Alice Bloch: 0:00

Hi, it's Alice here. I make Uncommon Sense. Before we get talking to Julian Go today about Frantz Fanon, I wanted to let you know about the Sociological Review Foundation's Public Lecture, which this year will be on Wednesday 2nd September at SOAS in London. It's with the science journalist Angela Saini and her lecture is titled: Anatomy of a Myth: Why human classification can't cure health disparities, and it takes on the fatal consequences of sorting people by race and sex. Do check out our show notes, where there's a link to buy your ticket and to learn more. And if you're listening to this and the event sold out or passed, then do sign up to our mailing list so you can hear about future events, that link is also in our show notes. Thanks.

Rosie Hancock: 0:55

Hi everyone, welcome to Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. I'm Rosie Hancock in Leipzig, Germany, and I'm here with Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau, Canada.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 1:05

Hi!

Rosie Hancock: 1:06

And this is Uncommon Sense, where we typically take a word or a term that we might like to think we understand and see it differently, a little bit more sociologically. Today, though, for the first time, we're going to the next level and we're going to talk about a person: Frantz Fanon. He's someone who many, many sociologists and writers like to reference, but there's not always the time or the space to talk about his work more fully. So, we're going to try and do that today. We'll come right back to Fanon in a moment, but Alexis, can I ask you if there's anyone you studied who you only later went back to and realised that there's just a whole lot more to their ideas?

Alexis Hieu Truong: 1:50

Well, it's kind of a bit of a different answer, but, like, when I was doing my MA and my PhD I was super a Goffman fan, like so much so that my colleagues got me a Goffman shirt, a Goffman mug, everything, and on one hand I really wanted to get to know him as a person, and I've tried to uncover stuff about his more like personal life, but it's been difficult as he seemed to be quite a private person on that front, but as a scholar also I feel that he's often cited without going too much into depth and that's led to some misuse and misunderstandings. How about you?

Rosie Hancock: 2:23

Well, in undergraduate, there was this tiny little segment, it might have been only half a week, on Hannah Arendt, and I really loved Arendt, but I basically came out of that course remembering the banality of evil, and it wasn't until much later that I realised that actually Arendt's writings are so rich and there's so much more there. So, I've definitely had the experience of sort of realising that I've reduced a thinker to a very sort of simple idea. And today we're going to be talking about Frantz Fanon. Born in the French colony of Martinique in 1925, he fought for the liberation of France in World War Two and then fought against France later for the liberation of Algeria. He was a doctor, a psychiatrist, a philosopher and his work grasped the nature and pernicious impact of colonial violence, and he theorised resistance to it. He died in Baltimore, in the US, in 1961.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 3:20

And we're doing this, talking about Fanon, also because Fanon comes up a lot in this podcast, actually, and in talk amongst sociologists, but we don't always have the time to get really like the bigger picture.

Rosie Hancock: 3:33

Yeah, we did a quick search and he has been mentioned in our show on burnout with Hannah Proctor, where she spoke about his psychiatric work in Algeria, our show on endings with Patricia Kingori, where she mentioned colonial time, the one on listening with Les Back, that was the one where we spoke about not always trusting your senses. And that's not all, Fanon came up in our shows on childhood with Brenda Herbert and on desire with Angelique Nixon, who spoke about how Fanon inspired her to see tourism as the stagnation of decolonisation.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 4:06

Fanon also pops up in debates on the nature, inevitability and legitimacy or illegitimacy of anticolonial violence. So, we wanted to make space here to discuss Fanon more fully, to put his work in context and show why it speaks to sociology. And to do this, we're joined today by Julian Go, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Along the way, we're going to not just unpack Fanon's thought, some key biographical turning points and his two key texts – Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth – but also the meaning of words like postcolonial. So, let's jump in. Hi Julian, thanks for joining us.

Julian Go: 4:52

Hi, very honoured to be here and I'm happy to chat with you all.

Rosie Hancock: 4:55

So, Julian, among other things, you're interested in the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism. So, can you tell us a little bit about your own research, what you work on, and I was wondering, as part of that, could you explain this term social logics. I'm imagining that we might end up coming back to this via Fanon, who had a lot to say about what oppression looked like and how it struck deep at the level of individual consciousness and feeling.

Julian Go: 5:24

Sure. So, yes, much of my work as a sociologist has been focused around issues relating to empires and colonialism, and yes, indeed, in particular, the social logics. The study of empires and colonialism, in my view, is crucial for understanding modern society. The vast majority of the world, for most of modern history, was a world of empires and the vast majority of societies were colonised by other powers, or they are former colonial powers. So, to study empires and colonialism is not to study some weird thing as a sociologist; it's to study, I think, one of the dominant socio-political formations of modernity. Now, what does it mean to look at the social logics? Well, a lot of people, a lot of scholars and public intellectuals have talked about imperialism, empires and colonialism. They mostly think about it and have thought about it in terms of raw political domination, in terms of economic expansionism and economic extraction. Of course, empires and colonialism involve those things, but those things are also attendant with sociology. There are social logics, meaning that colonial societies have social structures. There are social relations that colonialism creates, and very distinct types of colonial relations. There are interactions in colonial societies between settlers and colonised peoples, between colonial officials and colonised peoples. So these are societies, and to talk about the social logics is really to get us to think about how these are societies that have patterns and structures that we might study and look at that aren't just about economic expansion and economic extraction or political domination, even though, of course, they are connected to them.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 7:14

And Fanon, I feel like we can already hear it in the way you're talking about his work, but he's kind of one of these authors that you read and it, it makes you feel something, right? Am I right to say that you encountered Fanon when you were a grad student in Chicago in the 90s, not via like an official reading list specifically, but thanks to your own interest in colonialism? Can you describe that encounter for us?

Julian Go: 7:39

You're exactly right. In the 90s, I was getting my PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. It was a fairly long programme, and in that period you're supposed to come up with a dissertation topic, and I became interested in empires and colonialism, and yet sociology hadn't yet thought seriously and hard or researched colonialism and empires. So, I had to look to other things, and through that search I created my own reading list and Fanon was on that list. What, what I discovered is that it was really difficult to even talk about colonialism, modern colonialism, without thinking about and talking about Fanon. So I started reading him and – you know, to be frank – my experience was confusion. I didn't know what he was talking about. He wasn't a sociologist, he's not a sociologist. He's talking as someone who's thinking about and writing about the French Empire and French colonialism, and he's talking about the experience of being a Black subject of the French Empire, but he's doing so in these really abstract philosophical ways with a lot of literary references. So, I will be the first to admit he's confusing to read, but once you sit down with him, as I did, and really try to understand and engage, you can see a couple things. One is he's angry, he is fed up with his experiences as a Black man in the French Empire. The other thing, you know, he, he's talking about these little experiences that he's had, and he gives these little micro incidents, but he also talks about these big, huge structures of colonialism and big huge structures of capitalism, and how it's related to colonialism. So, besides confusion, it was just fascination. I, you know, he was saying a lot and there just seemed to be so much there.

Rosie Hancock: 9:24

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to say about Fanon and, you know, he kind of, in a sense Fanon embodies in a certain way this idea the personal is political, or maybe even kind of vice versa, right, the political is personal. I mean, he died really young, he died at 36 and he lived a huge life in 36 years. So he was born in 1925, he was a French citizen on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was a French colony. He volunteered to fight for France in World War Two, but he came to radically question any notion of allegiance to the coloniser. He later trained as a psychiatrist, completing his studies in Lyon, before moving to Algeria, also a French colony, in 1953 where he became head of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville hospital and became very active in the Algerian revolutionary struggle for liberation from France, so, he continued that fight from outside Algeria as well. Julian, there's so much within this biography, and we'll get to Fanon's psychiatric work and his time in Africa a little bit later. But, for now, could we slow things down a bit and reflect on the shaping of Fanon's own consciousness, a deeply sociological consciousness I think you can say, in Martinique and then during the war?

Julian Go: 10:48

Yeah, indeed, I think for me a couple things about Fanon's upbringing really stand out. One is that, yes, he's born in the French colony of Martinique, so this is a colonial society, but he's born into a relatively well-off family, upper-middle class, some might say something of a petty bourgeoisie family. His father was a customs inspector, right, so an agent of the colonial state. His mother owned a hardware store in downtown Fort-de-France, the capital. And this is important because it means that, within colonial society, Fanon was relatively privileged and he was part of a class in the colonies that thought of themselves as kind of French. One of the ideologies of French colonialism was that you could become French, you could assimilate into French culture, and this class from which Fanon is brought up is a class that thought of themselves as loyal to France and were trying to assimilate into French culture, and this, of course, is partly why it made sense for him to go fight for France during the war because he's brought up in this class that thinks of itself as French and as loyal to France. Another thing is that in high school, in Martinique, he encountered certain interesting ideas taught to him by Aimé Césaire, who was another anti-colonial thinker at the time and who becomes a very prominent figure in French anti-colonial movements and in French politics, at the time as Césaire was teaching in high school. And there, Fanon got exposed to certain philosophies and ideas like négritude, this is just basically the idea of, you know, of Blackness, of taking pride in Blackness, to put it simply. And so basically Fanon's upbringing is complex. On the one hand, he's socialised into a culture that thinks of itself as French and trying to assimilate, but he's also sort of beginning to get exposed to some ideas of what it means to be Black. The real, I think, turning point comes when he goes to fight for France in World War Two, and then immediately after when he goes to France to study. You know, the biographers will tell you one of the crucial experiences that he has fighting for France is in the army, and the French army is racially segregated. You know, he goes to die for this country that is segregating him, right. And then after the war, he goes to Lyon to study, as you, as you mentioned, and he recounts in his work how he basically confronted racism in new ways that he hadn't in Martinique. There's an experience he talks about in his first book – Black Skin, White Masks – where he is on the train and a little boy says, "Oh, look, there's a black man. I'm scared, mama. I'm scared", you know, "I'm frightened" and he experiences this racism that he really hadn't experienced before. So, I think these are the beginnings of developing, as you say Rosemary, this, this consciousness of being someone who's part of this thing, the French Empire, but who's also sort of put aside and othered and not treated very well ultimately.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 13:47

Can we discuss basically the book that came out not long after World War Two in 1952, that's Black Skin, White Masks, and he was actually just 27 and it's a book for which the word interdisciplinary seems almost timid, right, here we find Hegel, Sartre, psychoanalysis. Julian, can you take us through basically the key sociological points of this book?

Julian Go: 14:15

Again, there's so much going on in Fanon's work. And I'm a sociologist, so when I read Fanon, I think about the sociology first and foremost, not everybody sees the sociology as I would. And so when I read Black Skin, White Masks, and I think about the sociological contributions, I think that there's a couple ways that we can sort of get our heads around these contributions. One is to recognise that at the time when this is published in early 1950s, 1952, the experience of being a colonised subject, a racialised, colonised subject, that experience was not well known, and Black Skin, White Masks is really fascinating because it's an exposé of the experiences of being a racialised subject of the French colonial empire and a lot of the text is about the effects that colonial racism has on him. One of the ways I read it is a really important and powerful expression of what is it like to be a Black person in the French Empire. What is it like to be oppressed in this way? What is it like to be the object of racism from a society that you had previously thought was loyal to you and that to which you belong? And so I think that one of the concepts that he raises is really interesting here. He talks about third-person consciousness, and this is a kind of, Fanon's way of talking about the experience of being othered, you know, like the child on the train pointing at you – look, a black man – you are forced to look at yourself as society looks at you. And this is, he calls this third-person consciousness. It's a weird thing. W.E.B. Du Bois talks about something similar. It is the experience of being marginalised and seeing yourself through the eyes of others, and what's particularly pernicious about it is that the view that you get from the eyes of others, if you're a colonised subject in a colonial society or in an imperial metropole, is not good. Sociologists talk a lot about how society shapes your sense of self. What Fanon is doing here is talking about, well, how is my sense of self shaped in a racist colonial society? The other thing is related, and I think this is the second one that I would, I would raise, and that is this idea of sociogenesis. This is a term Fanon uses. The way I read this is essentially to talk about how society constructs race. In other words, I think what, what we sociologists would say is that Fanon in this text is offering an early analysis of how race is socially constructed. It's not something essential. It's not just about skin colour, it's not about biology. It is a construction, a kind of invention that society creates. And though other thinkers in the early 20th century had articulated a similar idea, again in the context of the French Empire in which Fanon is writing, this is not something that, at least especially colonisers, would buy into, right? Colonisers thought of colonised peoples as fundamentally biologically inferior and other, and Fanon is basically saying that this notion of racial difference is a social construction, and in particular it's a construction of colonial society and imperial systems, right. So, in this text what you can see him doing is coming up with a kind of theory that says, you know, colonial exclusions or colonial structures which are exclusionary, creates a system in which colonised peoples are defining themselves in relation to how the colonisers see them, and interestingly, how colonisers are constructing themselves also in relation to the colonised. And what this means in a colonial context is that Black colonial subjects are constructing their sense of self in relation to White colonised peoples, and White colonised peoples are constructing themselves in relation to Black colonised subjects, and this is how ideas of racial difference are formed, right. Fanon says, let me just quote here, because it's a really interesting quote. He says, in Black Skin, White

Masks: 18:33

"for not only must the Black man be Black, he must be Black in relation to the White man". In other words, this is a relational, system of relations in which racial identity is constructed. Again, this is a kind of, it's a novel sociological idea that race isn't inherent, that our identities are constructed, including racial identities. This critique of how colonialism creates a kind of these racial identities allows Fanon to register critiques of philosophies like négritude and register critiques at the same time of the French imperial system. One of the things going on with the French imperial system at the time is that the French were telling colonies like Martinique, you can assimilate, you can become like us and you can actually be a part of us. And so, one of the political strategies for decolonisation was not to create an anticolonial, or, you know, a separate nation site, but to integrate fully into France as any equal region of France, as a département. Martinique actually becomes a département of France. It becomes a kind of equal part, supposedly an equal part of France. Fanon's old teacher, Aimé Césaire, promotes this. He thinks that this is the way to go. And when Fanon criticises French racism in the colonial context, I personally think that he's critiquing that ideology. He's saying that the French are never going to accept you. So, what Fanon does is reject this idea of departmentalisation. He rejects this and basically turns to full independence. He says the only way we can be truly liberated is full independence, because this colonial system of racism is always going to be there.

Rosie Hancock: 20:18

I mean, I feel I feel like we're really starting to understand why Fanon is so influential, because even just from his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, there's just so much already that we've, that we've sort of covered that's, that's influential, that's still relevant today. I mean, actually, what's really interesting is I believe Martinique is still technically part of the European Union as an outermost region, something that we talked about in a previous show with Manuela Boatcă, and we're going to link that show in our show notes. But jumping forwards just a little bit, Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in France, moved to Algeria in 1953 and Algeria remained a French colony for basically a decade after that. And there he practised most famously at a psychiatric clinic in Blida, and became very active in the country's liberation movement. We heard from Hannah Proctor in our episode on burnout how Fanon's clinical work saw him treating individuals affected by the violence of colonialism, you know, facing the question of how you heal the human when it's the system that's actually the problem, and it must have been a bit like treating people with asthma who live right near terrible air pollution. So, but we want to, we want to step forward to Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, which came out in French in 1961 – this was the year of his death actually – and in English in 1963, and it was written at the height of Algeria's war for independence. Could you tell us what's in it and, importantly, why it matters sociologically?

Julian Go: 22:02

One way I think about this – if you pair Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth – one way that I make sense of it is that Black Skin, White Masks was a kind of analysis of colonial subjectivity, by which I mean it's an analysis of a personal experience. From his personal experience, he makes these larger claims, such as the kind I mentioned about colonialism as a system of racism and so on. Wretched of the Earth, well, it's still subjective, but it's more objective. It's very much a sociological analysis of the deep structures of colonialism, and a couple of things are going on here that are really interesting and important for me and my thinking about colonialism. One is that precisely from this experience of working in the psychiatric hospital and treating French soldiers who are violently suppressing Algerian revolutionaries, Fanon begins to see how violence is not only pernicious but pervasive. Violence for him is the essence of the colonial system, right? Colonial system is based upon force and violence, right, you can only maintain this colonial society using force. And so I think this experience of working as a psychiatrist and treating French soldiers is really important for Fanon, and I think of The Wretched of the Earth, this is one reflection of that. And it gets to, as I said, this idea that colonialism is a system rooted in violence, which, again, you know, maybe today some people might not think that's so surprising, but again, at the time, colonialism was legitimate and seen as legitimated because it's a, it's a supposed to be a benign relationship, you know, the French are taking care of the Algerians, and they're treating them well, and they're giving them modernity and all this stuff, to say that colonialism is rooted in violence is a radical claim. So, that's one important insight here that he gives. The other one is that Fanon begins to tell us a lot about colonial societies, and as a sociologist, you know, one of the things that I think about when I read Fanon and his analysis in Wretched of the Earth is how little other sociologists at the time were even thinking about colonial societies, much less trying to analyse what they're about. But Fanon is really teasing out what this colonial society is like, and the other point he makes is that colonial society is fundamentally a binary system. It's a, it's a distinct socio-political organisation of exclusion, so it's a fundamentally racially fractured society, whereby, we might say today it's a kind of white supremacy system, but it's an apartheid system, right, again, we might say today, but Fanon is saying that this is the way colonial societies, writ large, are structured. Like, the uniqueness of colonial societies is that they are fundamentally racially exclusionary societies built upon violence and coercion. He talks about how, for example, in colonial societies, what keeps it together, what keeps this racially exclusionary system together is violence. And the army and the police, he points out, you can't tell the difference between the army and the police in colonial societies. They're doing the same thing. This, I think, has implications for thinking about postcolonial societies. The last point I'll say, which is related to this, is Fanon theorises the role of the national bourgeoisie, that is, that – even though he sees colonial societies as fractured into a kind of binary system – he also complexifies his analysis by talking about different components of colonised society, talks about peasants versus the urban proletariat, but most importantly talks about the national bourgeoisie. These are the colonised elites who had kind of bought into the system, who are benefiting from it economically, kind of like his parents in Martinique, but you know, this is a heightened capitalism at this point, and so there are sort of local capitalists. And Fanon is cautious of their role in anticolonialism, because he sees, you know, he cynically, I think rightly, sees self-interest. He says, you know, only want to overthrow the French so that they could come, take over and be the new oppressors. And again, this is a really insightful thing at the time. I think it was controversial for the, for anticolonialists because the colonial bourgeoisie or the national bourgeoisie were supposed to be on your side, and you were supposed to ally with them, but he was registering caution. And again, I think this is also, this is very much important. So many societies, once they did achieve independence, became subject to the domination and oppression of the, what Fanon is calling the national bourgeoisie.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 26:44

On this idea of postcolonial societies, right, Julian, you write that Fanon is understood to be part of the first wave of postcolonial thought among writers like W.E.B. Du Bois. The postcolonial is often misunderstood, right, and so we wanted to get your thoughts on that. What, what does it mean? Can you define that a bit for us, because colonialism – even today – is far from over, right?

Julian Go: 27:12

Exactly. So, in simple terms, I'd say that there are two main meanings of postcolonial. The first is the more common sense term, which I think just refers to a historical moment or historical phase after colonialism. So, you have Algeria, a colonial society and then you have Algeria when it gets independence as a postcolonial society, and basically just referring to a moment after colonialism when colonialism ends, and you can talk about a postcolonial world order, in which refers to the historical moment after decolonisation, after the vast majority of the world – again, except for certain exceptions – when the vast majority of the world is now a world of independent nation states. So, this is all referring to a political status and referring to a political or a historical moment after colonialism. What happens among intellectuals and in the academy in the 80s and 90s is that postcolonial begins to be used in a different way. It becomes a label for a way of thinking about the world. To understand this, you have to understand that one of the many things that Fanon and other thinkers let us see is that colonialism was a social system that shaped one's identity, but also at the same time it shaped one's consciousness and mind, mindset, and that so much of what colonialism did was produce racialised imagery, for example, it produced images of colonised peoples and colonised societies as inferior and lacking. And so all of these stereotypes can be seen as a kind of colonial mindset, right, that even colonised peoples, some of them, internalised. The idea of a postcolonial way of looking at the world, or a postcolonial thought, I think, is saying that we can have modes of thought and ways of looking at the world that go beyond those stereotypes, that don't fall prey to the stereotypes and images and ideas that colonialism forced upon us. And so postcolonial here is not so much a historical moment, but it's pointing to a horizon of thought, it's pointing to a possible world – which we may not be there yet – but a possible sort of modality of thinking that transcends the limitations on our thought that colonialism imposed. That's, I think, the way I like to think about when you hear a word like postcolonial theory in the academy, that's, that's that second notion of postcolonial that I'm getting at. A way of thinking about the world that transcends and goes beyond the legacies on our minds that colonialism left.

Rosie Hancock: 29:56

I mean, you know, through Fanon we're reminded to challenge the everyday meaning of these terms, like postcolonial, which you've just sort of shown us so brilliantly. But also, I mean, you yourself suggest cosmopolitanism is another term, sort of a related term in a way. Could you explain that to us?

Julian Go: 30:17

Yeah, cosmopolitanism is another one of these key words that have thousands of meanings and academics like to argue about them. In Fanon, I see a kind of what I would call a post-colonial cosmopolitanism. Here, I'm using the idea of cosmopolitanism in the very basic sense of a way of worldliness, right, and not like, you know, I travel the world, but that my primary object of reference when I talk about politics is humanity on a world scale. It's not national identity, it's not racial identity, it's that we are all humans, and to be a cosmopolitan in this sense is to say that my primary loyalty is to humanity, not to a nation or not to a racial group. And even though Fanon was supportive of anticolonial movements and creating independent nation states, I think that what he pointed to was that once we create these independent nation states and take control of our destinies, we can eventually get to a point where cosmopolitanism becomes the key value for us, and we come to a level where we are caring for humanity as a whole. And I say, I say this is postcolonial cosmopolitanism, because I think for Fanon it comes out of the experience of being dehumanised, right? So, if colonialism is a system of oppression based upon racism, it means that it's a system based upon dehumanising colonised people as subhuman, as not quite human, and therefore not deserving of full equal rights. And if colonialism creates this system of dehumanisation, then a postcolonial cosmopolitanism is a system that emerges from that period of dehumanisation, kind of almost dialectically, that is almost in direct opposition and thinks of a world and tries to create a world where humanity is the main value. I think that this is really important in Fanon's work. I think what's driving so much of his values is a kind of humanism, right.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 32:16

On this, jumping on this idea of kind of this longing or this move towards a shared humanity, right, there are all, like it, it kind of sits in tension with, some people might say, like certain other concepts. So, Fanon is often invoked in relation to violence, and perhaps the most common misunderstanding to remedy here is the idea of him as some kind of casual condonor of violence. Can you carefully unpack, like, his points about violence for us, and what is being said and also about whom?

Julian Go: 32:54

Yeah, so this is one of the most common perceptions, you rightly note, of Fanon, is that, oh, Fanon, he's a theorist of violence, he's for violence, he's all about anticolonial violence, and people dismiss him on those grounds. But I think that this is based on a misunderstanding. Look, I think Fanon, like so many other thinkers from the colonies, is a great thinker and all great thinkers are complicated, and all complicated thinkers are misunderstood. His writings on violence, his role in the Algerian Revolution, right, he becomes a spokesman for the FLN, the, you know, the anticolonial organisation in Algeria, his role sort of didn't help this perception. Nonetheless, it has prevented people from fully understanding the breadth of his analysis of violence. Simply put, as a sociological analysis, I think what Fanon is offering is exactly the natural conclusion to his points about violence in Wretched of the Earth. If colonialism is a system based upon violence, then the natural reaction from the colonised is going to be violent, right? That violence begets violence, that's another way to think about it. Now, whether you support violence, say anticolonial violence, is, I think, a different story. I think that there's an analytical level here that we need to appreciate in Fanon, bracketing the implication for what it means normatively. And just the analytic point is, look, if you have a system based upon mistreating people, and you know, and using violence and a bloody system, then you have to expect that there's going to be violence that is going to be used against you, and that violence is probably the only way fully out of this system. And again, this is just a sociological observation. When he writes about violence, he's not saying it, I don't think, in any other way, but that. He's not saying, you know, all the French are evil, kill them all, you know, he's not saying that. I mean, he might be, you could take his theory to be implying that by some, but Fanon himself doesn't say this. Fanon is a humanist, as I said, and he sees French soldiers as victims of a system, right? He understands the system of violence and what it does. I think about this as a theory of what happens when you build a system on violence, right, and it makes sense, it's logical, right? I mean, when you think about it, again, it's as simple as saying violence begets more violence. I don't think the theory advocates violence. I think that Fanon, in his politics, came to a place where he joined the revolutionary movement which was using violence, but again, I think that the personal politics is not exactly reducible to the theory, and I don't think the theory is completely reducible to the personal politics. All thinkers are complicated morally and intellectually, and if we really want to learn from them, then we really have to bracket whatever misconceptions we might go into and we might have.

Rosie Hancock: 35:59

Yeah, and I mean, maybe we also should read some of these things properly before jumping to conclusions.

Julian Go: 36:07

Yes, that's right, that's exactly right.

Rosie Hancock: 36:09

I mean, we've covered a lot of ground so far, you know, the social construction of race, postcolonialism as a horizon of thought, cosmopolitanism as a kind of almost humanist political orientation, we've nuanced Fanon's take on violence, so this is just so brilliant to talk about it all.

Alice Bloch: 36:35

Hi, it's Alice again, producer of Uncommon Sense, and thanks for coming here to listen to Julian Go talking about Frantz Fanon. A few reminders, as usual. As I said at the top of this show today, the Sociological Review Foundation's Public Lecture this year will be on Wednesday 2nd September at SOAS in London with the science journalist and author Angela Saini, who – rather like this show likes to do actually – is going to be upending some mainstream assumptions, in this case about human classification and why it can't cure health disparities. Do check out the link in our show notes for more information and, as I said, if it's sold out or the events passed, then do sign up to our mailing list to find out about future events. Also, in our show notes, there's a really quick survey we've created to find out more about you, our audience. Do take a moment to fill it out, it really is brief. The Sociological Review Foundation is a charity all about celebrating sociology and getting it out into the world, and your responses there could really help us as we keep doing that with this show. Back to the conversation.

Rosie Hancock: 37:44

Julian, at this point at the show we normally ask our guests for someone who's given them some uncommon sense, but I guess that's Fanon for you. So, we wanted to talk instead about Fanon's relationship to other thinkers, both his own place in the canon– I guess, for lack of a better word – but also the people who influenced him. I believe you've been thinking with Kevin Pham at the University of Amsterdam about the possible influence upon Fanon of Vietnamese anticolonial thinkers. Could you elaborate for us?

Julian Go: 38:15

Kevin and I have a paper coming out in Postcolonial studies, the journal of Postcolonial Studies, on exactly this. How some of Fanon's ideas can be seen as part of a wider anticolonial discourse, and that some of them are, you know, partly at least influenced by some other anticolonial thinkers who come before Fanon. And in this case, it's some anti-colonial thinkers, we got to remember, Vietnam was also part of the French Empire, Vietnamese thinkers were also in France, and one of them is early Ho Chi Minh, who later becomes Ho Chi Minh. But these are anticolonial thinkers who are talking about colonialism in ways that are very similar to Fanon, and so in this paper we postulate that, you know, maybe Fanon is influenced by some of these thinkers and when you look at his reading list, you can actually see Fanon's reading lists and his libraries, and you find some of these Vietnamese thinkers. And so that got us thinking, well, maybe we need to not think about so much of, you know, what you know, it's not Fanon's not original, but rather what are some of the possible influences upon him, and how he can be situated as part of a wider range of anticolonial thinkers who all might have interesting things to say. Again, bracketing the normative implications regarding violence, but just thinking about them as thinkers, as people offering us interesting ideas.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 39:38

I'd like to share a bit of a personal experience. So on this show I've talked in the past about, as a racialised person living in Canada, like I've experienced being the only Asian or Vietnamese person in elementary school, and so my father was from the south of Vietnam and my mother's side is from Europe and in Canada, and so, yeah, being really categorised as just an Asian in general, right? And then meeting, when I was 18, a full Vietnamese friend who said,"Oh, but you're, you're white, right?". And then, so that was, but recently, actually about a year ago, I went in a, in a restaurant to order pho and the person – so it was more a North type of recipes, a restaurant – and the person said, "Oh, you speak French?", and I was like yeah, "Oh, so you were colonised?", and I had never been told that before. I kind of knew it in the back of my mind, but that forced me to look at that in a very, I want to say, almost confrontational, like it was, it really struck something and it then led me to, to have discussions with my other family members, ask questions to my father about Vietnam, other kind of questions, to have another type of story. So, I'm still in the process of that, but hearing you talk about your article, also, is, is, yeah, it generated

Julian Go: 41:07

Québécois, is that, is that how you, yeah? that.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 41:09

Yeah, yeah. So I'm in Quebec, yeah. Can you, if we go back to what you were saying, can you talk to us a bit about why it's important to place Fanon at the centre of sociological thought and of intellectual history, indeed, of maybe history itself, and not just some like kind of fringe module that you might study, aside from the usual suspects, found founding fathers, right, Weber, Marx, Durkheim and so on.

Julian Go: 41:39

A lot of my colleagues in sociology and other disciplines are starting to read Fanon a lot more than they used to, and I think there's a kind of, you know, he's trending, let's say, Fanon is trending. And I think that – can we talk a little bit about politics here – for some on the right, this is sort of indicative of, you know, vapid wokeness, right, or identity politics, and that is absolutely wrong. The way to think about this is that Fanon is offering sociologists exciting ideas about society that we would otherwise be denied, precisely because sociology traditionally had not thought about colonialism, had not thought about it as a significant part of history, had not thought about colonial societies, right? The main theorists of society that I read barely mention empire, barely mentioned colonialism, even though the vast majority of societies today are either, you know, postcolonial societies or society, or imperial powers. So it's this is not a fringe thing, like Fanon is, he's talking about what is the dominant experiences in most of the world. And so, why should we read him? Because we as sociologists purport to understand society, and colonialism and empire have been crucial for shaping our modern societies. So, this is an intellectual necessity if we, as sociologists, are going to pursue our goal of understanding modern society.

Rosie Hancock: 43:08

And finally, Julian, you know, so often on the show we reference and celebrate thinkers who actually aren't officially canonised as sociologists at all, and we're all in favour of that, we love that. And I, you know, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, you know, briefly about this trend, about what it says about sociology, you know, how, how generative and brilliantly sort of undisciplined and border breaking it can be when we start, you know, thinking with these non-sociologists.

Julian Go: 43:37

Yeah, I mean, I actually think that we probably think about non-sociologists more often than we acknowledge. A perfect example is Karl Marx. I mean, Karl Marx isn't a sociologist, because sociology as a discipline didn't exist, but we read his texts which aren't, you know, labelled sociological. We canonised Marx as a sociologist, even though, you know, he really wasn't and isn't, in some ways. We read Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto as sociologists, but that's a political pamphlet that contains sociology in it. So, I think of Fanon's writing similarly, right? There's sociology there, even if it's not written by a card-carrying sociologist, and I think that this, I don't know if it's sociology in particular, but I just think the way in which disciplines have been formed is that we, you know, we tend to construct a canon and we often need people outside of our discipline to help inform us of the things that we're missing, right. So, this is, you know, my example of Fanon is really important here, because, again, Fanon is offering us some things that our conventional sociological canon can't offer.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 44:50

And that is all for today's show. If you enjoyed this, check out our episode notes on Europeans with Manuela Boatcă, natives with Nandita Sharma, margins with Rhoda Reddock and more. It's all in the show notes.

Rosie Hancock: 45:03

We're back next month with a different take on therapy speak, but before then, please do take a few minutes to complete our listener survey which is also in our show notes. It helps us to understand why you listen and might just help us shape the series too.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 45:17

Back here very soon, bye.

Rosie Hancock: 45:19

Bye!