Book Review: Jill Jarvis, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

Jill Jarvis’s book Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view. This book can be read from the larger ethical-political perspective in the field of International Relations, where there is a growing demand for Reconciliation Commissions to address archives beyond the legal framework. The book, as the title suggests, brings together both Postcolonial Studies and Memory studies in the context of Algerian history. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Jarvis’s deconstructive approach to testimony and memory examines how literature archives the two as forms of resilience, as bearers of witness to experiences that surpass both time and space to fill the gaps in official forms of testimony. As more and more nations are demanding compensation from their perpetrators for past violence and crime against humanity on the political front, this book’s relevance is heightened with its demand for justice and reform, and not merely to forgive and forget. The work of deconstruction that Jarvis undertakes to break down familiar language through reflections on the idea of Muslim, justice, witness, and revolt among others, she critiques the age-old practices of testimonial interrogations and censure that destabilises the multifaceted embodiment of Empire. “France remains constitutively haunted by the empire that it has tried both to exorcise and atone for (12)” succinctly covers the period of Algerian colonisation in 1830 to France’s continued endeavour to redeem and absolve itself from its colonial violence that has been and still remains under the shroud of wilful Western amnesia. Jarvis attempts to expose the denial of the paradox of the French Republican values they are so proud of, to demand justice and reform for the most abject

‘A definite quantity of all the differences in the world’: Glissant, Spinoza, and the Abyss as True Cause

In a conversation with Manthia Diawara aboard the Queen Mary II in 2009, Édouard Glissant elaborated his definition of Relation, a concept that he formally presented in his book Poétique de la relation in 1990, but that emerged out of years of writing about creolization and cultural action in the Caribbean. Sitting at the ship’s window, with the Atlantic Ocean crashing around him, Glissant explains that “the truth that is increasingly coming to light about Black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step towards the Other.

Into the Looking Glass: The Mirror of Old Age in Beauvoir and Améry

Although the pandemic's early months were witness to a nearly unprecedented level of public concern for the plight of the old, such attention did not lead to much sustained analysis into either the concrete experience of old age or the many ways in which a greater knowledge of aging might prove instructive for rethinking the possibilities of contemporary philosophy and social change. The present paper seeks to pursue this otherwise neglected line of inquiry by recovering a previously unexplored episode from the history of social theory in which Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Améry set themselves before the mirror of old age in order to there explore reflections as inimical to their time as our own. For what this intertextual scene of contestation so clearly demonstrates is that the aging body is itself a body of knowledge capable of transforming the very ideologies and social systems that continue to deform the lives of old and young alike

Fanon and Hair

What would it mean to think about Frantz Fanon’s work on race, embodiment, and identity in the context of the contemporary cultural politics of Black hair? Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks offers us some key terms for deepening our engagement with this issue and, in that continuing relevance, tells us something important about the persistence of the colonial gaze in contemporary life. The discourse around black hair has evolved to mean more than what it meant in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it continues to revolve around the symbol of black beauty, celebration and resistance, the symbol is not exclusive to one single hairstyle choice. One of the perils of freedom is the ability to exercise the right of choice. That includes the freedom to choose how you want to look and what language you want to speak. This is about giving agency to black bodies to make choices that make meaning for them and not define it around the white gaze or white ear.  In trying to create safe spaces, we must take caution as not to create barriers around new thoughts and ideas that are uncategorizable. The existence of blackness has long been denied so we should take caution to not disqualify aesthetics that do not fit a specific type of mold. As a black woman born to Senegalese parents, raised in the United Arab Emirates and now living in the United States, I have always been around multiple cultures and that came with the ability to now speak multiple languages (Wolof, English, Arabic and French). And my hair journey…has ranged from having an Afro, braids, perming my hair, going through a period of transition, wearing it natural, adding extensions and the list goes on. Many have tried to disqualify my blackness for one reason or another. But, in no way am I less Black than another because of a hairstyle choice or the languages I speak. My blackness has always been spoken to me by my family. My blackness is a constant reminder to me by society. My blackness is rooted in my experiences. My blackness is rooted in my very existence. As long as I continue to live in my black body, no one can take away my blackness, and all the marvelousness it is capable of. To this, Fanon might suggest I read his Black Skin, White Masks as a way to explain my back-and-forth hair journey between natural and permed to further understand the effects of colonialism on the black psyche. Though Fanon’s perspective can explain so much this, I would like to put his text in dialogue with Rokhaya Diallo’s Afro where she compiles the experiences of 120 Afropeans, men and women, living in France and their experience of wearing their natural hair out. They range from professors, bankers to ministers and civil servants. Hair dictates a lot of factors in a black woman's life. Although they are talking about hair, their experience conveys what it means for a black body to exist in predominantly white spaces. By putting these two texts in dialogue, we can extend Fanon’s discourse around must black bodies conform when existing in white spaces? To what extent does Fanon’s theorization of black bodies in white spaces hold up?

Black Skin, White Masks and the Paradoxical Politics of Black Historiography

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has the paradoxical status of being a text that rejects historiography and History as a primary means of facilitating radical political transformation while also being a key point of departure for histories concerning modern colonial and decolonial thought.1 This reflection is an examination of the tensions in Black Skin, White Masks as a political work and as an intervention into philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and existential debates. Prompted by the 70th anniversary of the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, I examine the richness of the past two decades of historiographical scholarship on slavery, abolition, and freedom struggles in the Caribbean and North America alongside arguments that Fanon made about the limited role of history in sustaining and guiding anti-colonial thought and praxis. Black Skin, White Masks remains relevant, albeit troubling, for querying the presumed connections between historical knowledge, political action, and scholarly production facilitated by academic and political trends. I am interested in how the provocations of Black Skin, White Masks, in particular its last chapter “By Way of Conclusion,” provides fertile grounds for questioning, positioning, and refining contemporary historiographical production

The Lived Experience of Social Construction

A critical engagement with Black Skin, White Masks in the wake of social construction theory and controversies over critical race theory

Martinique Between Fanon and Naipaul

An argument for the proximity, if not absolute sameness, of Naipaul and Fanon on the status of the West Indies in the age of colonialism and independence struggle

Atlantic Theory and Theories

Notes on Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXX, no. 2 (2022

Epidermalization of Inferiority: A Fanonian Reading of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour

As part of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the following reflections are akin to his critical work on the psychoaffective impact of colonialism. Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority has inspired my analysis of the socio-political struggles in Haiti and the complex antagonisms shaped by colonialism, contemporary political personalities, and constantly clashing perceptions of race, gender and nation. I turn to Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority in Black Skin, White Masks to explore the effects of French colonization on the female protagonist’s psyche in Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Amour. Chauvet was born just short of a decade prior to Fanon, and writes, like him, in the moment of anti- colonial struggle in the Caribbean, exploring like Black Skin, White Masks the psychological effects and affects of colonialism. A Fanonian reading of the text illustrates the psychological impact of colonialism on women in post-colonial societies that remain deeply governed by the former colonizer’s values

The Work of Staying-With

There is a breathlessness to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon leaves us in no doubt that he is an author with a great deal to say about matters, among which racism, colonialism and the effect of both on the black body and psyche are his preeminent concern, that are politically urgent. As they are. Such is Fanon’s urgency that he uses every resource at his disposal – works of literature that turn on the colonial condition, psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan with the likes of Mannoni in between), as well as the occasional philosophical invocation (Hegel is a presence if by no means a fleshed-out one; although, it must be said, it is Jean-Paul Sartre who is called to do duty most often). Although Fanon suggests that he considered presenting Black Skin, White Masks as a doctoral thesis, one finds it difficult to imagine such a prospect, in no small measure because the project is so stylistically incoherent. Black Skin, White Masks is an admixture of the anecdotal (Fanon has no trouble extracting political or psychoanalytic conclusions from his personal encounters; a tendency which applies as much to his Martinican past as to his experience of living in France; a tendency that extends to making deductions based on his observations in colonized Algeria), the psychoanalytic, the implicitly philosophical and the rhetorical. That is, the rhetorical in the sense that this is how Fanon structures his argument: through the declarative, through declamation. A scientific work Black Skin, White Masks is not.