I need someone who watched Lucía(1968,Dir. Humberto Solás) before

Robert Stam

Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of ldentification

Frantz Fanon, the West-Indian-born, French-educated writer who practiced psy- chotherapy and revolution in North Ahica, is best known as the eloquent critic of colonial oppression and as the astute diagnostician of the twinned pathologies

of whiteness and biackness. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in his work, with important writing by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Diana Fuss, Anne McClintock, Henry Louis Gates, Neil Lazarus, Kristin Ross, Eila Shohat, and Christopher Miller. A kind of posthumous wrestling over Fanon's legacy has generated lively debates about the gendered politics of the veil, the validity of Fanon's "therapeuti c" theory of violence, and the relative merits of the psychoanalytically oriented Black Skin, White Mask versus the revolutionary socialism of Wretched of the Earth.In a postnationalist moment/ queer and fem- inist readings have focused on Fanon's blind spots concerning forms of oppression rooted not in nation and empire but in gender and sexuality. What, contemporary analysts are asking, now seems archaic and retrograde in Fanon, and what antici- patory and prescient? A{ter pointing to the broad contemporary relevance of Fanon's theories, I would like to explore the multifaceted relationship between Fanon and the cinema, as a prelude to the analysis of a film based directly on his life and work: Isaac |ulien's Black Skin, White Mask.

In a postnationalist erat we have become more aware that Fanon was hardly infallible: he sometimes romanticized violence, idealized the peasantry, knew lit- tle about Arabic or Islamic culture, and had severe blind spots concerning gender and sexuality. Yet a contemporary rereading of Fanon also reveals his extraordinary prescience as an important precursor for a number of subsequent intellectual move- ments; in his lapidary phrases we find the germ of many subsequent theoretical developments. His anticolonialist decentering of Europe in Wretched of the Earth

1196l) can now be seen to have both provoked and foreshadowed Derrida's ciaim (in

" Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, " 19661 thatEaro- pean culture has been "dislocated," forced to stop casting itself as the "exclusive culture of reference." Fanon, along with allied ftgures like Cesaire and Cabral, reversed the currents o{ intellectual exchange: the Third World was generating that

Copyright O 2003 by Robert Stam. Portions of this essay rework previously published mate- rials from two sorilces: "Permutations of Identiffcation: Isaac fulien's Black Skin, White Mask" , published rn BlacklRenaissancef Noire I, no.2 (Summer/Fall 19971, and Unthinking Eurocenttism, co-authored with Ella Shohat (London: Routledge, 1994).

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Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinena

. :atic phenomenon called "theory." What Fanon called "socialtherapy," similarly, -:1 now be seen to have anticipated the "antipsychiatry" of such figures as David

-- ,oper, R. D. Laing, and Felix Guattari. How can Freud's "talking cure" facilitate a .:.nsition to "ordinary unhappiness," Fanon asks, when social oppression itself gen- :::testtextraordrnary unhappiness"? How can psychoanalysis help the anaiysand ,. j'ust when colonialism provokes unending maladjustment? How can patients feel :: :rome in their environment when colonialism turns the colonized into strangers = rheir own land? How can psychoanalysis cure mental distress when colonialism ,self triggers veritable epidemics of mental distress? Isn't psychoanalysis, in such

, :Jntext/ a matter (to recycle Brecht's analogy) of rescuing the drowning rather than :::auing the broken dam?

Although Fanon never spoke of Orientalist discourse, similarly, his cri- :iues of colonialist imagery provide proleptic examples of anti-Orientalist cri- ,-:ue ) la Edward Said. When Fanon argued that the colonizer "cannot speak of ,-:: colonized without having recourse to the bestiary," he called attention to the :nimalizing trope," the discursive figure by which the colonizing imaginary ren-

::red the colonized as beastlike and animalic. Within coionial binarism, Fanon ' :ites rn Wretched of the Earth, "the settler makes history; his life is an epoch, ..r Odyssey," while against him "torpid creatures/ wasted by fevers, obsessed by .:cestral customs/ form an almost inorganic background for the innovating :'.-namism of colonial mercantilism" (Fanon, 1963, p.5l). Here Fanon anticipates ':hannes

Fabian's critique of classical anthropology's projection of the colonized .. 'allochronic," as living in another time, mired in an incapacitating "tradition" .:in as modernity's antithesis. For Fanon, in contrast, the colontzer and the col- rized are contemporaneous and coeval. Rejecting the "progressive," Eurocentric

: aradigm of linear progress/ he insists in Wretched of the Earth that "we do not ,,,'ant to catch up with anyone." It was in this same spirit that Fanon criticized :svchoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who argued in his Prosperc and Caliban: The . svchology of Colonization that colonized peoples suffered from a "dependency - rmplex" that induced them to identify with the fatherlike colonizer. For Fanon, -r contrast/ the colonized did not necessarily identify with the colonizing Pros- ::ro, but rather with the rebellious Caliban. (Fanon's fellow Martinican and men- : rr Aime Cesaire pursued this same identificatory logic in his version of >hakespeare's Tempest, where Caliban becomes Caliban X, the militant who je nounces Prospero for teaching him to jabber his language well enough to follow rders but not enough to study science.)

Fanon can also be seen as an advance practitioner of cultural studies. Although he was ciearly never part of an explicit cultural studies project, Fanon

=iready in the 1950s took all of cultural life as iegitimate objects of study, ana- -r zing a wide array of phenomena-the veil, dance, trance/ language, radio, film- :. sites of social and cultural contestation. Although he didn't use the talismanic :hrase cultural studies, he certainly practiced what now goes by that name. Indeed, his practice casts suspicion on the conventional Anglo-diffusionist

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Robert Stam

genealogical narrative that cultural studies began in England and then spread elsewhere. In a different perspective, when |ames Baldwin spoke of film reception, when Roland Barthes spoke of the mythologies of toys and detergents, when Leslie Fiedler anatomized popular cultural myths, when Henri Lefebvre analyzed the politics of everyday life, when C.R.L. fames analyzed cricket, and when Fanon spoke of the differentiated spectatorship ofTarzan, all in the 1950s and 1950s, they were doing cultural studies avant la lettre.

Although Fanon has o{ten been caricatured as a racialhard-liner, he in fact anticipated the antiessentialist critique of race. "Lumping all Negroes together under the designation of 'Negro people,"'Fanon writesrnTowardthe African Rev' olution, "is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression." In 1939, he asserts, no West Indian "proclaimed himself to be a Negro," it was only the white man who "obliged him to assert his color" (Fanon, 1959, pp. 20-211. In Fanon's relational view in Black Skin, White Mask, the black man is obliged not only to be black, but "he must be black in relation to the white man" (Fanon, 1967a, p. ll0). The black man/ as Fanon put it, is "comparison." Nor was colo- nialism essentially aracialmatter; colonialism, he argued, was only accidentally white. {In confirmation of Fanon's point, we can cite the case of Ireland, the first British colony, which was subjected to the same processes of otherization that other, later, epidermically darker, colonies also suffered.) For Fanon, ractahzed perception was inflected even by language; "the black," he wrote in Black Skin, White Mask, "will be the proportionately whiter in direct relation to his mastery of the French language" (Fanon, 1967a, p. lB) Fanon thus saw race as languaged, situated, constructed. "When the West Indian goes to Erance," he wrote, "his phe- notype undergoes a mutation" (Fanon, I967a, p. 19). As someone who became aware of his own biackness only in France, and who was regarded by some Alge- rians as culturally European (i.e., white), Fanon could not buthave a lively sense of the conjunctural, constructed nature not only of racial categorizations but also of communitarian self-definition. Yet for Fanon the fact that race was on some level "constructed" did not mean that antiracism was not worth fighting for. In the era of the "posts," we know that social identity is constructed, but the more relevant question is by whom and by what social forces are they constructed, and to what ends. Fanon's was a mobilizing, rather than a quiescent, sense of con- struction, one they embraced fluidity but without abandoning the struggle for such constructs as black solidarity, the Algerian nation, and Third World unity.

Fanon can also be seen as the precursor of what is variously called depen- dency theory and systems theory. Fanon's claim in The Wretched of the Earth that "european opulence is "literally scandolous" becuse it "comes directly from the soil and the subsoil of the underdeveloped world," anticipated in stereo- graphic, almost aphoristic, form the arguments of later theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, |ames Petras, and Fernando Henriclue Cardoso (for Latin Amer- ica), Walter Rodney (for Africa), and Manning Marable (for Afro-America) {Fanon, 1963, p.95). Fanon's remark that "objectivity always works against the native," similarly, provides a historically precocious example of the media critique that

tono,'. 4lg, , r-r,u,/ the Cin, na

-:-:rre so pelvasive during the 1960s and 1970s. Speaking more genelally, -.

-,n's key anticolonial concepts reverberated outward in many directions, -:rcting on feminism (which "gendered" and reinvoiced Fanon's three-stage .:.,r1,. of disalienation), situationism (which denounced the metaphorical colo-

' :.rion of everyday life), and sociological radicalism (which saw French peas- , -.',> as "the wretched of the earth").

It is sometimes thought that the revolutionary Fanon of Wretched of the

-. ::r has become pass6/ and that oniy the psychoanalytic Fanon of Black Skin, :',-:e Maskmerits contemporary attention. But the mole impoltant point is the

- ::rplementarity ofthe two projects, the inherent relationality between the soci- - +- of the former and the psychology of the latter. And although Fanon argued ,:rack Skin, White Mask that only a psychoanalytic interpretation could reveal

.,-.: 'affective anomalies" that generate black pathologies Fanon in fact was a plac-

- ng psychlaftist with little practical experience of psychoanalysis. And .-:,rough Fanon occasionally cited Lacan, he was not a Lacanian. As David Macey

I 'nts out in his biography, Fanon departs from the basic tenets of Lacanian psy- - ranlysis by stressing the need to strengthen the ego, whereas Lacan saw such -:-- e rnphasis as the capital sin of American "ego-psychology"(Macey, 2001, p' 323)'

: -.:ron also doubted the universality of the Oedipus complex, claiming that it was -

- i to be found in the French West Indies. (Stuart Hall, in the Isaac |ulien film, -,.rs doubt on Fanon's doubt.) At the same time/ Fanon himself did anticipate a -i-.course very much inflected by psychoanalysis, to wit, postcolonial discourse. :'-r, here too he was more postcolonial in a political than in a theoretical sense, ::--recially in his trenchant critique of nationalism in the chapter entitled "Pitfalls : \ational Consciousness'/ in The Wtetched of the Eatth.

The luxtaposition of the two words Fanon and cinema triggers a veritable ,rrent of associations. We might think of Fanon's prose-visceral, kinesthetic,

.larply imaged, hard hitting, vulcanic, incendiary, with impact on the very nelves : the reader-as itself cinematic. Or we might explore the cinematic " attethfe" oI

:anon's work, the myriad fflms that were influenced by or quote Fanon, including

:\'en Mario van Peebles 's Panther, which features a full-screen shot of the cover of

-lte Wretched of the Earth. Long before Panthet, however, the Argentinian film la -fora de Los Hotnos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) not only quoted Fanon's adage

:hat "Every Spectator is a Coward or a Traitor," but also orchestrated a constella-

:1on of Fanonian themes-the psychic stigmata of colonialism/ the therapeutic i'alue of anticolonial violence, and the urgent necessity of a new culture and a new

human being. One iconoclastic secluence entitled "Models" invokes Fanon's final

erhortation inTheWretched of the Earth: "So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to

Europe by creating states, institutions and societies in which draw their inspira- rion from her. Humanity is waiting for something other than such an invitation

ivhich would be almost an obscule caric^tu;r.d/ {Fanon, 1963, p.315). As the corn-

mentary derides Europe's "racist humanism," the image track parades the most

highly prtzed artifacts of European high culture: the Parthenon, "Deieuner sur l,Herbe,,, Roman frescoes, portraits of Byron and Voltaire. In an attack on the

Robert Stam

cultural hierarchies of the spectator/ the most cherished monuments of Western

culture are equated through lap-dissolves with the commercializedfetishes of con-

sumer society. Classical portraiture, abstract painting, and Crest toothpaste are

leveled as merely diverse brands of imperial export. The couplet "Fanon" and "cinema" also elicits the memory of some very

influential Third Worldist cinema manifestos, most notably Solanas-Getino's "Towards a Third Cinema" and Glauber Rocha's "Aesthetic of Hunger," both of

which resonate with Fanonian overtones. Both stress anticolonial violence, lit- eral/political in the case of Solanas-Getino and metaphoric/aesthetic in the case of

Rocha. ,,Only through the dialectic of violence," Rocha wlote/ "will we reach lyri- cism" (quoted in Avelar, 1995, p. 101). Indeed, Fanon's aura hovers over the entire

initial phase of Third Worldist cinema, over ftlms like Rocha's Baruavento ll952l' Carlos Diegues's Ganga Zumba (L9631, and many other fflms of the 1960s and

1970s.

Here I will examine just two films deeply indebted to Fanon: Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers and Sembene's Xala-before moving on to fulien's Black Skin,

White Mask. The Pontecorvo film, one of the many Third Worldist films portraying inde-

pendence struggles, although directed by an Italian (in collaboration with the Alge-

rians), is thoroughly imbued with a Fanonian spirit. An early European commercial feature treating anticolonial wars of liberation, the film reenacts the Algerian war for independence from France , a war that raged from 1954 to 1952, costing France

20,000 lives and Algeria infinitely more {with estimates ranging from 300,000 to a

million and a half). Indeed, in an age when Arab, Muslim, and Algerian have become

virtual synomyms for terrorist violence, it is important to recall that the violence in the Algerian situation had for at least a century been overwhelmingly perpetrated

by the French. The French writer Victor Hugo, in Choses Vues, reports on an Octo-

ber 16,1852 conversation with a French general in Algeria who told him that "it was not rare, during the French attacks, to see soldiers throwing Algerian children

out of the window onto the waiting bayonets of their fellow soldiers. They would

rip off the earrings o{ the women, along with the ears, and cut off their hands and

ftngers to get their rings."l A century later, during the Algerian war of Indepen- dence, violence continued to be disproportionately French; their actions included

airstrikes on civilians, terlol bombs in the casbah, collective punishments, and ratonnades (rat hunts) in which racist Europeans took revenge on any Arab they happened to meet. At times, the killing of a single French soldier would lead to destruction of an entire village. Indeed, the French "pacification" campaign resulted in the destruction of 8,000 villages. It is this disproportionate and asym- metrical violence that is forgotten when critics speak as if Fanon were the partisan

of violence for its own sake. By focusing only on the reactive terrrorism of the col-

onized, the violence o{ other forms of terrorism-colonialist terrorism, state ter-

rorism, the vigilante terrorism of the ratonnades-is rendered innocent and invisible.2 As Ben M'Hidi puts it in the film: "Give us youl planes and tanks, and

Fo,,or. AIte ,.-,rd rlrc Ctnena

, --r no longer plant bombs in caf6s." French intervention in Algeria was marl<ed ::cndous massacres, such as that of May B,1945, which resulted in 103 Frenc.h

- :rd at least 15,000 Algerian dead (according to French official accounts) or

- .- -' )r by civilizational benefits for the Algerians. Already in 1847, not very long -- :he French takeover of Algeria, Alexis de Tocqueville complained, in his Rap-

,.-r 1'Algerie, that "we French have rendered Muslim society much more mis- ,-,:. more chaotic, more ignorant and barbarous than it was when we first - '-lntered it."'3 Despite myths of "integration," colonialism was inherently

- , .: . For the i 948 election, each European vote was equal to eight Algerian votes . -.-: the double electoral college, a measure designed to thwart a nationalist elec- .- r'ictory. And at the moment of independence, despite the French claims of a , ,:r:n civilisatrice, Algerians were overwhelmingly nonliterate.

A number of recent incidents and a spate of publications have brought - ::. issues now published in English as The Battle of the Casbah, to the {ore. In : :e centl)r published memoir, a French "Special Services" agent who served in

- -.:ria, General Paul Aussaresses/ speaks proudly of having "committed, clan- - :::rnel1l and in the interest of his country, actions condemned by ordinary moral-

rvhich were often illegal and therefore kept secret, such as stealing, ..:ssrnating, vandalizing, and terrorizing. I learned to break locks, kill without :'i ing atrace, to lie, to be indifferent to my own suffering and to that of others. . . . ----j al1 that for France" {Ausaresses,2O0l, p. 15) In his chillingly nonchalant -::ollnt, Aussaresses defends summary executions and torture in all its {orms, ---,'iuding electric shock and near-drowning, shown tn Battle of Algiers. He speaks . reing personally involved in the planning of a bomb plant in the casbah (much

-.-:ng the lines of the bombing portrayed in the Pontecorvo ftlm), but which would :-,-r-e involved burning down most of the casbah by setting spilled fuel on fire. The ::.r jected death toll was 70,000 dead. Aussaresses speaks as well o{ personally hang- :E the prototype o{ the film's Ben M'Hidi "in a manner which would suggest sui- -,de" (Aussaresses,2001, p. 16). (At the end of the book, he speaks withpride of :aving worked at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg for the American special services to : e engaged in Vietnam) (Aussaresses, 2001, p. 196). Some French intellectuals com- :ared the impact of Aussaresses' revelations to that of Marcel Ophuls 1971 docu- :rentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which prompted the French to con{ront the .rmilarly sordid history of Vichy collaboration.

Nor was French violence against Algerians limited to Algeria; it is also :ook place within France itself. On October 17, 1961, the same year that The ,\-retched of the Earth was first published in French, another battle took place, dnown as the "battle of Paris." On that day, after a peaceful Algerian protest march, the Parisian police fired machine guns into the crowd, literally clubbed -{lgerians to death, and threw many Algerian bodies into the Seine. A document published soon after the massacre by a tiny group of progressive policemen spoke of the bodies of the victims floating to the surface daily and bearing "traces of

)4

Roberr Stam

blows and strangulation." Six thousand Algerians were taken to a sports stadium, where many died in police custody. The official police-led coverup had it that Alge- rians had opened ffre, that the police had to restore "law and order," and that only two people had died. Careful reconstructions of the events have established that

the death toll was actually over 200 people, with hundreds missing. The presiding poiice chief was none other than Maurice Papon who, according to some leports/ had several dozen Algerians clubbed to death in front of his eyes in the courtyard of the police prefecture.a Maurice Papon was the same man accused of organizing deportations of fews under Vichy, when he was police chief in Bourdeaux, and who

had also served in the French colonial administration in the 1950s. The events have received renewed attention of late, and on October 17 , 2OOO, a commemora-

tive plaque was installed in Paris. Yet Papon has recently been released from prison, and his crimes against Algerians are rarely mentioned in press accounts. But the French election of May 2002, with |ean-Marie le Pen becoming a serious candidate for President of the Republic, was also "haunted" by the war in Algeria, provoking a veritable "return of the repressed." Although its long-term origins trace back to Vichy and beyond, the movement led by Le Pen emerged in the early

1960s in the wake of what was seen as a humiliating defeat of France by Algeria. For Le Penism, the figure of the Maghrebian Aral simultaneously embodies the former colonized, the victor over France, and the immigrant " enerny." With Le Pen, the link to Algeria is very direct and personal. Le Pen was in Algeria from |an- uary to March, 1957-.the period portrayed in Battle of Algiers-as a lieutenant in a regiment of parachutists linked to the Massu Division. In fact, Le Pen arrived on

lanuary 7, 1957, at the height of the "battle of Algiers," just when General Massu was given full police powers by the General Governor Robert Lacoste. As part of the "anti-terrorist" campaign, Le Pen was accused of various crimes. Although he admitted (in an interview in Combat in 1962, that he "tortured because [he] had to," Le Pen later fought off charges that he tortured and killed the Algerian Ahmed Moulay, in front of his wife, her 4-month old daughter, and theu l2-year old son, on March 2, 1957. Moulay was submitted to water torture (forced to drink liters of soapy water) and to electric shock. Moulay's wife, who had witnessed every- thing, was subsequently informed by French police that her husband had been the

victim of a "settling of accounts" among Algerians. But Moulay's son, Mohammed Cherif Moulay, kept a bitter souvenir of the episode, the sheaf of a knife on which was written: ]M Le Pen, ler Rep, which he subsequently donated to the Museum of the Revolution in Algiers. (See Le Monde, May 3, 2000)

Banned in France and threatened by the partisans of Algerie Francaise, Bat-

tle of Algiers offers a marked contrast with the timidity of 1950s French cinema in treating the war in Algeria. Apart from Godard's Le Petit Soldat 11962l, which took

a decidedly ambivalent stance toward the question of torture in Algeria, and apart

from the brief, usually coded references to Algeria in fflms such as Cleo de 5 a 7

\1962), Adieu Phillipine 11962), and Muriel (196511, most French fiction films sim- ply ignored the Algerian war.s {Only a few documentaries llke Chronique d'un Ete

z)

Fanon, Algeia, and the Cinema

-, : Le loli Mai managed to briefly bring the war center stage.) Battle of Algiers also :,:rs a marked contrast to the French and American films set in North Africa,

-.re Arab culture and topography form a passive backdrop for the heroic exploits : : uropean heroes and heroines. Whether French lPbpd, le Moko, 19361 or Ameri-

-,:- ,Morocco, l93Oi Casablanca, 19421, the films exploit North A{rica mainly as ... erotic setting for Western love dramas, a tropical decor dotted with palm trees ., : Iazlly traversed by camels. The linguistic politics of most European features ::: rn North Africa featured Arabic only as a dull background murmur, while the

- . al" language was the English of Gary Cooper or the French of |ean Gabin. In Bat- . ,:i Algiers, in contrast, the Algerian characters, although bilingual, generally

.:;ak in Arabic with English subtitles; they are granted linguistic dignity. Instead : relng shadowy background figures, picturesquely backward at best and hostile

.-.: menacing at worst, they are foregrounded. Neither exotic enigmas nor imita- : - r Frenchmen, they exist as people with agency.

Recent publications have revealed the astonishing extent to which Battle ' llgiers adheres to the actual historical events. In many cases, the names of the

- .'aracters and their protoq,?es are the same: Ben M'Hidi and Ali-la-Pointe actually :,rSted. Elsewhere the prototlpes existed but their names are changed.Yacef Saadi, :..: Ngerian leader of the "battle of Algiers" and author of a book of memoirs about ::c independence struggle (Souvenir de la Bataille d'Alger), plays himself in the --in, but under the name "D1afat." Indeed, it was Yacef Saadi who first sought out . -ntecorvo about the possibility of doing the film. The French poiice actually did :-ace their bombs in the Rue de Thebes, the oniy street in the casbah wide enough : r their getaway car. The terrorist bombs were actually placed in the sites depicted: = nilk bar, a ca{eteria, and an Air France offtce. The prototype of Coronel Mathieu, ::e head of the parachutists, was actually named General |acques Massu.Thepara- ,-:-utists formed an elite unit, with their own rituals and songs and their "romantic =-rra" was reinforced during the war by photo spreads in Paris Match and France -i,rr. Kristin Ross links the first appearance of Colonel Mathieu, in B attle of Algier s, :-. this publicity image of Massu and the parachutists, represented as "the mythi- :a1 figure of the warrior, possessed of a cold, steely, faraway gazet a distinctively :.rgged camouflage uniform, sunglasses, sunburn, and a special manner of walking" Ross, 2002, p. 36). It was Massu who presided over the strike depicted in Battle of -lgiers, and who ran a powerful death and torture apparatus that "disappeared" r 000 suspects. In |une, 2000, a former Algerian independence ffghter, Louisette ,ghilahrin, accused Massu of visiting the scene where she was tortured and raped by ]Iassu's 1Oth division. (See Le Monde, October 28, 2002)

But the crucial innovation of Battle of Algierc did not have to do with fac- :ual accuracy'. rather, it was to deploy the identificatory mechanisms of the cin- e ma on behalf of the colonized, presenting the Algerian struggle as an inspirational e xemplum for other colonized peoples. Interestingly, the issue of identiftcation is at the heart of the work both of Fanon and of the cinema itself. For Fanon, the struggle between competing identiffcations and projections exists at the very core

la

Robe , t 5{arr

of the colonial encounter. The revolution, {or Fanon, mobilizes popular identi{i- cation; it exorcises the colonizing power that has occupied and settled even the intimate spaces of the colonized mind. Nation and psyche exist in a relation of homology. National revolution promotes a massive trans{er of allegiance away {rom the metropole as introjected ideal ego. Even Fanon's celebrated "three phases" turn on the issue of identiffcation. In the first phase (colonized assimila- tion), the colonized identify with the paternalistic colonizing power; in the sec- ond phase {nativist authenticity), they identify with an idealized myth o{ origin as a kind of Ur-mother or Ur-father; and in the third phase (revolutionary syn- cretism), they identi{y with a collective {uture shaped by popular desire.

As Diana Fuss points out in an essay on Fanon included in ldentification Papers, Fanon worked at the point of convergence o{ anti-imperial politics and psychoanalytic theory, finding a link between the two in the concept of identift- cation. The notion of identification, which "names not only the history of the sub- ject but the subject in history," provided Fanon with a "vocabulary and an intellectual framework in which to treat not only the psychological disorders pro-

duced in individuals by the violence of colonial domination but also the neurotic structure oi colonialism itsel{." For Fanon, identification was at once a psycho- logical, cuitural, historical, and political issue. The issue of identification also has a cinematic dimension, however, one closely linked to debates in film theory, which also speaks of identification and projection, of spectatorial positioning and suture and point-of-view and alignment as basic mechanisms constituting the cin-

ematic subject. Fanon himself, interestingly, also delved into the issue of cine- matic spectatorship. He saw racist films, for example, as a "release for collective aggressions ." In Black Skin, White Mask, Fanon uses the example of Tarzan to point to a certain instability within cinematic identification:

Attend showings of aTarzanfrlm in the Antilles and in Europe. In the Antilles, the young negro identifies himsel{ de facto with Tarzan against the Negroes. This is much more difficuit for him in a European theatre, for the rest of the audience, which is white, automatically identifies him with the savages on the screen. (Fanon, 1967a, pp. 152-53)

Fanon's example points to the shifting, situational nature of colonized spectatorship: the colonial context of reception alters the processes of identiftca- tion. The awareness of the possible negative projections of other spectators triggers

an anxious withdrawal from the film's programmed pleasures. The conventionai self-denying identification with the white hero's gaze, the vicarious acting out of a European selfhood, is short-circuited through the awareness of a "scteened" or "allegorized" colonial gaze within the movie theater itself. While feminist film theory has spoken of the to-be-looked-at-ness {Laura Muivey) of female screen per-

formance, Fanon calls attention to the to-be-looked-at-ness of spectators them- selves, who become slaves, as Fanon puts it, of their own appearance: "Look, a Negro! . . . I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed" (Fanon, 1967 a, p. I I 6).

f onor. Algrroun,) the Cinema

Identiffcation formed part of the very plocess of production oI Battle of

Algiers. Production accounts tell us that the Algerian extlas identified so much

with the struggle, staged for the cameras just a few years a{ter the events them-

selves, that they actually wept as they performed their grief over the destruction

of the casbah.6 More important, the film sees the events through a Fanonian anti-

colonialist prism, a result not only of Algerian collaboration in the ftlming but

also of Pontecorvo's and Solinas's passionate reading of Fanon. Indeed, sequence

after sequence provides audiovisual glosses on key passages frorn The Wretched

of the Earth, beginning with the film's dualistic conceptualization of a socially

riven urban space. The iterative pans linking the native medina and the French

city contrast the settlers' brightly lit town, in Fanon's words/ "a well-fed town, an easygoing town, its belly . . . fuil of good things," with the native town as a ,,place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute// (Fanon, 1963, p. 89). The divid- ing line between these two worlds, for the film as for Fanon, is formed by barbed

rvire and barracks and police stations, where "it is the policeman and the soldier rvho are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesman of the settler and his

rule of oppression." The contrasting treatments provoke sympathy for the AIge-

rians. While the French are in uniform, the Algerians weal everyday civilian Jress. For the Algerians/ the casbah is home; for the French it is a frontier out- post. The iconography of barbed wire and checkpoints reminds us of other occu-

pations, eliciting our sympathy for a struggle against a foreign occupier. While

:lever caricaturing the French, the film exposes the crushing logic of colonialism

and fosters our complicity with the Algerians. It practices/ in other words/ a cin- -matic politics of identification. It is through Algerian eyes, for example, that we .,r-itness a condemned rebel's walk to his execution. It is from within the casbah

:hat we see and hear the French tloops and helicopters. Counter to the paradigm

cf the frontier Western, this time it is the colonized who are encircled and men- :ced and with whom we are made to empathize. it is with them that we are made

:o feel at home. The circular flashback structure of Battle of Algiers begins and ends with

scenes involving the tortured Algerian who shows the way to Ali-la-Pointe's hide-

tut. Indeed, the film is punctuated by excruciatingly painful scenes of torture. Here

:oo pontecorvo adheres to the historical record by calling attention to a French prac-

:lce that was denounced at the time not only by Algerians but also by French left-

-sts like Francis |eanson, Henri Alleg, and |ean-Paul Sartre. French anticolonialist

:{enri Alleg spoke in La Quesrion (Interrogation, 1958) of being tortured by the

lrench paratroopers.T The French generals themselves, meanwhile, did not deny

:nat they tortured; they simply argued that it was necessary. Thus the prototype for

Coionel Mathieu," General Massu, published in I97l his self-exculpatory mem- ,,r La Vraie Bataille d'Alger (The Real Battle of Algiers), where he explicitly chal-

-:nged the contestatory tone of the Pontecorvo film. A recently published book by

::re anticolonialist ]ules Roy, with the Zolaesque tide l'Accuse le Genetal Massu lI

-\ccuse General Massu,200l), answels Massu',s defense of torture. Roy mocks

\ lassu's euphemisms-which render torture as "force{ul interrogation" -by saying:

]B

Robert Stam

,,Torture for you is so sweet: just a tightening of the sexual organs in a vice, or an

electric current along the throat with bare wires, or on the breasts ' ' ' no big deal,

nothing serious. "8 Yet the issue of tolture came up again recently in May 2001 when

a group of French intellectuals called {or an offfcial incluiry into torture during the

Algerian War. The Pontecorvo film, following along the lines of Fanon, sees tortule as

an integral part of colonialism. As Fanon wrote in "Algeria Face to Face with the

French Torturers,,: ,,Torture is inherent in the whole coloniaiist configuration . . .

the colonialist system, in order to be logical, must be prepared to claim toltule as

one o{ its important elements" (Fanon, 1969,pp.65,69). Colonel Mathieu, in the

film, tells the iournalists mole or less the same thing: "If you believe in a French

Algeria, you must accept the means o{ defending French Algeria'"

At times, it is as if Fanon had written the script lor Battle of Algiers. one

sequence/ in which three Algerian women masquerade as Eulopeans in order to

pass the French checkpoints and plant bombs in the European sector/ seems to

illustrate a passage from "Algeria Unveiled" (in A Dying Colonialism), where

Fanon, in one o{ the few passages where he actively empathizes with women of

color (although still seeing them through a masculinist grid), speaks of the chal-

lenges facing the Algerian woman who crosses into the European city:

The Algerian woman . . . must overcome a multiplicity of inner lesistances,

of subjectively organized {ears, of emotions. She must at the same time con-

front the essentially hostile world of the occupied and the mobilized, vigilant,

and efficient police {orces. Each time she ventures into the European city, the

Algerian woman must achieve a victory over herself, over her childish fears.

She must consider the image of the occupier lodged somewhere in her mind

and in her body, remodel it, initiate the essential work o{ eroding it, make i-t

inessential, Iemove something of the shame that ]s attached to it, devalidate

it. (Fanon, I967b, P. 52)

The sequence {rom Batt\e of Algiers shows three Algerian women prepal-

ing their masquerade before a mirror. The mood is tentative, almost trembling'

The lighting highlights the women's {aces as they remove their veils, cut and dye

their hair, and apply makeup to look more European. They look at themselves as

they put on an enemy identity, ready to perform their national task. Whereas in

other sequences Algerian women use the veil to mask acts of violence, here they

use European dress for the same purpose. One woman, Hassiba, first seen in tra-

ditional Arab dress, her {ace covered by a veil, might in a Western context be

received initially as a sign of the exotic, yet soon she becomes an agent ln a

national trans{ormation where masquerading as the colonizer plays a crucial role'

As the sequence progresses/ we become increasingly close to the three women/

although we become close to them, paradoxically, as they perform "European-

ness.,, At the same time, we ale made aware of the absurdity of a system in which

people warrant respect only if they look and act like Europeans. The film thus

demystifies the French colonialist myth of assimilation, the idea that a select

lo

Fanon, Algeia, and the Cinena

- ::rie of well-behaved subalterns could be "integrated" into French society in a - : >iur€ of progress and emancipation. Algerians can assimilate, the film suggests, ' .-: only at the price of shedding everything characteristically Algerian about '-:n-their hair, their clothes, their religion, their language.

A number of Algerian women have written about their experiences as ,,:: an guerrillas. Malika Ighhilharizt a twenty-year-old lyc6ene during the histor- .:.r- battle of Algiers, has written about how she would get broad smiles from the :-nch guards at the checkpoints:

People would see me getting out of the car just like a Frenchwoman. I would go into a block of flats and put on my veil and my face veil, come out veiled and go down into the Casbah. I would leave what I had to leave and pick up whatever-messages/ weapons-had to be got out of the Casbah, and then I would pull off the samee trick. In the entrance to a block of flats, I took of{ the veil, put on my lipstick and my sunglasses, came out and got back into my beautiful car.e

-: a related passage from A Dying Colonialism, Fanon writes:

It must be borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as a "woman in the street" and her revolutionary mission instinctively. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of an area in her bodice. (Fanon, 1957b, p. 5O)

While we can lament the masculinist overtones of Fanon/s instinctiveness, '.'te Battle of Algiers sequence (which leaves moot the question of instinct) is par- -rcularly subversive in controverting traditional patterns of cinematic identiffca- :ron. Many critics/ impressed with the filmmaker's "honesty" in showing FLN :errorist acts against civilians, lauded this sequence for its "objectivity." But that :he film shows such acts is ultimately less significant than how it shows them; the

'igniffed of the diegesis (terrorist actions) is less important than the mode of address

and the positioning of the spectator. The ftlm makes us want the women to com- plete their task, if not out of conscious political sympathy then through the specific protocols of cinematic identification: scale (close-up shots individualize the rvomen); off-screen sound (the sexist comments of the French soldiers are heard as ri from the women's aural perspective); and especiaily point-of-view editing. By the trme the women plant the bombs, spectatorial identi{ication is so complete that it is not derailed even by close shots of the bombers' potential victims. At the same trme, the {ilm does not hide the terrible injustice of terrorism; it is encapsulated in the absolute innocence of a child eating ice cream. The eyeline matches between close shots of the bomber and of her intended victims both engender and disturb identification; for although the patrons of the caf6 she attacks are humanizedby close-ups, the film has already prepared the spectator to feel at home within the bomber's perspective/ to sense the reasons for such a mission. Historical contextu-

30

Robert Stam

alization and formal mechanisms have short-circuited, or at least made us reflect

on/ our o{ten simplistic attitudes toward anticolonial violence, an issue very much

linked to the events of September 1 1.10 Pontecorvo thus hijacks the apparatus of objectivity and the formulaic

techniques of mass media repoltage (hand-held cameras/ zooms/ long lenses) to

express political views usually anathema to the dominant media. For the First World mass media, terrorism means only freelance or infrastate violence, violence

without army uniforms/ never state terrorism or government-sanctioned aerial bombardments. But Battle of Algiers presents anticolonialist terror as a response to coloniaiist violence: in Fanon's words/ "the violence of the colonial regime and

the counterviolence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity" (Fanon, 1963, p. 88). For Fanon, the terrtviolencerefers to both forms of violence. The colonialist, who is accustomed to a monopoly on the means of violence and who never tires of saying that " they"

only understand the "language of force," is surprised when force is answered with force, fire with ffre. At the same time/ Battle of ALgierc, in its portrayal of neatly sequenced tit-for-tat violence, is on one level overly generous to the French, since the French were the practitioners not only o{ high-tech violence (planes, heli- copters/ tanks) but also the administrators of systematic, quasi-industrialized tor-

ture. An oppressed people, Fanon tells us rn A Dying Colonialism, "is obliged to practice fair play, even while its adversary ventures/ with a clear conscience, into the uninhibited exploration of new means of terror" (Fanon, 1967b, p.24).

At the checkpoints, the French soldiers treat the Algerians with discrim- inatory scorn and suspicion, while they greet the Europeans, including the Alger- ian women masquerading as Europeans, with amiable "boniours." The soldiers' sexism, meanwhile, leads them to misperceive the three women bombers as French and flirtatious when in fact they are Algerian and revolutionary. The sequence almost literally stages the passage from "Algeria Unveiled," in which Fanon describes the Algerian woman's confrontation with the colonial poiice: "The soldiers, the French patrols, smile to her as she passes, compliments on her looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects that her suitcases contain the

automatic pistol which will presently mow down four or five members of one of the patrols" {Fanon, I967b, p. 521.

The Battle of Algiers thus underlines the racial and sexual taboos of desire

within colonial segregation. As Algerians, the women are the objects of an overt military as well as a covert sexual gaze, they openly become objects of desire for the soldiers only when they masquerade as French. They use their knowledge of European codes to trick the Europeans, putting their own "looks" and the soldiers'

"lookings" (and failure to see) to revolutionary purpose. (Masquerade also serves the Algerian male fighters who dress as Algerian women to better hide their weapons.) Within the psychodynamics of oppression the oppressed {the slave, the black, the woman) know the mind of the opplessors better than the oppressors know the mind of the oppressed. In Battle of Algierc, they deploy this cognitive

31

Panon, Algeia, and the Cinema

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.,i re 1 . Passing at the checkpotnt in Battle of Algrers. New Yorker Fihr

:s)'mmetry to their own advantage, consciously manipulating ethnic, national, :nd gender stereotypes to support their struggle.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to idealize the sexual politics of 3attle of Algiers or of Fanon himself. Historically, Algerian women performed reroic service: they worked as nurses and combatants with the NLF in the :naquis, they hid terrorists from paratroopers in their homes, they suffered tor- :ure at the hands o{ French soldiers {Djamila being the most famous case), and they shouted "Free Algeria" during de Gaulle's visit in 1958. The film shows some of these activities, but the women largely carry out the orders of the male revo- lutionaries. They certainly appear heroic, but only insofar as they perform their service for the Nation. In his writing, Fanon seems to confound a conjunctural sit- uation-the revolution's need for women guerrillas-with a permament condition of liberation. The film does not uitimately address the two-fronted nature of women's struggle within a nationalist but still patriarchal revolution; it elides the gender, class, and religious tensions that fractured the revolutionary process, fail- ing to realize that nationalism revolutions are from the outset constituted in gen-

der. (Mohammed Horbi, an Algerian interviewee in Isaac |ulien's Black Skin, White Mask, a participant in the independence movement/ points out that the more progressive Algerian revolutionaries saw Fanon's essay on the veil as a " rattonalization for Islamic patriarchal conservatism. " )

For Fanon, the liberation of the Algerian nation and the liberation of women went hand in hand: "The destruction of colonization is the birth of the new woman."11 The ftnal shots of Battle of Algiers encapsulate precisely the same idea.

They feature a dancing Algerian woman waving the Algerian flag and taunting the

)L

Roberr SIam

French troops/ superimposed on the title "luly 2, 1962: the Algerian Nation is born"; a woman " carries" the allegory of the "biTth" of the nation. Yet the film does not bring up the annoying contradictions that plagued the revolution both before and after victory. The nationalist representation of courage and unity relies on the image of the revolutionary woman, precisely because her ffgure might oth- erwise evoke a weak link, the fact of a fissured revolution in which unity vis-)L-vis the colonizer does not preclude contradictions among the colonized. In l99l Pon- tecorvo returned to Algeria to examine some of these contradictions in Gillo Pon- tecorvo Returns to Algierc, a film about the evolution of Algeria in the twenty-five years elapsed since the release of the fflm, focusing on topics such as Islamic fun- damentalism, the subordinate status of women, the veil, and so forth (the docu- mentary was made before the civil war in Algeria had taken a toll of over 50,000 dead). And in the mid-1990s, an Algerian feminist film, Djamila Sahraowi's la Moitie du Ciel d'Allah (Half of God's Sky), interviews many of the actualwomen militants who hid weapons under their Islamic garb. They reiate their youthful enthusiasm for the revolution, along with their subsequent disenchantment as the revolution became ever more patriarchal, and oppressive, asking for endless sacri- fice with precious few rewards.

The revolutionary leader Ben M'Hidi, in Battle of Algierc, at one point tells Ali-la-Pointe that "beginning the revolution is difficult, carrying it out is more dif- ficut, and then the realprobletns begin." If Battle of Algiers portrays the indepen- dence struggle, another film throroughly informed by Fanonian ideas, Sembene's satirical fil:;r.t Xala, focuses on the struggles that come afterindependence. The Sem- bene ft1m draws on a very different strain within Fanon's writing: his mordant cri- tique of the indigenous postindependence bourgeoisie. The fflm revolves around a fable of impotence, in which the protagonist's xala, a divinely sanctioned curse of impotence, comes to symbolize the neo-colonial servitude of the black African elite. The protagonist, El Hadji, is a polygamous Senegalese businessman who becomes afflicted with the xala on the occasion of taking his third wife. In search of a cure, he visits various medicine men, who fail to cure him. At the same time, he suffers reverses in business, is accused oI embezzlement/ and is ejected from the Chamber of Commerce. In the end, he discovers that his xala resulted from a curse sent by a Dakar beggar whose land El Hadji had expropriated. He finally recovers from his malady by submitting to the beggars' demands that he strip and be spat upon; the film ends with a freeze-trarne of his spittle-covered body.

In the world of Xala, the patriarchal structures of colonialism have given way to indigenous A{rican class and gender oppression, precluding the utopia of lib- eration promised by nationalist rhetoric. Impotence thus betokens postindepen- dence patriarchy as failed revolution. Lll<e Battle of Algiers, Xala can be seen as an audiovisual gloss on Fanonian concepts. It is interesting, in this context , that atvar- ious points Fanon himself showed interest in the subject of impotence, for exam- ple, in the discussion in Wrctched of the Earth of the case of the Algerian man rendered impotent by the rape of his wife by a Frenchman. {Fanon's masculinist

1l

Fanon, Algeia, and the Cinema

. :-ss is on the husband as victim of impotence and humiliation rather than on the -:e as the victim of rape.) Furthermore, the draft of an unpublished paper by

--ques AzouIay, FranEois Sanchez, and Fanon was to be a study of male impotence

:he Maghrebian cultural context, within the native "knowledge system." The

- -:hors point out that North A{rican men beset by impotence, like El Hadj inXaIa, .:::led to bypass Western-trained doctors in favor oI matabouts and talebs llke :-- se in the Sembene fi.Im, since they attributed the impotence to magical causes.12

Fanon's portrait o{ the national middle class as "underdeveloped" and .:eedy," with "practically no economic power . . . not engaged in production, nor

-rvention, nor building, nor labor ," perfectly suits El Hadji and his commercial .:::r-ities. For Fanon, the energies o{ the national bourgeoisie are completely

-.-naiized into activities of the intermediary type" (Fanon, 1963, pp. l4B,I49l, :::in a perfect description of El Hadji's merchandizing o{ secondary products such ,. Er-ian watel and yogurt. The businessmen of the Chamber of Commerce, with . -.:rr briefcases full of French bribe mone, fit Fanon's descriptiort of " a greedy lit- :rxste...aget-rich-quickmiddleclass...notthereplicaofEuropebutitscar- -.:ure." Completely identi{ied with racist European values, this black elite .' :rds tourism in Spain because "there are too many blacks'" Nationalism, for ...:s new elite, means/ as Fanon puts it, "quite simply the transfer into native -.::Jsof thoseunfairadvantageswhich arcalegacy of thecolonialperiod'"Itis -. accident that El Hadji finances his third polygamous marriage with money : ,.:ropriated from peasants, precisely the class that Fanon lauded (with only par- ,:- accuracy) as the truly revolutionary class. As "the people stagnate in unbear-

- - -c poverty"-emblem atized by the beggars waiting on the sidewalk outside El

-,ljr's place of business-they "slowly awaken to the unutterable treason of their ,::.lers." While the elite constantly calls to mind its heroic sacrifices in the name

: :he people, the people "show themselves incapable of appreciating the long way

.:-\- have come . . . fthey] do not manage, in spite of public holidays and flags . . . , convince thernselves that anything has really changed in their lives."

Fanon's critique of the pitfalls of nationalism anticipated, and concretely

-luenced, subsequent Algerian {and North A{rican) cinema. While accepting the -.-<ic anticolonialist thrust of Third Worldist discourse, postindependence films

-.\'e interrogated the limits and tensions within the Third World nation, espe- : .11y in terms of the fissures having to do with race, gender, sexuality, and even :-rgion. Within this evolution from Third Worldist to post-Third Worldist dis-

- urse/ Algerian cinema increasingly pays attention to the ftssures in the nation, r:sures that have recently turned into veritable chasms, and to a civil war that ..:,. taken over 50,000 lives. A{ter the first "heroic" phase of independent Alger- ,r cinema, which stressed the glories o{ the revolutionary struggle, for example, ...\\-tndfromthe Aures11965)andChronicleof theYearsof Embersll9T5), Alger- ,=n cinema turned its attention toward social problems internal to Algeria, ' .'hether the status of women lWind from the South, I975i Leila and the Othets,

- 9'8), male sexuality (Omar Gatlato, 1977), or agrarian reform (Noua, 1977).

fi

Robert Stam

But some 1990s films offer an even more pronounced critique of the Alger- ian national revolution. Youcef, the protagonist in Mohamed Chouikh's Youcef, Or the Legend of the Seventh Sleeper (199411, escapes from an asylum-one is reminded again of Fanon's psychiatric ward-into what he believes to be Algeria in 1960, a world where the FLN is heroicaliy battling French armies. A surreal time gap between Youcef 's subjective perception and present-day Algeria becomes

a satirical trampoline for exposing the minimal progress in the life of Aigerian peo- ple since independence. Yesterday's heroes, Youcef soon learns, are today's oppres-

sors, ready to sacriffce anyone who opposes their regime, including their old FLN comrades. Insanity no longer resides in an individual but in a social system. Other films call attention to gender-based oppressions. Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli's Silences of the Palace ofiferc a gendered and class critique of Tunisia, where the hope for social transformation after independence has yet to be completely realized. The protagonist, the lower-class singer Alya, whose revolutionary lover

had assured her, back during the climactic moment of anti-French struggle, that not knowing her father's identity would not matter in the new Tunisian society, is disappointed when he refuses, years later, to marry her. The film that began with her singing the famous Um Koulthum song "Amal Hayatt" (The Hope of My Life) ends with her decision to keep her baby. Instead of the symbolic birth of a nation that concludes the Battle of Algiers-"The Algerian nation is born"- Silences of the Palace n.afiativizes literal birth, thereby giving voice to women's struggle against colonialism from within as well as from without.

To my knowledge, the ftlm Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, directed by Isaac |ulien and produced by Mark Nash, is the only fflm dedicated exclusively to the subject of Frantz Fanon. The |ulien fflm is a product of the age of the "posts": poststructuralism, postmodernism, and, most relevant to Fanon, postcolonialism.l3 With postcolonialism, the Manichean opposition of oppressor and oppressed, and the binaristic dualism of First World/Third World give way to a more nuanced spectrum of subtle differentiations, in a new global regime where

First World and Third World (the latter now redubbed the "South"). Over time, the "three worlds" theory of the 1960s has given way to more subtly differenti- ated analyses of the global political topography. The nation-state, once the pri- mary unit of analysis, has given way to analytical categories both smaller and larger than the nation. A paranoid and gendered discourse of penetration and vio-

lation has given way to a sense of resistance within intimacy. With giobalization, models of Manichean oppression have given way to images of interdependency. Notions of ontologically referential identity have made way for identity seen as an endlessly recombinant play of constructed dif{erences. Once rigid boundaries

now are presented as more porous; imagery of barbed-wire frontiers dla Battle of Algiers have given way to metaphors of fluidity and crossing. The segregated space of the Algerie Francaise of the Pontecorvo fflm has become the miscegenated space of contemporary France and the miscegenated aesthetics-at once North African, French, and Afro-American, of beur cinema, the fflms made by Maghre- bians in France. {See Peter Bloom's essay in this volume.) The brutal borderiines

Fanon, Algeia, and the Cinema

- -onial Algeria have been replaced by the more subtle borderlines separating : --r'ban metropolises of France from the banlieu. Colonial metaphors of irrec-

- - --able dualism give way to tropes drawing on the diverse modalities of mixed- -'. religious (syncretism), linguistic {creolization), botanicai (hybridityl, racial

. --,;sage). Totalizing narratives of colonial domination have mutated slowly . fn awareness of a rrrodicum of reciprocity. Instead of binary oppositions, we - :nutual shaping and indigenizatron within a Bakhtinian "in-between."

In this new epoch, both "Fanon" and " AIgeria," historically shaped utter- - r s, also mutate/ changed by the new context. And just as we now know more

- ,-t the savagery of French repression during the War in Algeria, we are also less . :,\- to idealize the Algerian revolution in the wake of a civil war that has taken .' -ir-es of over i50,000 Algerians, a war rooted, in some ways, in fractures r:-rd,v present during the war for independence. in his Une Vie Debout: Mem- :.; Politiques, Mohammed Harbi, one of the Algerians interviewed in the fulien ::r has called attention to the deadlv internicene battles between various fac- ..: in the independence movement, to the ethnic tensions between Arabs and

:-:ers, and to the murder of tens of thousands of harkis, Algerian collaborators .:r the French. Far from being a universally popular uprising, the independence

'.'ement was dominated by a small cadre of middle-class urban leaders. Thus . ind a symmetrical repression of history; on the French side, of torture and --,nial massacres, and on the Algerian side, of violent factional splits and the

:'issacres of the harkis. As David Macey puts it, "the post-colonial Fanon is in 'i:r)- ways an inverted image o{ the revolutionary Fanon of the 1960s." The Third '' rldist Fanon, for Macey, "was an apocalyptic creaturei the postcolonial Fanon

:ries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is ,. longer angry" (Macey, 2001, p. 28). in this moment of the eclipse of revolu-

:lary nationalist metanarratives, |ulien obviouly has an altered conception of .ion's emancipatory project. Which is not to say that fulien does not understand

.:-J appreciate Fanon's project. Indeed, Fanon and ]ulien can be seen as sharing ,::tain features: {1) both are writers/artists: one with pen, the other with a cam- :ri ,3fld a1so, occasionaliy, a pen); {2) both deal with taboo topics; they probe deep ". -runds, if only to suture them better; (3) both work against the grain of inherited i:nres and discourses: psychoanalysis/the art film; and {a) both meld theory with ,:rivism. Indeed, just as Fanon perceived the Eurocentric limits both of psycho- ,lalysis and of Marxism, we might say that Isaac |ulien interrogated the Euro- -:nrrism of a certain avant-garde.

|ust as Fanon's work emerges {rom the charged situation of colonialism, - *lien's work comes out of the wave of black uprisings against police brutality in -re 1970s and 1980s. If Fanon embodied the theory and practice of Third World- sm, Isaac |ulien's film embodies the theory and practice of postcolonial

;ost-Third Worldism. It acknowledges, in other words, that we are living in a very :iiferent historical/theoretical moment from that of the Battle of Algiers.Indeed, :he frequent clips from the Pontecorvo fllm are meant to remind us of the pas- .ions of that other moment. But given the altered discursive context, the Isaac

Jn

RoberL SLam

|ulien film offers a fairly " sool" and "post" take on Fanon's incendiary prose. The film conveys both identification with and distance from Fanon, while deploying a carefully calibrated self-reflexive and ironic distance from Third Worldist rhetoric. The film lacks the nationalist passion characteristic of Fanon's histori- cal moment, when tricontinental revolution was assumed to be lying in wait just around the next bend of the dialectic, when the Third World Left and the First Worid Left were thought to be walking arm in arm toward a preordained victory celebration. It is this discursive shift that makes a 1960s militant ffim like Hour of the Furnaces, despite its versatility and brilliance, now seem somewhat dog- matic, puritanical, masculinist, and Manichean.

A founder of Sankofa, one of the black British ftlm collectives of the 1980s, Isaac fulien has directed a number of politically and aesthetically interventionist films. It is not easy to sum up the semantic riches of his films. Even the generic label of "documentary" is misleading, since |ulien's "documentaries" often include highly staged sequences set within stylized decors rooted in his back- ground in the visual arts. At the same time, it is possible to posit some salient traits shared by the films. First, fulien's fflms constitute an ongoing and multi- leveled reflection on the role of Afro-diasporic artists/ intellectuals and of black cultural forms: Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance rn Looking for Langston, pirate radio in Young Soul Rebels, Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask. Apart from providing an hospitable filmic environment {or intellectuals such as Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Patricia Williams ,TriciaRose, and Robyn Kelly, the films unembarrassedly engage with film theoretical discourse and with cultural stud- ies. A fiim iike Teruitories, for example, superimposes a theoretical analysis over visual depictions of the Notting Hill Carnival; slow motion renders the process of thought as it plays over and around the arrested media image.

fulien's films also show constant concern with the critique of racism, homophobia, sexism. But that is to put the issue negatively. To put it positively, his films promote an open-ended reflection on multiple axes of difference having to do with nation/race/gender/sexuality I and even generation and ideology (as in Passion for Remembrance), axes that mutually inflect and complicate each other within an overdetermined intersectionality, which are not reducible to each other, which confound any simplistic notions of essential identity. His films promote what might be called an audio-visual-textual dance of positionalities, within which race is gendered, class is sexualized, and so forth. A corollary of this open- ended dance is a pushing-the-envelope audacity, a constant flirtation with "incor- rect" images, for example, the choice oI a gay Langston Hughes to "represent" the A{rican American community, or the disturbing sadomasochistic image of a black man being erotically whipped by a white man in The Attendant.

Third, |ulien's ftlms display a strong and variegated diasporic conscious- ness of blacks as cosmopolitan, international people. The fflms promote a kind of chronotopic superimposition. They rarely have single geographical locations, and even when they do, other locations are made to impinge on them through " aIierr"

,/ Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinenta

--::s and sound. Here we might think of the presence of Martinique, France, - -::d, and Tunisia tn Black Skin, White Mask, or of the link between black ' . >ir and African American musical culture tn Young Soul Rebels. Related to ' , :rasporic consciousness is a search for utopian spaces-the clubs in Looking : -.i7gston, the disco scene in Young Soul Rebels-spaces typified by gender

" ., r::rg, transracial intimacy, artistic freedom, and " gay relatlity," spaces where , - < and gay culture do not have to be checked in at the door like winter over- -:. Often the diasporic consciousness is realized through the creative deploy- .--: of Afro-diasporic music: jazz and blues in Looking for Langston, disco in ,'-_. Soul RebeLs, rap in Darker Side of Black.Even Black Skin, White Mask's

. :::r-al of Fanon's attempt to turn the psychiatric ward at Blida into a normal, '

- -::.nized, hopeful space pays tribute to this utopian desire to transmogrify and . -::rrr irom alienation the negativities of everyday existence.

A1l of |ulien's ffhns display a clear option for stylization and reflexivity- - - :nal terms, a refusal of illusionism, a preference for reflexivity and flamboy- , :nd low-budget) theatricality. fulien's is a challenging cinema, characterized

, nigh multitrack density of information. Both image and sound are haunted ' :ner texts. His films feature innovative ways of weaving archival footage with - - ,- rn films with staged scenes and interviews in a kind of audiovisual layering.

-. - rilms also demonstrate a highly creative attitude toward the audiovisual -, -:rive, seen in the ways that archival footage is used to re-create, in a telescoped, .-::rrst minimalist fashion, the Harlem Renaissance (rn Looking for Langstonl or --,:crre Francaise (in Black Skin, White Mask).In the latter film, |u1ien turns the .:-'.- lack of moving image materials depicting the historical Fanon into a tram-

. ,,ne {or extraordinary creativity. }ulien's films offer a palimpsestic aesthetic, --: that goes against the grain of conventional expectations not only for the fic-

-.- r feature but also for the documentary film. In |ulien's work, interviews are .. =';er merely interviews; too much is happening in the shot or on the sound track.

- rrnk, for example, of the ways that Patrrcta Williams's commentaries are super- :rposed on footage of the "Rush Limbaugh Show" in Oh That Rush! in such a

'.,,'ay as to highlight the contradictions between the two. She is mobiiized, made :. move around, hover over, and surround Limbaugh in the manner of an intel- -e ctual guerrilla sniper. The frame itself seems unable to contain such explosively :gonistic figures. Patricia Williams's subtle briliiance makes Rush Limbaugh look :arvdry, defensive, mean-spirited; her intellectually vibrant persona gives the lie io Limbaugh's racist diatribes.

In sum, |ulien's fiims challenge thematic as well as formal taboos; they iairly revel in unorthodoxy. They rub against the grain of at least two traditions: frrst, that of a "high modernist" avant-garde interested only in a festival of nega- trons of dominant cinema, that is, the negation of narrative, of fetishism, of iden- tification, of pleasure. This tradition betrays a certain Anglo-puritanism, an ingrained suspicion of {iction, beauty, and pleasure. }ulien's films, in contrast, dis- play an unabashed fondness for beauty, pleasure, rhythm, expressed in antipuri-

l8 Roberr Stam

tanical films that avoid the dead-end anhedonia of a certain avant-garde. But

|ulien's films also go against the grain o{ another tradition, that of a certain strand

of politically radical film. In Black Skin, White Maskwe sense a committed film-

maker but not apreachy one. The fflms do not deliver predigested a priori truths; the approach is dialogic rather than authoritarian. The fflms are multivoiced. Identification operates, but not in the conventional manner. It does not take place

through idealized figures, through positive images, or through point-of-view edit-

ing or the usual protocols of subjectification. The identi{ication is not with heroes

or heroines, but with a conflictual community of aspiration, a polyvocal commu- nity that shares issues and questions rather than fixed or deffnitive answels.

Black skin, white Mask does not cultivate the "aura" of its protagonist.

It avoids the hackneyed, sycophantic formulas of "great man" documentaries: the

ritual visit to the ancestral home, the shots of the actual desk where the artist

worked; the reverential homages; the lachrymose reminiscences of prestigious

friends; the knowing voice-over asserting irrefragable truths. More precisely, the

film avoids three pitfalls typical of its genre of intellectual biography: (1) hagiog- raphy, that is, a blind adoration that would make Fanon a perfectly admirable man

and an infallible prophet; l2) faclle critique, that is, a pattonizing censure of Fanon's "mistakes" as seen from the supercilious standpoint of an unforgiving

present; {3) ventrilocluism, that is, an approach that would turn Fanon into another

version of Isaac fulien, which would present a contingent and personal reading of

Fanon as if it represented a real ontological essence. Instead, the film dialogues with Fanon. It sees and critiques his blind spots, but it also sees Fanon's questions as burningly relevant to the present. It ffnds Fanon's contradictions themselves interesting and productive.

fust as Fanon mixed genres and discourses in his book, mingling psycho-

analysis, sociology, poetry/ literary criticism, and so forth, |ulien mixes genres in his

fflm, including archival footage; interviews with Fanon's {amily (brother, son}, fel-

low psychiatrists (Azoulay), and scholars {Frangoise Verges, Stuart Hall); quoted ffc-

tion fi|ms; stylized fantasy seeuences; and soliloquies by the actor (Colin Salmon)

playing Fanon. The film also places Fanon within a long historical context/ moving

from Martinique as one of the "old colonies" that predated the French Revolution,

through references to Victor Schoelcher and the abolition of slavery in 1848, through

to the turn-of-the-century heights of French imperialism. Despite the title, the film does not limit itself to Fanon's 1952 text.It speaks of Fanon's democratizing prac-

tices in the asylum at Blida, of his relation to the Algerian revolution, while draw-

ing on materials fromTheWretched of the Earthsuch as the case studies o{ coionial

neurosis and psychosis related to the torture of Algerians. We learn about the sweep-

ing changes and reforms Fanon made in a hospital where degradation, humiliation,

and forced drugging had been the norm. Forced to retrofft psychoanalysis in light of

the needs of the colonized, Fanon saw the psychiatric hospital itself as pathogenic,

since it sealed off patients from the emotional sustenance of their ordinary rela- tional life-worlds. Fanon hoped, consequently, to transform the ward under his juris-

IO

Fanot't, Algena, and the Cinenta

-:--'rn into a relatively nonhierarchical space of interactive conviviality. In this - - :i: d kind of isomorphism links Fanon's attempt (together with his Algerian few- : :rnfrere Azoulayl to create a microrevolution in the psychiatric ward in Blida-

' -;r1le, on the one hand, with the macrostruggle of the NLF to revolutionize the - :J World nation, on the other.

Within this task, Isaac |ulien cites his own intertext, specificalIy, Battle ' -,,giers. He especially privileges the torture sequences/ scenes perfectly rele- .-: ro Fanon as the psychoanalyst who had to deal with both the torturers {the

. .rch) and the tortured {the Algerians). The film also cites Battle of Algiers in ,-, s that are almost subliminal. A trilled flute, taken from the sound track but

--:.:ched from the image track, is deployed as a kind of minimalist leitmotif, a ::n of punctuation, an acoustic synechdoche for the situated, vibrating tension

: :he colonial agon. Here, I will focus on three specific aspects of Black Skin, White Mask: its

-::loyment of the gaze, of space/time, and of voice. The Fanonian analysis of the -..:e , as is well known, inserts itself within an intertextual tradition that goes back .: -east as far as Hegel's anatomy of the master/slave dialectic, through Alexandra r-- ,eve's reexamination of that dialectic in his Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel

))+7), through Sartre's existential unpacking of le regard (especially rn Anti- .:nite and [ew) and Lacan's neo-Freudian analysis of the gaze and the "mirror

-::ge." InWtetched of the Earth, Fanon casts colonialism itself as a clash of gazes: - nave to meet the white man's eyes." The colonist trains on the colonized a look : desire, of appropriation, of surveillance. He overlooks, surveys, and oversees/ ,'irhout being looked at, surveyed, or overseen. "The look that the native turns on .re settler town," meanwhile, "is a look of lust. . . to sleep in the settler's bed,

rth his wife if possible" (Fanon, 1963, p.159). And the colonialist's greatest crime -.,,'as to make the colonized look at themselves through colonizing eyes, the very .ct of self-regard was mediated by superimposed alien looks and discourses. It is :lnsequently no accident that the Isaac fuiien fi1m proliferates in images of dis- : "rrbed specularity, in Magritte-like images of mirrored shards, images reminiscent

r other films, such as Hitchcocl<'s The Wrong Man, where the fragmented mirror ,mage literalizes psychic splitting to evoke a crisis in identity.

In his influential "Orphee Noir" essay that introduced Senghor's A ntholo- .:te de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Malgache de Langue Francaise ,1948), Sartre lescribed the project of "negritude" as a turning back of the gaze, by which the f rench, who had objectified A{ricans, were now obliged to see themselves as oth- ers saw them. In "ocularphobic" language that recalls the returned glance by rr.hich the camera f character turns its gaze on the surprised spectator, Sartre tries ro make his French readers feel the historic, poetic fustice of this process by which rhe distanced, sheltered colonial voyeur is abruptly vu;

I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen. . . . Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze

40

Robert Stam

is thrown back into our eves picked to the bone.Ia

by this steady and corrosive gaze, we are

In the wake of both Sartre and Fanon, fulien's ftlm thematizes the racial- ized, sexualized look. It provides audiovisual object lessons illustrating Fanon's analysis, but it also expands and interrogates that analysis. Like that other filmic allegory of voyeurism, Hitchcock's Rear Window, the |ulien film proliferates in words having to do with looking: "see," "regard," "the desiringgaze," "field of vision," "scopophilia," "voyeutism," the "look that hactures," the "sexualized nature of the look." Indeed, one can see the film as a theorized orchestration of looks and glances, captured and analyzed in all their permutations: the actor Fanon's direct iook at the camera/spectator; de Gaulle's paternal look at Algeria as he parades through Maghrebian streets {edited in such away that veiled women shield themselves from his regard, thus evoking the theme of "Algeria Unveiled"); the dumb, uncomprehending look of French soldiers on Algerian women/ their misinterpretation of the hermeneutics of the veil; the aftogarrtt imperial look of French helicopters surveying Algerian crowds; the look of the sympathetic woman observer (cited from Battle of Algierc) who cries as she witnesses torture and empathizes with the victim.

A particularly complex sequence features "Fanon" as psychoanalyst lis- tening (i'ecoutel both to the tortured and to the torturers, who tell their mutually implicating stories about fathers, mothers, children, and soldiers. Historically, Fanon would in the daytime treat French soldiers suffering the traumatic effects of having tortured Algerians, while at night he treated the victims of torture, often in a revolving door situation, where the victims were returned to health only to be delivered up once again into the maws of the French interrogation system. The sequence offers a suggestive combinatory of looks: the French soldier looks at Fanon, whiie Fanon looks elsewhere; Fanon looks at the soldier, while the soldier looks away. A rare reciprocal and homosocial look, interestinglt passes between Fanon and the Algerian ffghter, in a mutual homosocial gaze of shared militancy that evokes Fanon's call in Black Skin, White Mask for a utopian world of mutual recognitions. The most disturbed look is Fanon's look at two men kissing; the gaze

is returned when one of the men (played by Kobena Mercer, another theorist of theraciahzed, sexualizedgazel looks back at Fanon, after which Fanon looks away as if unable to sustain a homosexual gaze. We sense a kind of homoerotic panic, the anxiety provoked by a willed disidentiffcation. Fanon denied, the film reminds us, the existence of homosexuality in Martinique; his claim that "there is no homosexuality here" ironically echoes the racist's "there is no racism here." Here the look is disrupted, named, disturbed, critiqued.

The film also points out the limitations of Fanon's view of heterosexuality. As Fanon scholar FranEoise Verges points out in the film, Fanon practices a double standard. For him as a man, the choice of a white French wife is an expression of his own inalienable freedom; it in no way compromises his integrity. But in the case of |acqueline Manicon, the black woman author of the novel le Suis Martiniquaise,

rono,,, elcri;rd rhe Cincma

-. :: choice of a white man as love object is a betrayal, a symptom of Europhile alien- :::Jn/ a desperate grasping for the magic "touch of whiteness." In short, Fanon prac- . :es asymmetrical pathologrzation, he scapegoats black women for doing exactly 'rat he has done, that is, choosing a lighter-skinned partner. The shallow analysis

, nfirms Fanon's own admission, an echo perhaps of Freud's befuddled "What do .-rmen wantl" of lack of knowledge about the black woman. "As for the black

' .'-rrllarr," Fanon tells us, "I know nothing about her." Here we ftnd again a kind of . :LLed cognitive blocking, a gendered djsidentification.

Black Skin, White Mask also stages the kind of diasporic space/time lived --.'the biographical Fanon. The very scene of the fflm constitutes a dispersed ,rachronistic chronotope. The film's "home" location is the psychiatric ward in :-rda-foinville, where Fanon went in 1953, even though the film is largely based : a book published earlier, in 1952. The film's story evokes Martinique, France,

--geria. Tirnisia. Yet other spaces enter the fflm through radio broadcasts allud- rq to the black struggle in the United States as a way of generalizing meanings -:r-ond the originary space in which they were articuiated. We find this palimpses- ::c space/time in the sequence in which Fanon encounters the French mother and -:r frightened child: "Look a negro! I'm frightened!" The sequence alternates the -lage of Fanon confronting the woman and child, all three dressed in period cloth- -:rg, with images of present-day European metropolises and their immigrants: -\rabs, West Indians, South Asians, and other manifestations of postcolonial -arma. The sequence thus shuttles between past and present in such a way as to --nderline the scene's contemporary relevance and overtones.

]ulien's film brings out a salient feature of Fanonian ecriture: its subtle rchestrations of voice, its ironic pseudoidentification with the alien voice. In his

:SSols, Fanon sometimes impersonates the voice of his oppressor. Fanon's writing ,s thus double-voiced in the Bakhtinian Serise; it mimics the voice of oppression -,rhiie investing it with a contrary ideological orientation. In the film, the actor -mpersonating Fanon says, "there's no racism here; you're just as civilized as we ;rs//-1agisf statements that pretend to be the opposite. Here racist discourse is :rojected or ventriloquized in a kind of discursive masquerade. It is this sly vocal :nimicry that makes it possible for a dishonest polemicist like Denesh d'Souza to nisquote Fanon-even when he quotes him verbatim in The End of Racism. ,{lthough the words are the same, the double-voiced signifying is lost. But in the ilm we sense the attitude behind the words; the double-voicedness is restored rhrough performance, through the grain oi the voice and the barely suppressed anger with which the actor articulates the phrases, as well as through facial :xpression, intonation, and mise-en-scdne. "Fanon" cites the racist, but against the dialogizing backdrop of another ideological orientation.

Black Skin, White Mask is framed, interestingly, by statements that imply a critique of al1 dogmatism. The film begins with untranslated Arabic (the man obsessively asserts/ "I didn't kill anyone), a usage which brings up the debate about Fanon's knowledge of Arabic and the implications of this knowledge (or lack of it)

4)

Robert Stom

for Fanon's right to speak for the Algerians. But then |ulien has his "Fanon" say: "I do not come with timeless truths." And the fflm ends with {lnal words that refuse any "final word." Fanon looks directly at the camera and says: "Oh my body, make of me one who asks questions." (The corporeal genesis of the interrogation itself implies a transcendence of the mind/body binarism.) That Fanon makes the body the asker of questions is especially appropriate to the work of a fflmmaker who has taught us new ways to look at and conceptualize the black body.

And like any open worl<, Black Skin, White Maskleaves us with our own questions. What is gained, and what lost, by choosing to read Fanon back to front, as it were, by privileging the psychoanalytic critique of early Fanon over the revo- lutionary socialist of Wretched of the Earth! Is there a danger of psychologrzing Fanon? Of turning him into a posty pomo-poco academic? And what is lost in the hlpersexualization of the issues? What, one wonders, about forms of colonialism or racism that have little to do with the sexualized gaze, for example, the colonial appropriation of native land, or the devastating electronic machinations of interna- tional financial agencies like the IMF? What about forms of oppression that operate by refusing to 1ook, by refusing to take notice? What about the look that ignores, that renders invisible? Isn't there a danger of reducing complex historical and cul- tural issues to a ractalized psychodrama, whose mysteries are penetrable only by a psychoanalytic master-discourse? Could it be that the goal of the colonized is not to win a reciprocal gaze,but to put the colonialist out of the picture altogether? Or does achieving the reciprocal gaze depend on first achieving independence? Might aural metaphors of voice be more productive than visual metaphors of gaze? And what else is lost in this privileging of the category of the gaze? Is there a danger that in emphasizing Fanon's blind spots we forget how much he helped us seel Or that we lose sight, as it were, of our ovr.n blind spots? Has the film missed an opportu- nity by not at least hinting at Fanon/s relevance for contemporary activism in the age of the "posts," against globalization, for example? But that one ends up asking such questions is very much in the dialogical spirit of the film itself; the film makes us as spectators, alongside Fanon and fulien, the "askers of questions."

NOTES

l. Cited by Ignacio Ramonet in "Cinq Siecles de Colonia1isme," Maniere de Voir 58 (fuly-August 20Ol):7.

2. Robert Young in his book Postcolonialism: An Historical Inuoduction, misses this fun- damental distinction in his emphasis on Fanon's "espousal of the virtues and necesslties o{ vio- lence" and of the "hyperventilating violence fwhich] always formed part of the original policy of the FLN campaign and equally of the French response," an out-of-sequence formulation that has the FLN initiating the violence and the French "responding."

3. Quoted in Benjamin Stora, Histoire de 1'Algerie Coloniale (1830-1954) (Paris: La Decou I99IJ, p.28.

4. Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Memoire, tome II, La Trouble et la Memoire 1955-1998 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 150, cited in Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 44. The {ullest account of Oct 17,1961 is to be found in Jean-Luc Einaudi. lsee References)

F ii

43

Fanon, Algeia, and the Cinema

i. For a comparison between French cinema's treatment of the Algerian war and Ameri- .-.- :rnema's treatment of the war in Vietnam, see Benjamin Stora, Imaginajres du Gueues: - -.:-e-Vietnam, e France et aux Etats-Unis (Paris: La Decouverte, 1997).

(r. For a detailed account of the production of Battle of AJgierc, see Irene Blgnardi's biogra- -- . ri Pontecorvo, Memorie Estorte a uno Smemozato [Memories Extorted from an Amnesiac] -,-.n: FeltrineIIl, 19991. The material onBattle of Algiers is summed up in Bignardi, "The Mak- . : The B attle of Algiers," Cineaste 25, no. 2 (2000).

'. See also Alexis Berchadsky, Relfue "La Question" (Paris: Larousse, 1994). 8. See |ules Roy, ['Accuse ]e General Massu (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 54. 9. Interview, cited from Djamila Smrane, Les Femmes Algeriennes dans la Gueue, tn

'..,=t-, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, p. 404. These revolutionary women also appear and recount -:-r experiences in the Algerian {eminist fiJ:n Women Hold up Half the Sky of ALlah.

10. The relationality of these issues in both space and time became vividly clear to me the ::< of September 11, a week that I happened to be teaching Fanon's Wretched of the Earth rn

. .:'uction with Battle of ALgierc. One student explained that he didn't have his copy of :. .ched of the Earth because he had le{t it a f ew days beiore in the World Trade Center. I asked

", students to compare the horrendous violence done at the World Trade Center to the violence - :e by the three women with the bombs rnthe Battle of Algiers. Was it the same kind of vio- .--el Together, we made the following points. While both incidents constituted terrorism .r,ch took innocent lives, there were also clear distinctions. In the case o{ Algeria, a violent

:-,:rns was used for a worthy end-the independence of Algeria and the end of colonialism. In : .: case of Bin Laden, both the means (mass murder) and the ends (punishing the "infi.del" , -: rrding to codes that are arguably not even part of the religion being invoked) were completely ' :::ehensible. In the Algerian case/ the terrorism was clearly in reprisal for specific acts o{ French : ,:re t€rror (colonial domination, the bombing of the casbah) within the same national spacer in ::.= World Trade Center case/ the terrorism could only be seen as a "reprisal" in a much more - ::uitous and inferentlal sense, and in any case the violence was not exercised against those ::>:onsible for what was claimed to be the initial offense. And while the WTC terrorists made

Jemands-for example, release o{ prisoners-the Algerian demands were quite clear: national .--iependence.

1 I . See Frantz Fanon , Sociologie d'une Revolution (Paris: Maspero, 1961, p. 83. Tr. Haakon

-:evalier, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 12. See Macey, Frantz Fanon, pp.237-238. 13. For more on the notion of post-Third Worldism, see Eila Shohat and Robert Stam,

-:.:hinking Eurocentrism: Muhicuhuralism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994).

14. Jean-Paul Sattre, Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen, quoted in Marttnlay, Dovmcast Eyes ::rkeley: University of Call{ornia Press, 1993), p.294.

REFERENCES

\ussaresses, General Pa:ul. Services Spdciaux Algdrie 1955-1957. Paris'. Perrin, 2001 . -\r'elar, Tose Carlos. A Ponte Clandestina: Teorias de Cinema na Ameilca latin. Sao Pauio:

Edusp/Edotor a 34, 799 5. :inaudi,

|ean-Luc. La Bataille de Pails: 17 Octobre 1961.Parrs Seuil, 1991. :anon, Frantz . TheWretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press,

1963. Black Skin, White Mask. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967a. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967b. Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

Harbi, Mohamrned. Une Vie Debout: Memofues Politiques Tome 1: 1945-1962 Paris: La D6cou- verte, 1990).

\Iacey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. New York: Picador, 2001. Ross, Kristin. May '68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Roy, Jules. I'accuse le General Massu. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Intoduction. Oxford: Blackweil, 2001.

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