Abstract
Abstract My thesis is to rethink Frantz Fanon in terms of psychic dynamic of representation, racist economy of investment, Identity and difference, nationalism and its cognitive failures and ultimately the political manifesto of violence. I draw upon Foucault’s notion of “epistemic shifts” to elaborate the trajectory of Fanon in the postcolonial contexts and thus re-confirm Fanon’s solution to the psychic dislocation and social neuroses of colonization. Introduction deals with the motivation of thesis and reviews the current studies of Fanon. Chapter one discusses the appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Fanon and Bhabha. It restores to surface the route in which Fanon extends the mirror period to detect the intangible bonds over subjective constitution and racial imago, the Imaginary register and bodily schema, visibility and skin that orientate us towards the colonial phantasy. Then, it examines Bhabha’s application of psychoanalytical languages to colonial discourse so such an extent he interrogates the image-identification, knowledge-stereotype, power-fetish on the pivotal turn of the mirror reflection of alienation, recognition, differentiation and difference. The solution, we find, is his introduction of “repetition with difference” that negotiates the fixed ideas of the colonized. Last of all, it traces the route in which Fanon elaborates the technologies of the colonized self and thus subverts the disciplinary gaze as activated in “Algerian Unveiled” and “This is the Voice of Algeria.” Chapter two illustrates Fanon’s critical engagement with the “affective erethism” of Manicheism deliriums that mirror and translate the psychic dislocation and social neuroses. It indicates to trace the voyage inside/outside the phantasmatic metropolis of racism while he deals with the monadized subjects of alienated languages, perverse sexualities, misrecognition of Man, Negrophobia. Chapter three deals with the politics of the wretched of the earth that is absent in colonialist historiography and nationalist imagined communities. With intellectual hindsight of Subaltern Studies group, it examines Fanon’s phenomenological descriptions of the “spontaneity” of the peasantry so that Fanon retrieves the subject of history and points out the cognitive failures in terms of time lag. In addition, I elaborate the travel theory of Fanon on the pivotal turn of “the occult zone of instability where the people dwell” and undertake to re-present the partial truths of Fanon at the multiculturalist assertion of difference. Conclusion is a meditation on the disarticulated color woman in Fanon’s decolonization project. It reexamines the appropriation and misrecognition of color woman so that it reconfirms Fanon’s contribution and travel theory elsewhere.