Recent turn of events in Azania for the past few months point to an increase in the level on the contradictions at the core of this classic post colonial Society. While i agree with the prognosis offered by my leaders in the broader Black Consciousness tradition. This note is is provoked by a tendency that is gaining precedence especially among certain sections that claim allegiance to the scholarship & revolutionary Framework developed by Franz Fanon in his practice & scholarship. The tendency to unproblematically prioritize biological/genetics based race definitions of Black revolutionary subjectivity as opposed to histories as a basis for subject formation. Before you dismiss my input as yet another rainbow nation ilussion. Let me tell you what i am not saying; i am not saying that given my countrys recent history race has no place in shaping the everyday experiences of most people particularly Black people. I am not denying the strong correlation and co-manifestación between the variable of race and the articulation of history and that these by and large frame the possibilities open for the emmergence revolutionary Black subjectivity. What i Am saying is the following , a return to Fanon own theorization precisely about the revolutionary Black subjectivity, what he calls the Fact of Blackness. In this discussion, Fanon makes it clear that correlation between White supremecist gaze of classification of populations into biological racial categories have been internalised by the racialised subject & remain a measure of their humanity: they are Black in relation to the White man, they are human as far as humanity is White. Uncritical acceptance of relationship is what produces the master- slave dialectic accompanied by attendent polítics of juxtaposition. Where Black people go ona tangent to prove to the White supremecist gaze, that they too are human and that they have a history without questioning the Fundamentals of a racialised Framework laid out for them in advance- it enters the realm of objective reality thereby transforms them in to objects in a reality they did not determine. Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, visual character,”but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more. Preference for a biological Reading of Black revolutionary subjectivity where racial biology/genetics is a dependent variable- without rejecting the rational base of such an assertion may lead us to back to the polítics typified by the Negritude movement (at best- with all its reactionary potentialities). On the other hand, if we choose history as a basis of our definition of Black revolutionary subjectivity. So that biological definitions of race become an independent variable/a floating signifier- then we open up the possibility for a more dynamic open process of meaning-making. In the long term, this opens the possibility of articulating subjectivities that are as immense as the world...as deep as the deepest of river...that have the power to expand without limit yet are, contingent to & situated in unfolding revolutionary praxis. This is call to return to Fanon, in favor of a comprehensive definition as opposed to populist politically expedient Framework currently en-vogue in critiques of Neo-colonial Kapitalist exístanse in Azania today. Like Fanon said: “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.” Because the seduction of an essentialising discourse militates against what i think was Fanons intervention in his discussion of the *Fact of Blackness*(BWM): that it is not sufficient to define Blackness only in relation whiteness (juxtaposition)-without rejecting the parameters imposed by the white supremecist gaze vs. Black inferiority reaction/submission. it is necessary but insuficient to put the white man back into his place.. and grow bolder, jostle him and tell him point-blank: “Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.” then shout our laughter to the stars. So that the white man can grow resentful. We then pat ourselves on the back and say: . … yebo! We won! This approach is too Quick to make claims to victory. It is merely a reaction, if we were asked for a definition of ourselves we would say: we are Moemi- one who waits to be defined & formulates her own sense of self based on a rejection of what has been defined for her. It is a safe position but essentially reactionary, where we are only defined by our victimhood. A revolutionary consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute.. We cannot take any pre-given definition as Absolute- biological & genetic definitions have these pretensions- that is why they are inconsistent with any revolutionary Project which claims Fanon and the radical tradition he is part of. He warned that consciousness committed only to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being There is need to dig deeper, risk more, against the confort of certainty and uniformity... “What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”Fanon Stuart Hall puts it more elegantly in a series on YouTube dedicated to this theme, i copy the First interview below. Aluta Continua!
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 23:31:44 +0000
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