Papers by Edward gates bey
Fanon is the purvey~.r of the transgressive and transitional iiiith, l{~ .ro~Y yearltfor the tota... more Fanon is the purvey~.r of the transgressive and transitional iiiith, l{~ .ro~Y yearltfor the totaft:ransforrriation <>.f~:1li !fi~ ~Qciety' .. but he speaks most effectiv~ly fr:<?m the uncertain iQ!~rstices of historical change: ..from. _the Jn:~~ of ambivaT~ eJ},~_be.tweeni~@c¢'~nd .st!~uality; ou.t. of ~I.ll1I.l~~s~l~e(f~n t~,ac:!i.ction between ~~ltur~~and1~lass} f~!D ~~ep ~!~!ll_t!t~ s!~~~ 2fpsy~!!_ic representatio11 and social_rea.lity. T~:~.~!a.~~~-~St() exp~r.~~11c~ the sens~ pfc:liyi~i()(l !h!t prefigures .;:•and fissures-.the emergence of a truly_r!:).di~ thoQghl: that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark. }J;is voic~ is. inost clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term, ip. the silence of a sudden mpture: 'The.Negr-0 is not. Any more than the white man~' The awkward division that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of the process of change. That familiar al•gnment of c;olonial subjects-Blac._k/White, Self70ther-is disturbed with one brief pause al!4 the-traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they aie found to resi. in the narcissistic myths of Negritude or White cultural. s~premacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon• s writing to the edge of things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, 'exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can he horn•. 'the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville is~one such, ~l~<;ewhere, in the divided world of French Algeria, F.anon <U.,scovered the impossibility of his mission as a colonial p~y ciliiatrist: :..."'-" If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country. lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. .. The social strudure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged. I ~ad to meet the white man's eyes.. An u~familiar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of colour em:ounters xii I Foreword t:Umculti~s in the development ofhis bodily schema. .. bvas battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intelle<:tual deficip.cy, fetishism, ractal defects:-.. Hook myself far off from my own presence. . •. What else cauld it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body With black blood? FrQm within the metaphor of vision complicit with a Western ~e~ph~sic of Man>emerges the "~~~J~p:ment of !he coloma! relabou. Th~ BlAck presence rums ~~e repre-•$.entative narrative of Western personhood; its past tethered. to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and degeneracy will.not produce a history of civil progress,""'aspace for the Socius; its present, dismembered and disloeated. wjJlnot contain the image of identity that is questioned in t!le dialectic of mind/body Jllld resolved in the epistemology qf \~PPe3:r~nce .and reality: .• The White man's eyes break up t~e Black man's body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, it.~ field of vision disturbed.
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Papers by Edward gates bey