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Texture as Substance: Reading Homi K. Bhabha Re-membering Frantz Fanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

[T]he idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the “Otherness” of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. (116)

According to Isaac Julien, the director of Black Skin, White Mask, a film imagining the life of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha is presented in a nonspeaking role as a colored, racialized “colonial subject” to lend “texture” to the cinematography (Interview). Unlike the eloquent postcolonial critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, who are interviewed extensively in the ilm, the mute Bhabha is a cipher, a visual trace of diference in the philosophical, cinematic, and audio montage that composes Julien's meditation on decolonization (Frantz Fanon [Director's cut]). In many ways, Julien's Fanon seems indebted to Bhabha's strong reading, against the grain of Fanon's oeuvre, in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” a foreword Bhabha wrote for a new British edition of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1986. Julien's Fanon is an interstitial igure, stitched together through multiple viewpoints and physically composed of cinematic elements juxtaposed in striking contrast to one another. He emerges from scraps of discourse cast of and reassembled, much as Bhabha's Fanon is captured in Fanon's ungrammatical utterance that betrays by ellipsis the nature of identity, which is that identity is “not”: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (113). The revelation that the nature of identity is spatially split and temporally deferred-the deinition of Derridean diférance-is most truly represented in the colonial situation, where white mythologies of wholeness and authenticity are actualized as performances of power. When these mythologies are accompanied by paranoid fantasies of blackness that reveal the contradictory duplicity of white representations of the other-the simian Negro, the inscrutable Chinaman-this racial discrimination and its neurotic imagery reveal the nature of the white self and its pretense of universality: that the human is not whole and that the Enlightenment dream of self-presence is an illusion thrown up by the anxious exercise of mastery over those lesser humans, the Negroes.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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References

Works Cited

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