new formations no 47
AFTER FANONGuest Editors: Timothy Bewes, Laura Chrisman, Scott McCracken
This issue of new formations returns to some of the concerns that have animated the journal over the last fifteen years. The title ‘After Fanon’ takes its cue from the Symposium organised by the editorial board in September 2001 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. The four articles are representative of the intellectual bequeathed by Fanon, covering questions of nationalism and identity in India, Africa, the United States and Latin America.
Two articles take different theoretical perspectives on film: Derrida and serial killer movies; and Adorno and Antonioni; and two articles extend the some of the discussions on urban culture in new formation 37. Eighteenth-century Edinburgh and nineteenth-century London are analysed in relation to concepts of flow and spectacle. A review article investigates the recent interest in theories of trauma in cultural studies. In a new departure we also include an in-depth review of last year’s Surrealism exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Contents: and Contributors:
Scott McCracken: Editorial
Timothy Bewes: Symposium on the Life and Work of Frantz Fanon
Neil Lazarus: Mythemes of Fanon and the Burden of the Present
Vikki Bell: Reading Macey, Reflecting on Fanon
Timothy Bewes: 'At the Level of Individuals, Violence is a Cleansing
Force': Fanon, Internationalism and Terror
Benita Parry: Fanon and the Trauma of Modernity
Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr: On Revolutionary Humanism: The Existentialist
Legacy of Frantz Fanon
Azzedine Haddour: The Importance of Sartre in Fanon
Priyamvada Gopal: Frantz Fanon, Feminism and the Question of Relativism
Guatam Premnath: The Afterlife of National Liberation: Fanon Today
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Vikki Bell, Timothy Bewes, Priyamvada Gopal,
Azzedine Haddour, Neil Lazarus, Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr, Benita Parry, Guatam
Premnath
Laura Chrisman: 'Introduction: Rethinking Race and Nation'
Robert Spencer: 'This Zone of Occult Instability': The Utopian Promise
of the African Novel in the Era of Decolonisation
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo: 'On the Road' with Che and Jack:
Melancholia and the Legacy of Colonial Racial Geographies in the Americas
David Kanzanjian: 'Yankee Universality': Race, Nation, and Empire
in H.C. Carey's The Past, The Present, and the Future
Rajeev Patke: Adorno and the Postcolonial
Fabio Vighi: Mimesis and the Un-Reconciled Condition: A Theoretical
Approach to Antonioni's Cinema
Lisa Trahair: A Taste for Murder: Aesthetics in the Silence of
the Lambs
Ben Highmore: Street Life in London: Towards a Rhythmanalysis
of London in the Late Nineteenth Century
Nick Prior: Urban Portraits: Space/Body/City in Late Georgian Edinburgh
Jane Kilby: The Writing of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Liberty
of Reading
Michael Calderbank: Be Alarmed!: 'Surrealism: Desire Unbound', (Tate
Modern, London, 2001)
BOOKS REVIEWED
Carlo Ginzburg, No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English
Literature
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and
its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music
David Howarth, Aletta J. Norvall and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse
Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change
Mandy Merck, In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies
Maud Lavin, Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design
Will Wright, The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory
Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative
Editorial:
This issue of new formations returns to some of the concerns that have animated
the journal over the last fifteen years. The title ‘After Fanon’ takes its
cue from the Symposium organised by the editorial board in September last
year to mark the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. As Timothy
Bewes points out in his preface to the papers, new formations 1 contained
what was to become an influential group of articles on Fanon’s legacy. The
discussion conducted at the Symposium reflects how debates on Fanon have
moved since 1987, but the points of contention were also influenced by the
Symposium’s own historical moment. Three days after 11 September 2001, the
relationship between Third and First Worlds, the politics of violence, and,
unexpectedly, religion were to the fore. When so much has been written about
the attack on the symbols of American power, the discussion published here
is reminder that, as Stuart Hall has pointed out, that event did not come
out of clear blue sky, it had a history. Fanon’s writings still offer some
of the most productive insights into imperialisms, past and present, and
the dialogues recorded here demonstrate both the continuity and the immediacy
of his thought.
The four articles that follow might be said to represent a part of Fanon’s
intellectual legacy. As Laura Chrisman comments in her introduction to this
section, they represent a continuation of the theme of new formations 45,
‘“At the Rendez-Vous of Conquest”: Rethinking Race and Nation’. More broadly,
they represent the importance new formations gives to the field of postcolonial
criticism, a field that in 1987 was still in its infancy. The section contributes
to the journal’s belief in the importance of politically committed critical
work in that field as in all areas of cultural theory; and that commitment
makes for at least one link between this section and the following. Both
Rajeev Patke and Fabio Vighi find new resources in the writings of Theodor
Adorno, a critic for whom the question of commitment was central. Both articles
might be seen as a continuation of the challenge laid down by new formations
38, ‘The Legacy of the Frankfurt School in Cultural Studies’. One of that
issue’s conclusions was that there is much work to be done if that legacy
is to be properly incorporated into contemporary critical work. Patke’s
article addresses Neil Lazarus’s contention in the issue that postcolonial
theory needs to engage with Adorno’s thought. In some ways Vighi’s Adorno
is a more familiar one, dealing as he does with the work of art. Yet Adorno’s
name is not usually associated with film theory. Vighi’s article, ‘Mimesis
and the Un-reconciled Condition: A Theoretical Approach to Antonioni’s Cinema’,
thus manages a twofold success: it illuminates Adorno’s aesthetics through
a reading of the work of the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni; and
it offers new insights into Antonioni’s films, particularly L’eclisse. Both
Patke and Vighi find through Adorno what others have found through Fanon,
the possibility of hope where there seems to be none.
Lisa Trahair’s article, ‘A Taste for Murder: Aesthetics in The Silence of
the Lambs’, is also a contribution to film theory, but this time its interest
is Hollywood film, products of what Adorno would have called the culture
industry, rather than high art. Trahair begins with Derrida’s concept of
the vicarious, using it to open up a discussion of the serial killer genre.
She argues that far from being a retreat from art, such films themselves
question the place of aesthetic practice in everyday life. Trahair engages
with theories of film spectatorship, suggesting that the concept of the
vicarious makes the issue of identification ‘much more complicated than
film theorists have previously acknowledged’.
The last two articles in this issue focus on earlier moments in the history
of spectacle. The object of analysis for Ben Highmore and Nick Prior is
the modern city, the material space that gave rise to modernity’s enthusiasm
for spectacular pleasures. In ‘Street Life in London: Towards a Rhythmanalysis
of London in the Late Ninteenth Century’, Ben Highmore employ’s Henri Lefebvre’s
analysis of the ‘diverse temporalities of everyday urban life’. The incorporation
of movement and circulation into historical criticism, he suggests, opens
up a new way to analyse visual images such as the series of photographs
and commentaries collected in John Thomson and Adolphe Smith's Street Life
in London. In such an analysis, the ‘captured rhythms’ bound up in the frozen
image might be released. Nick Prior has a similar concern in ‘Urban Portraits:
Space/Body/City in Late Georgian Edinburgh’. At an earlier stage in the
history of the city, Prior finds the dynamics of another modern capital
are also defined by flow and he argues that: ‘Popular prints sold and displayed
in the High Street were a medium for the production of bodies in space,
but they also acted as a potential obstacle in the path towards refinement
that was so central to Edinburgh’s leaders in the age of ‘enlightenment’.
Focussing on John Kay’s popular caricatures, Prior, like Highmore, is also
concerned to release the culture of the quotidian concealed in the historical
object. Finally, Jane Kilby’s review article, ‘The Writing of Trauma: Trauma
Theory and the Liberty of Reading’, analyses the recent upsurge of interest
in trauma theory in cultural studies.
In the first of a new series of short articles that review contemporary
cultural events, Michael Calderbank offers an analysis of this year’s exhibition
of the Surrealists at the Tate Modern in London. He unpicks the contradictory
implications of the use of the term ‘desire’ in the exhibition and asks
whether the Surrealists still command the capacity to bring alarm to our
apprehension of the everyday. The everyday, as pointed out by Rita Felski
in new formations 39 is often the point at which the politics of culture
take place. The politicisation of the mundane, the trivial, the overlooked,
is a motivating force behind this issue. In that sense, it follows Fanon,
for whom the strategic neglect of the wretched of the earth was a matter
of urgent and immediate concern. The legacy of his work reminds us that,
in the surrealist-inspired words of Walter Benjamin, the overlooked contains
‘explosive materials…latent in what has been’. To view them as such, Benjamin
continued, is to treat them ‘not historiographically, as heretofore, but
politically, in political categories’. As Fanon would surely have agreed,
reflection on the explosive materials of history has never been more timely
or more necessary.
Scott McCracken
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