjuncture of the late 1950s (defined by the Cuban revolution, the 1959 uprising in Martinique and the imminent independence of the British islands) did bode well for the French Caribbean (pp. 167–169).

Of course, CLR James’s question leads to another one: how could Fanon have managed to ‘bring his knowledge’ back to Martinique? Few people understood the difficulty of translating political ideas better than CLR James (Renault, 2015: 127). He spent a lifetime transporting revolutionary strategies across the Caribbean and the Atlantic seas in attempts to make them stick ‘in relation to the [various forms of] social life and development around him’, as he said in 1944 with respect to the task of ‘Americanising Bolshevism’ (James, 1999: 20). As to Fanon: a return to Martinique would surely have forced him to relate his experience as a Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) intellectual to the specificities of the island, notably the ways in which the colonial relation and its spatial forms were being reorganised then. Like for James (and Antonio Gramsci), for Fanon, too, internationalism raised the eminently relational and comparative problem of translation: a reflection about the conditions under which political projects are translatable, that is, open to being transported and adapted across contexts (Kipfer and Hart, 2013).

The creole movement and creole urbanism

Fanon’s capacity to pursue his strategically motivated reflections along relationally comparative lines was cut short by his untimely death. The necessity of such a pursuit can be seen most clearly in some of the situated critiques that have been levelled at Fanon himself. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fanon’s native Martinique. There, Fanon’s revolutionary expectations ran into multiple obstacles that repeatedly pushed his post-humous presence on the island underground, at least until the 1980s (Manville, 1992: 246; Pierre-Charles, 2011: 172–175). These obstacles were brought into sharp relief by Aimé Césaire’s Parti Progressiste Martiniquais and its project to recast the meaning of liberation as a struggle for equality within, or in association with, imperial France. They were also raised by movements and intellectuals critical of Césaire’s project. While understood by Césaire as an avenue of decolonisation, this project helped in fact to modernise the colonial ruling bloc, in part through reforms like agricultural policies and urban strategies to build social housing and regularise informal settlements (Blérard, 1988: 116; Césaire, 2003).

Among the critics of this project were the creole intellectuals (Bernabé et al., 1989). Shaped by the renewed anticolonialism from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, these intellectuals initially insisted on the imperative of postcolonial sovereignty. Chamoiseau (2002) even considered the 1959 uprising (when shantytown dwellers took over the old colonial town centre of Fort-de-France in another radical claim to ‘the city’) as Martinique’s aborted contribution to the world history of anticolonial revolution. Yet the creole critics did not follow Fanon’s tricontinental and political conception of liberation (and the partisan universalism he shared with Césaire, political disagreements notwithstanding). While the creole intellectuals are also open to global processes (créolisation: cultural diversification and human migrancy), their main project has been to embed political independence in what they saw as the particularity of the island and the Caribbean at large: créolité as distinctive language, culture, artistic practice. The creole project of displacing and supplanting Césaire’s négritude and Fanon’s anticolonial internationalism with a national-regional and cultural-linguistic alternative thus also highlights how Fanonian projects had to face the specific way in which colonial rule was reorganised in Martinique.

The intractable character of colonial rule in post-war Martinique becomes even clearer when considering spatial organisation, including creole urbanism (Kipfer, forthcoming: chapter 3). We can say that creole urbanism represents the built equivalent of the cultural, social and linguistic fusions and mixing processes captured by the twin terms creolité and créolisation, as Confiant (1994) suggested it in his Allée des Soupirs. At one level, creole urbanism keeps alive past anticolonial imaginaries by binding them to the present. Insofar as it expresses memories and political repertoires of survival and resistance since slavery, creole urbanism offers a counterpoint to the modernising urban strategies through which Martinique’s colonial status was literally solidified in the post-war period. At another level, however, creole urbanism represents a fusion of European and Caribbean forms and practices, thus highlighting the territorial compromise (Schmid, 1996) that helped build Martinique into a ‘successful’ colony, as Glissant (1997: 189) put it bitingly.

Nowhere is territorial compromise clearer than in Chamoiseau’s (1992) Texaco. Texaco shows how the subjects of creole urbanism (shantytown dwellers, survival artists, storytellers) survived in modified form in the present. They did so in part because of the shantytown dwellers who managed to defend their settlements and pushed City Hall (under mayor Aimé Césaire) to wrest reforms from the old slave-owning families and the French central state. The fragile, layered equilibrium which emerged as a result of a struggle between creole and ‘solid’ (‘European’) urbanisms reflects the broader ways in which the colonial relation was ‘rebuilt’, maintained and reconstructed. Reorganising and mixing up colonial compartmentalisation instead of abolishing it, this new colonial relation placed roadblocks in the way of genuine decolonisation as Fanon understood it. It has made it difficult for students, trade unionists and environmentalists to tie social struggles to the question of national-regional political independence. This is because each struggle to advance demands for justice and equality within a French institution reveals the colonial character of these institutions but binds those struggling closer to these same institutions.

Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous time-space

While Indigenous North America was not a reference point for Fanon, his work has been used repeatedly to analyse settler colonialism there. In fact, Fanon’s ‘presence’ on what some Indigenous people call Turtle Island speaks to the internationalist dimension of Indigenous liberation struggles. Read by many in the Red Power generation of the 1960s, Fanon’s work found echoes in the cross-continental networks and urban places through which militants from various nations found each other and other liberationist and far left milieus (Adams, 1975). Attesting also to the historical proximity of Black and Red Power, two projects targeting distinct but related imperial and colonial aspects of North American social formations, Fanon’s ‘presence’ alerts us to the ways in which Indigenous struggles searched for alternatives to the colonial-capitalist order. They did so by mobilising insights from Indigenous, Black, socialist and Third World liberation traditions from China to Tanzania, as Coulthard’s (2020) ongoing research is excavating.

Coulthard’s earlier Red Skin, White Mask (2014) centred Fanon (as well as Marx) to support Indigenous resurgence. He reminds us of this earlier ‘red’ moment in relationship to his own Dene nation even as it analyses the ways in which the colonial relation between Indigenous nations and the Canadian settler state has been reorganised since the 1970s. He shows how Indigenous struggles and colonial state responses have become enmeshed in an array of land claims, treaty negotiations, consultation and co-management processes that ‘recognise’ the Indigenous presence even as they undermine autonomous-Indigenous meanings of land, sovereignty and citizenship. Spurred on by the Idle No More movement and more recent mobilisation asking for Land Back (Yellowhead Institute, 2019), both of which developed links to the contemporaneous Black Lives Matter mobilisations (Diverlus et al., 2020), claims to Indigenous resurgence represent an immanent critique of the new colonial relation exemplified by the rise of recognition politics in Canadian politics and within Indigenous nations themselves. Coulthard’s (2014) critique of recognition insists that Fanon’s politicist anticolonialism (and its emphasis on the novelty of the nation in national liberation struggle) be adjusted and recast to treat tradition as a dynamic practice of elaborating and reinventing Indigenous lineages (pp. 48–49).

Indigenous resurgence challenges the urban strategies that have helped organise settler colonialism and the modern Canadian state. In terms of comparative urban research, they force us to grapple with a form of colonial urbanisation that is shaped by settlers in particular ways. Colonial settlement has defined colonialism in various parts of the world, as Fanon himself pointed out for Algeria. But in White settler colonies such as Canada, the settlers have done so as a permanent and overwhelming demographic majority dominating all forms of settler urbanisation (Dorries et al., 2019). In the mid-19th century, settler urban strategies became avenues through which Canada’s nation-state-in-formation advanced its two-sided colonial strategy. They have promoted genocidal assimilation (making Indigenous people disappear as such, physically or socially) and entrenched segregation (pushing Indigenous peoples onto reserves at a distance from settler colonial urban concentrations). This twin strategy invited non- or anti-urban Indigenous responses to settler colonialism, for it suggested that Indigenous peoples had no place in urban, that is, ‘civilised’, life. Yet, the contradictions of settler colonial urbanism have undermined this very strategy of invisibilisation. Indigenous practices have repeatedly (re-)asserted Indigenous presence within both concentrated and extended aspects of settler colonial urbanisation, most forcefully again since the 1950s.

In this context, generations of Indigenous intellectuals recognised the dangers and pitfalls settler colonial urbanisation harboured for Indigenous liberation. Radical Indigenous voices such as Adams (1975), Maracle (1990), Lawrence (2004), Coulthard (2014) and Simpson (2011, 2014) made a basic Fanonian point (without referencing Fanon directly): that anticolonial strategies can only be effective when challenging colonial compartmentalisation in all their spatial forms instead of taking for granted the very city–reserve divide that is at the heart of these geographies (Kipfer, forthcoming: chapter 4). To undercut settler geographies, organisers and intellectuals have mobilised Indigenous practices and imaginaries of time-space. Eschewing the abstract, propertied space embodied in colonial-capitalist territoriality, these shift dynamically and fluidly between place and movement, between nodal concentration and boundary-traversing, trans-local networks (Simpson, 2011: 89–94). In so doing they give us a clear indication of how Fanon’s critique of compartmentalisation can be translated to challenge North American settler colonial geographies.

Political anti-racism and territory as memory

In metropolitan France, Fanon has had many lives, some more subterranean than others. While Fanon has played a marginal role in the French social sciences, echoes of his work have reappeared at regular intervals in political circles, notably in what is now called political anti-racism, a multi-pronged current typically inflected with left-wing sensibilities that considers anti-racism as a starting point and goal for broad strategies of social transformation. Its emphasis is on racism as a political, not a cultural, let alone individual question. Since the 1960s, political anti-racism has taken a range of forms. It emerged from the efforts of migrant workers, inhabitants of migrant hostels, young residents of functionalist housing blocks, and students to fight for equality and against racism in autonomous, that is, organisationally self-determined, fashion (Boubeker and Hajjat, 2008; Gordon, 2012). Well-known historical examples of political anti-racism included the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA) and the Mouvement de L’Immigration et des Banlieues (MIB). Among the current formations that have brought Fanon back into the limelight are the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie (BAN) and the Front Uni des Immigrations et des Quartiers Populaires (FUIQP).

The PIR, for example, considers how racism in France remains strongly shaped by neocolonial realities, crucial elements of which Khiari (2008) has called a colonial counterrevolution. The situation of neocolonised inhabitants is more complex than the term internal colony might imply, however. The social lives of people of colour are not sealed off from those of the White majority. As a result, a political anti-racist strategy is best considered as having two moments: the moment of autonomy (organisational self-determination) and the moment of alliance (with other, typically left-wing and working-class organisations). The relationship between these two moments is considered to be dynamic, partly contingent on the political situation at hand. In Khiari (2006), they form a multilayered war of position where the decolonisation of France is a crucial linchpin in strategies of radical change. Very much in Fanon’s tricontinental spirit, these strategies must be internationalist in an anti-imperial sense. Such an anti-imperial internationalism is not spontaneous. As Bouteldja (2016: 120) argues it must be organised because non-White residents of France find themselves in a contradictory position within imperial world order. While relegated in France because of their family connections to (former) colonies, they also benefit from the imperial networks that sustain life in the metropole. Bandung of the North Committee (2018), a conference co-organised by the PIR, underscored the contradictions facing anti-imperial internationalists in the Global North.

A decolonial war of position in the imperial core has territorial dimensions. Political anti-racists, the PIR included, often see the quartiers populaires (social spaces inhabited by a majority of non-White working-class people, whether in central cities or various types of suburbs) as a key socio-spatial base. But the quartiers are not directly analogous to the territories in former or current colonies. The quartiers, too, are porous because the spatial practices of their predominantly non-White inhabitants cut across its boundaries and because neocolonised French inhabitants do not all reside in the quartiers. In France, spatial compartmentalisation is not a dualist replica of Fanon’s native and European town. This explains why not all anti-racist formations foreground anti- or de-colonial discourses. But the very fact that racialisation is not neatly fixed in space is reason to heed Fanon’s insight from post-war France: that the spatial aspects of racialised compartmentalisation are not only place-specific (e.g. generated by segregation); they also inhere in differential mobilities (produced by state-mediated relations among moving bodies).

Since the 1980s, the quartiers populaires have been targeted by (deeply contradictory) strategies of social mixing designed (often ineffectively) to undo the socio-spatial coherence of these segregated spaces (Kipfer, forthcoming: chapter 5). In a context where the boundaries of spatial segregation are redesigned, territorial unity (spatially unifying, racially dominated and socially peripheralised social spaces) cannot be the unqualified starting point or end goal of political strategy. If it could, political anti-racism would reduce itself to a form of neighbourhoodism (quartiérisme), a new version of urban trade unionism (Castells, 1983). In ways that run parallel to the project of creole urbanism, the PIR’s political anti-racism sees the territoriality of the quartiers also as an imaginary, as a collective memory of the political struggles that have connected far-flung colonies to mainland France (Khiari, 2006: 116). In all its historical layers, it represents an opening for political strategy because it relates to broader dynamics of radical change. This relational perspective translates Fanon’s internationalism into the uneven terrain of the imperial heartland, linking politically anti-racist and anti-imperial imperatives to projects of building united fronts against authoritarian neoliberalism and neofascism in France itself.

Conclusion

Intellectual work survives in different contexts if the problems that shape it persist (even if in modified form) and if organisers can respond to these problems politically with insights from the oeuvre in question. I have discussed how intellectuals have translated (or kept at bay) Fanonian insights in their respective contexts: Martinique, mainland France, and Canada. One could add to the list Fanon’s own Algeria. Since early 2019, this country has been shaken by the Hirak, what some have a called a movement for a second independence, a struggle against the military-political regime that confiscated the very popular aspirations for self-determination that carried it to power in the war of independence (Hamouchene, 2020). In a documentary, Rigouste (2020b) juxtaposed images from 11 December 1960 (when Algerians took over central cities, confronted the army and settlers and began to organise their own affairs in their neighbourhoods in anticipation of a truly independent, self-managed Algeria) and images from the Hirak (which occupied similar streetscapes). Rigouste’s montage (which treats Algiers in Benjaminian fashion, as an explosive constellation of past and present) is justified not because today’s situation is the same as in 1960 but because the images from 1960 remind us, flash-like, that there is much unfinished business in nominally independent Algeria. Fanon’s work allows us to name this business (genuine decolonisation as social revolution as well as political independence). And it makes it clear that the urban question (defined by struggles of the peripheralised against compartmentalisation) is crucial to accomplish this business of liberation.

Making strategic visions travel and linking different contexts politically is an internationalist imperative that inevitably generates the need for comparison. Building on earlier work on translation as comparison (Kipfer and Hart, 2013), I have stressed that this need emerges in Frantz Fanon’s work and from intellectuals who have grappled with his work in their contexts. Fanon’s internationalism places particular demands on comparative method. Placing national liberation in an unevenly developed, multi-scalar and evolving historico-geographical constellation of tricontinental revolution, his internationalism yields deeply relational comparative sensibilities (Hart, 2018). From Fanon’s internationalist vantage point, it is particularly obvious that the practice of translating political ideas must treat historical and geographical specificities not as bounded cases external to others or as passive receptacles of general processes or political projects. Consistent with the idea of internationalism and decolonisation as a world-making practice (Getachev, 2019; Kelley, 2019), these specific geographies should be seen as social spaces that relate to others and the world as a whole in a dynamic, mutually constitutive fashion. Part of these broader dynamics are internationally networked political strategies themselves. Paradoxically, one can see the comparative implications of Fanon’s work most sharply when confronting it with attempts to grapple with or critique his work that have emerged since his death. I have done this by discussing select insights from intellectuals of the creole movement in Martinique, Indigenous resurgence in Canada and political anti-racism in France. These three attempts demonstrate the promise and difficulty of making Fanon’s spatially nuanced internationalism live within the terrain of the imperial heartland (mainland France) and in two distinct colonial situations: departmentalised Martinique and settler colonial Canada.

These three engagements urge us to do what Fanon’s work demanded but could not accomplish: treat colonial rule and the colonial relation (and, thus, anticolonial strategies) as comparatively malleable and inter-related realities. I have argued that historicising and spatialising colonial rule is vital also for comparative urban research. It provides us with clues about how urban questions (which Fanon treated under the larger rubric of compartmentalisation) condense and refract historically distinct but comparatively inter-related practices, ideologies and imaginaries. Although not all developed as explicit contributions to urban research, each of the critiques of Fanon discussed in this paper gravitates around specific urban situations: the relationship between the (in-)formalised ring of neighbourhoods around the historic centre of colonial Fort-de-France, Martinique; the Indigenous presence in settler cities, urbanising networks and other colonial landscapes in Canada; and the relationship between the quartiers populaires and other social spaces in France, notably in greater Paris. These situations express a common reality (the struggle against racialised compartmentalisation) that is inflected by comparatively distinct historical geographies of (anti-)imperialism and (anti-)colonialism. Tracing the routes travelled by Fanon’s anticolonial internationalism allowed us to think each urban situation ‘through elsewhere’ (Robinson, 2016): in relation to each other, and, therefore, the processes and projects that connect them to these as well as world order as a whole.