Postmodern Culture

“The time has come”—with these words, penned more than a decade ago, David Marriott opened the original essay that would later serve as keystone and namesake for this volume (“Whither Fanon?” 33). Such a frame seems only fitting for an examination of anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, for whom all human questions are necessarily “grounded in temporality” (Black Skin xvi). But what is the time that, according to Marriott, has come? Whither Fanon? was published in 2018, squarely between the rebellions in Ferguson and Minneapolis, but it has been in the works for far longer. The original essay appeared in 2011, before Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, long before Donald Trump’s presidency, and directly amid the disillusionment of Barack Obama’s first term. Marriott’s overarching concern in the original essay was to trouble the postracial mirage of the Obama moment, a quaint prelude to the storm and stress that have battered the world since. It’s worth asking whether Marriott’s project speaks to this moment or past it, or whether this is the wrong question entirely.

Some 25 years ago, the editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader spoke of “Five Stages of Fanon Studies,” the fourth of which referred to poststructural and postcolonial critiques of Fanonian liberation largely located in the western academy, while the fifth pointed toward a still-new stage comprising radical scholars and activists “doing work with and through Fanon” to confront the persistent white supremacy and coloniality of the present (Gordon et al. 7). Today, however, the theoretical frame has shifted dramatically in response to the heat radiating off the streets, albeit not uniformly for the better. On the one hand, this fifth stage exploded with the viral return of Fanon in the age of Black Lives Matter—no fewer than four books on Fanon appeared in 2015 and several more since.¹ On the other hand, however, this return of/to Fanon as revolutionary icon has also been accompanied by the emergence of Afropessimism. Particularly in the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism retains poststructuralism’s psychoanalytic bent and skepticism toward grand narratives of liberation, but, in a sort of anti-anticolonial turn, dispenses with Fanon’s internationalism in favor of a new ontology grounded in the pure negativity of antiblackness.

How should we locate Marriott’s book in relation to this new framework? The resonances seem clear, as when Marriott describes antiblackness as “the discourse through which a singular experience of the world is constituted” (Whither Fanon? x), seemingly echoing Afropessimism’s re-ontologization of the world. For Marriott, however, this is less about ontology than about what Fanon calls the ontological “flaw” (Black Skin 89), and he remains deeply skeptical of any new ontology. Moreover, the implied political subject of this ontology— jealously guarded by Afropessimism’s hostility to intercommunal solidarities—coexists with Marriott’s broader appeals to the “nonwhite subject” and the “dispossessed everywhere,” the former incompatible with and the latter anathema to Afropessimist commitments (Whither Fanon? xv–xvi). But more interesting than asking whether Marriott is an Afropessimist—his own response is a cryptic “perhaps” (213)—is tracking what he does on the way to answering this question. As we will see, Marriott walks right up to the brink of Afropessimism’s most radical (and troubling) contentions without leaping, leaving open the possibility of a very different kind of movement, one more dialectical than immanent.

Marriott sets out from what is arguably both Fanon’s most enigmatic and most troubling statement: that “there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white” (Black Skin xiv). While many are unsure what to make of Fanon’s condemnation of blackness, Marriott embraces this uncertainty as inherent to its object: racial identity “confers no certitude in this world,” but instead “reveals a void” and little else (Whither Fanon? ix). For Marriott as for Fanon, we are thus not talking about either a black essentialism (what Marriott terms, too easily to my mind, “identity”) or the postracial denial of race’s...