Abstract
Subversive pedagogy is an embodied experience of disruption that shatters the oppressed colonial subject, undermines the discourse of universality, fosters a bottom-up perspective and gives birth to new militant political identities. After I present these aspects of Fanon’s thinking, I draw some parallels between Fanon’s subversive pedagogy and National Football League (NFL) athlete-protestors. Subversive pedagogy emerges as a visceral experience of disruption that exposes the authority, hierarchy and knowledge nexus and the doctrine of color blindness as neocolonial practices.
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Notes
- 1.
See Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 8–13.
- 2.
See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
- 3.
See Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996). For an analysis of affirmative action, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
- 4.
See Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 5.
For the ways in which poor, working-class and middle-class whites and wealthy elites overcome class animosity and unite via racism, see Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
- 6.
See John McWhorter, “Racism in America Is Over,” Forbes, December 30, 2008.
- 7.
See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Rorty argues that the cultural left has eclipsed the reformist left. See also Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-cognition,” in Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays, ed. Nicholas Xenos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). See, finally, Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 8.
See Eugene Scott, “Black Lives Matter Protester Confronts Clinton at a Fundraiser,” CNN, February 26, 2016.
- 9.
See Dan Merica, “Black Lives Matter Protesters Shut Down Sanders Event in Seattle,” CNN, August 10, 2015. See also Gil Troy, “Why Black Voters Don’t Feel the Bern,” Politico, March 7, 2016.
- 10.
See Haimy Assefa, “Restoring MLK’s Dream, Street by Street,” CNN, January 18, 2016.
- 11.
CNN, August 18, 2015. Mike Huckabee falsifies the content of King’s writings as well as the historical record. For King’s defense of extreme tactics, forcing a crisis and fostering tension, see “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 2000). King states: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue” (p. 67). See also Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014). For Cobb, “this willingness to use deadly force ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself” (p. 1).
- 12.
For a theoretical account that focuses on thinkers only from the Western canon, see Dana Villa, Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- 13.
See also Étienne Balibar, “Racism as Universalism,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994).
- 14.
Fanon calls for a “new start,” a “new way of thinking,” a “new man.” He claims that the European game is over and that “we must look elsewhere besides Europe” (pp. 235–239). Fanon also highlights confrontational tactics used to contest European domination. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), hereafter WE.
- 15.
Jean-Paul Sartre gave the question of violence center stage in his Preface to WE. Hannah Arendt has a critical account of Fanon and violence in On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). The focus on violence has led to the neglect of other themes in Fanon’s work. For Sefa Dei and Simmons, there has been “inadequate attention paid to Fanon’s ideas and the pedagogical implications.” See George J. Sefa Dei and Marlon Simmons, “The Pedagogy of Fanon: An Introduction,” Counterpoints 368 (2010): xiii. See also Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter, “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue,” Race Ethnicity and Education 13:2 (2010): 139–157.
- 16.
It is not only in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth where the pedagogical significance of the fight against colonialism appears. References to education and pedagogy can also be found in Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1988), hereafter TAR; Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), hereafter BSWM; A Dying Colonialism, trans. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), hereafter ADC; and Frantz Fanon: Alienation and Freedom, eds. Khalfa and Young, trans. Corcoran (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), hereafter AF.
- 17.
The French amener has a variety of meanings. Richard Philcox translates it as “induce.” Amener also implies to bring, to take, to cause, to bring up, to lead, to pull. All of these are closely connected with “to educate.”
- 18.
For these and related themes, see Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1999). See also The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996) and Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
- 19.
See Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), p. 39.
- 20.
For a critique of these and related ideas, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- 21.
Fanon states: “The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed its secrets to us” (BSWM 202). See also Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990).
- 22.
See Étienne Balibar, “Racism as Universalism,” p. 196.
- 23.
See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 226. See also Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 110–111.
- 24.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, p. 236. In reference to the “Carib,” Kant states he lives carelessly and “sells his sleeping-mat in the morning and in the evening is perplexed because he does not know where he will sleep during the night” (p. 78). See also Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), p. 63. See also Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 738–740. As Israel notes, other major European thinkers had troubling assumptions pertaining to race. Hegel claimed Africa has no history and it is not part of the historical part of the world. Germans were on the top of the racial pyramid. See also Teshale Tibedu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Hegel depicts Africans as “people of the senses” (xii). Tibedu continues: “Hegel articulated a sophisticated theory of the rationality of European colonial expansion” (xiii). For Robert Young, “Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism” in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 2.
- 25.
Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
- 26.
In contrast to Kant, Rawlsian universalism neutralizes racial/ethnic, gender and class differences behind the veil of ignorance in the original position. In this idealized space, the human is a human as such and is uncontaminated by markers of difference (e.g. ethnic/racial; gender; class; sexuality; ability). See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
- 27.
See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989).
- 28.
See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 213. See also Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Deconstruction targeted Western metaphysics as a practice of power, subverted it from within and attempted to open the project of critical reflection to a new emancipatory project.
- 29.
See Naomi Schor, “The Crisis of French Universalism,” Yale French Studies 100 (2001): 47. The French occupation of Algeria began in 1830 and ended in 1962.
- 30.
See Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 165–326. See also Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). See, finally, Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).
- 31.
Cixous and Clement, Newly Born Woman, 1988, p. 70.
- 32.
See the Manifesto of the 121 or “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria,” originally written in 1960, https://www.marxists.org/history/france/algerian-war/1960/manifesto-121.htm, accessed on December 27, 2017. See also Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). See, in particular, Balibar’s “Blanchot’s Insubordination: On the Writing of the Manifesto of the 121,” pp. 256–272.
- 33.
See Aimé Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
- 34.
Psychological warfare, pacification of the civilian population via arbitrary arrests, rape and torture were common practices in Algeria.
- 35.
See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989). See also Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (New York: Penguin, 2004).
- 36.
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 27.
- 37.
For the connection between the medical establishment and racism, see also Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Broadway Books, 2006).
- 38.
See also Étienne Balibar, “Politics as War, War as Politics: Post Clausewitzian Variations,” public lecture, Northwestern University, May 8, 2006.
- 39.
The new universal was based on the reciprocal relativism between cultures. See Fanon, TAR: “Universality resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures” (p. 44). Universalism thus becomes a political practice requiring interminable political struggle.
- 40.
The radio became a pedagogical instrument for the political awakening of the Algerian people via the spoken word. See Fanon, ADC, pp. 69–97.
- 41.
See Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- 42.
See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2000. See also Wilder, Ebony and Ivy, 2013.
- 43.
See Decolonising the University, eds. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancioğlu (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2018).
- 44.
In racialized societies, the dominant group sees its social mobility and success as a reflection of merit and hard work as opposed to preferential treatment. In contrast, the failures of dominated groups are the product of their indolence. For these and related themes, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). As Audre Lorde puts it, “racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision.” See Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980), p. 21.
- 45.
For an analysis of the concept of “whitening” (e.g. an aesthetic project where people try to look white), see Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
- 46.
See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 56.
- 47.
The French expression is “il t’emmerde, madame.”
- 48.
The visceral and anger inducing character of this pedagogical moment for Fanon distinguishes it from Socratic pedagogy. Socrates promoted self-examination. His goal was to get others to rethink their priorities. Fanon, in contrast, was motivated by ending oppression and caring for the wretched of the earth.
- 49.
See James R. Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 98.
- 50.
See CNN September 23, 2017.
- 51.
Even though the NFL recently settled with Kaepernick and paid him an undisclosed amount, Kaepernick’s defiance connects to Fanon’s work on the pedagogical import of radical black agency.
- 52.
Des Beiler, Washington Post, November 30, 2017. See also Daniel Kreps, “Watch Jay-Z Salute Colin Kaepernick, Perform ‘4:44’ Tracks on ‘SNL,’” Rolling Stone, October 1, 2017.
- 53.
See https://qz.com/1287915/the-nfls-racial-makeup-explains-much-of-its-national-anthem-problems/, accessed on May 4, 2019.
- 54.
For an analysis of different forms of political agency taken by black athletes, see Joshua Wright, “Be Like Mike? The Black Athlete’s Dilemma,” Spectrum: A Journal of Black Men 4 (Spring 2016): 1–19. See also Eric Adelson, “Power of Kneeling Kennesaw State Cheerleaders Revealed in President’s Resignation,” Yahoo Sports, December 17, 2017.
- 55.
See CNN, September 27, 2017.
- 56.
See CNN, September 27, 2017.
- 57.
For an analysis of the racial politics pertaining to the sports-entertainment complex, see William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). For Rhoden, “the power relationship that had been established on the plantation has not changed, even if the circumstances around it have” (x).
- 58.
Police killed 1147 people in 2017. Black people were 25% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population. See https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/, accessed on May 20, 2019.
- 59.
See Chris Perez, New York Post, October 8, 2017.
- 60.
Russell Blair, Hartford Courant, October 11, 2017.
- 61.
See Ian Hany López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
- 62.
See Juliet Hooker, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair,” Political Theory 44 (2016): 448–469.
- 63.
The athlete-protestors are violating the sensibility of the viewers. The failure to do violence to racist perceptions becomes a form of complicity with racism. See Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 79.
- 64.
See George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
- 65.
See Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait, 2000. For King, “the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists” (p. 77).
- 66.
For racism as a form of enforced invisibility, see Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1985). See also Andy Cush, “#Black Lives Matter Protesters Hit Whites Where It Truly Hurts: Brunch,” Gawker, January 5, 2015.
- 67.
In the same document, Thomas Jefferson blames the King of Great Britain for “exciting domestic insurrections” and stimulating “merciless Indian savages” into action.
- 68.
See Richard Morgan, “Group Calls for Boycott of NFL on Veteran’s Day Weekend,” New York Post, November 11, 2017.
- 69.
See Sam Levin, “FBI Terrorism Unit Says ‘Black Identity Extremists’ Pose a Violent Threat,” The Guardian, October 6, 2017.
- 70.
See Juliet Hooker, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair,” Political Theory 44 (2016): 464–465.
- 71.
See Sean Rossman, “Free Speech or Destruction: First Trump Inauguration Protestors Go on Trial,” USA Today, November 20, 2017.
- 72.
For Fanon, universality would not take the form of the imposition of European ideas and values but “resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures” (TAR 44). For an attempt to develop a post-colonial universal, see Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
- 73.
For a discussion of white innocence, see Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). See also Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter, “Pedagogy of Fear: Toward a Fanonian Theory of ‘Safety’ in Race Dialogue,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 13 (2010): 153, 154.
- 74.
For these and related themes, see Leonardo and Porter (2010): 139–157.
- 75.
For these and related themes, see Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Nikol Alexander-Floyd, “Critical Race Pedagogy: Teaching About Race and Racism Through Legal Learning Strategies,” PS: Political Science and Politics 41:1 (January 2008): 183–188.
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Sokoloff, W.W. (2020). Frantz Fanon’s Subversive Pedagogy. In: Political Science Pedagogy. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23831-5_5
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