Césaire and Fanon on Fascism: The “Boomerang Effect” Beyond the Metropole
1 Introduction
In the last decade, far-right movements have seen a resurgence in countries as diverse as the United States, Brazil, India, and the Philippines, and many scholars have noted their resemblance to 20th-century fascist movements (Snyder 2018; Marasco 2021; Stanley 2020; Paxton 2021). The prominence of fascistic movements in countries with colonial histories of different kinds, or, we might say, the presence of fascism in a world shaped by colonialism, raises pressing questions about the relationship between fascism and colonialism. While some recent accounts of fascism have gestured toward the proximity of colonial dynamics to fascist ones, approaches that view fascism and colonialism as part of a shared historical trajectory have been underappreciated by many mainstream accounts.1 Among accounts that do engage the anticolonial tradition to explore fascism, Fanon's work has been notably absent (Toscano 2023; Shaw 2020 Rasberry 2021; Robinson 2017). In this paper, I will argue that the work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon helps us better understand how colonialism creates the affective and psychological conditions for fascism. Césaire's work illuminates the affective “boomerang effect” of colonialism, where the brutality of colonial violence “returns home” to the metropole. Fanon's work takes us beyond the metropole, showing us how colonial relations can create fascistic dynamics within colonies and former colonies that have gained independence. Fanon's development of Césaire's argument does not just expand its scope but reflects a salient difference between the two thinkers: while Césaire's analysis, at least in Discourse on Colonialism, focuses on the promise of the colonized world (in contrast with the moral bankruptcy of Europe), Fanon sees the position of colonized countries as more ambivalent, even after independence. This difference leads Fanon to be attentive to the potential for fascistic movements within colonial contexts, including in former colonies that have gained independence. In doing so, Fanon's work does not just deepen Césaire's analysis but also resonates with accounts that highlight the role political and economic crisis plays in making fascism possible, the class composition of fascism, and the type of affectivity and psychology activated by fascist movements in periods of crisis.
I will begin outlining working definitions of fascism and colonialism. Next, I will explicate Césaire's “boomerang effect” thesis and situate it within other formulations of the boomerang effect in political theory. I will argue that Césaire's understanding of the boomerang effect is not simply a rhetorical move, but a literal claim about the emergence of fascism. In my reading, Césaire is concerned primarily with the affective and relational dimensions of the boomerang effect, providing at least one mechanism through which colonialism can lead to fascism; that is, “brutalizing” the colonizer through their violence toward the colonized. Next, I will give an overview of Césaire's influence on Fanon, highlighting the particular influence of Discourse on Colonialism, including his comments on fascism. Then, I will outline Fanon's account of the affectivities of both colonized and colonizer, affective tetanization and affective ankylosis, arguing that this focus prompted Fanon to consider how fascism could emerge in the colony and former colony. Fanon vividly explains how colonial dynamics (economic, political, and affective) continue to structure life in the independent colony. Such a configuration, I argue, is a particularly fertile ground from which fascism can emerge. Just as many scholars have identified aspects of European and American bourgeois society as ‘factories’ for fascists, Fanon helps us to see colonial society as a breeding ground for a variety and potentially fascist affectivities and psychologies. Finally, I will argue that the two thinkers’ comments on the United States reveal a difference between them, while Césaire views the United States as following Europe's trajectory, Fanon sees in the United States a possible (dangerous) path that the Third World might try to follow.
2 A Brief Note on “Fascism” and “Colonialism”
This paper provides an interpretation of the work of Césaire and Fanon, arguing that their work is in conversation in ways that have been underappreciated by existing literature. Importantly, I argue that they are both thinking through the problem of fascism, not just rhetorically or elliptically, but directly, as a pressing political problem. Given that fascism is a notoriously difficult term to define, I want to take a moment to give a working definition of fascism for our purposes. While both Fanon and Césaire have much to say on fascism, we do not see explicit definitions of the term in their work. Because nationalism is the centerpiece of fascist movements, it is unsurprising that fascist movements vary widely across national contexts. There is consequently a great deal of disagreement around which historical movements are rightly called “fascist.” This difficulty comes in part from fascism's protean nature, as Umberto Eco famously observed, “one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist” (Eco 1995, 5). Moreover, unlike socialism, liberalism, or even conservatism, fascism came into the world before it was robustly theorized (Paxton 2004, 16). For the purposes of this paper, I understand fascism as a nationalist political movement committed to extreme patriarchy, the valorization of violence, rejection of democracy, reliance on repressive mechanisms of the state, embrace of “natural” hierarchy, and persistent scapegoating of usually racialized others, both internal and external. Fascism is reactionary, in that it responds to real or perceived gains of the left, especially when those gains threaten a supposedly natural hierarchy (usually understood in national, racial, and gendered terms).2 It is a mass movement, meaning both that it involves organizing a mass base, rather than simply disenfranchizing them (Paxton 2004, 43) and that it draws its support from across society, rather than from a single class or a stable alliance between classes (Zetkin 1983, 103; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 215). Finally, while all political movements recruit their members through affect and emotion, fascism has often been viewed as having a particular reliance on them. As Robert O. Paxton writes, “fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of ‘mobilizing passions’ that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy” (2004, 41). The two mostly agreed-upon cases of fascist movements are Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, though there were smaller fascist movements across Europe in the interwar years and beyond. Franco's Spain is often considered to be fascist. Unsurprisingly, in the work of both Césaire and Fanon, Nazism is the most prominent example of fascism that they are working with, and indeed, they often write of Nazism in particular. Nevertheless, I think the broader specter of fascism haunts the work of both thinkers, especially, as we will see, Fanon.
Colonialism is similarly difficult to define, and despite being robustly theorized by both thinkers, one cannot point to an unambiguous definition. Colonialism is a historical phenomenon that has existed for millennia, but in contemporary discourse, it is most commonly used to refer to its modern incarnation, beginning with the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade. It is often difficult to distinguish between colonialism and imperialism. Frequently, they are distinguished by appeal to etymology. Imperialism comes from the Latin imperium and imperare, referring to command, “a sovereign form of power that seems to dominate ‘naturally inferior’ subjects and vast territories from above and afar” (Arneil 2023, 3). Colonialism, on the other hand, is rooted in the Latin colonia, referring to farming, and is “an internalized, penetrative, and productive form of power that seeks to segregate and ‘improve’ ‘backward’ people(s) from within and ‘improve’ ‘waste’ lands, overseen by colonial authorities living among and/or in close proximity to the colonized” (Arneil 2023, 3). Barbara Arneil argues that each represents a distinct ideological thread rather than simply a set of practices. In this paper I refer to colonialism in its modern form, a form of control from afar and by settlers used by European countries to solve political, and above all, economic problems. I take this understanding of modern colonialism to be consistent with both Césaire and Fanon, who, while sensitive to the affective and psychological dimensions of colonialism, emphasize its political and economic motivations as foundational (Césaire 1955, 33; Fanon 1986 xv). Fanon and Césaire refuse to conceive of colonialism either entirely ideologically or entirely in terms of practices but illuminate the interplay between the two. Modern colonialism involves both imperialism and colonialism (in Arneil's understanding), that is, control from a distance, and the use of settlements to transform conditions of production into capitalist ones. I understand modern colonialism to intertwined with the expansion of European capitalism around the world. While various forms of colonialism are explored by Césaire and Fanon, the “scramble for Africa” of the late 19th century, the earlier French colonization of Algeria, and the even longer standing French colonization of Martinique, the colony and later department of France from which both writers come, loom large. With these working definitions in mind, we can turn to Césaire's understanding of how colonialism and fascism are connected.
3 Césaire and the “Boomerang Effect”
The aim of this section is to offer an interpretation of the “boomerang effect” in Césaire's work and suggest what is unique about his formulation of this idea.3 In Discourse on Colonialism (hereafter Discourse), Césaire argues that colonial practices return back to the metropole in the form of Nazism, fascism, and genocide. In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault argues that, in addition to colonialism imposing European models of power and governmentality on other continents, “it also had considerable boomerang effects [d'effect de retour] on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” (Foucault 2003, 103; Foucault 1997, 89).4 In her 1951 book, Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt uses the phrase “boomerang effect” to describe how European imperialism, especially in Africa, made totalitarianism and genocide possible (1973, 206, 223).5 Other uses of the boomerang effect have set out to understand the origins of the Holocaust, and the way colonial practices, most specifically Germany's genocide against the Herero, Nama, and San peoples (in what is now Namibia) were later deployed by the Nazis (Olusoga and Erichsen 2011; Madley 2005). Here, the focus is not fascism but genocide. Others have used the boomerang effect to describe how imperialist wars, particularly those waged by the United States, impact the domestic policies of the imperialist country (Morefield 2020; Coyne and Hall 2018). While many of these approaches have some connection to fascist movements, our interest here is specifically in how fascism as a political movement gets cultivated by these boomerang effects. Césaire mentions various mechanisms through which this might happen, most significantly how colonialism creates relations of domination and affective states among the colonizers (and citizens of colonizing countries) that make fascism possible.
before they were its victims they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. (2000, 36).
Repeatedly, Césaire makes a particular kind of move; he highlights the hypocrisy of those who are horrified by Nazi violence but tolerated or even supported colonial violence that resembles it. Césaire's invocation of recent fascist violence and racism is meant to highlight the brutality of colonialism to his reader. Césaire repeatedly finds passages defending colonialism that read like Nazi propaganda (2000, 38–39, 49–51, 60, 68). Because of this strategy, it can sometimes seem like Césaire is equating fascism and colonialism by suggesting that fascism is what we call colonial practices when they happen in the metropole. If all Césaire were doing was making a moral point about hypocrisy, his work, while still a valuable contribution to anticolonial literature, would not have anything much to tell us about fascism. However, Césaire does not leave it here; he repeatedly makes a much stronger claim: that Europe's practices of colonialism cultivated fascism. He is not just trying to point out selective outrage, or accuse Europeans of hypocrisy, he is clarifying the actual complicity of Europeans in fascism's emergence, and suggesting that their continued support, or at least tolerance, for colonialism, could cause the emergence of fascism once again. On this point, we should take Césaire literally; he is claiming that practices of colonialism played a causal role in the development of fascism.
the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies. (Césaire 2000, 33)
European society begins to colonize on a global scale because of its own internal problems. Colonialism may address some of those problems by creating new markets, accessing new resources, and providing a place for surplus populations to go, but in doing so, it creates new problems.
Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labour, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. (2000, 42)
works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word…we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact…civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene set in, a center of infection starts to spread…a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. (Césaire 2000, 35–36)
Each time the colonizer commits this violence, or even accepts it, they are changed and deformed. But Césaire's description goes beyond those directly committing the violence and emphasizes the acceptance of it in France, or, we might add, in any colonizing country. The subjugation of the colonized world also played a role in pacifying the European working class, through the formation of a European and American labor aristocracy (Lenin 2019, 360–361; Robinson 2000, 20; Cope 2015), providing opportunities for economic and social mobility through settlement, and through a psychological sense of superiority enforced by social and political privileges, “a public and psychological wage” as Du Bois (2014, 573) famously called it. However, Césaire shows the flip side of such apparent pacification: the brutalizing, dehumanizing effects of racism on the racist society. We see in Césaire that there is first a boomerang effect on the interpersonal level, the person committing the dehumanizing violence is dehumanized by it. On the second level, this dehumanization and brutalization is diffused into broader European society, which is materially enriched by it, and told stories of the inhumanity and savagery of the colonized. This dehumanization, infection, toxin, poison, or sickness gets diffused throughout Europe, with fascism being one of its expressions.
It seems that Césaire's “boomerang effect” is far more psychologically weighted than Arendt and Foucault's. Rather than exclusively describing how techniques of power boomerang back to the country exercising that power, Césaire shows how people(s) are changed when tasked with domination. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues persuasively that Césaire ought to be read with reference to the Freudian concept of disavowal, writing “Because Europe has disavowed the violence it has perpetuated in the colonies, it remains unready to confront the return of genocidal violence in Europe” (81). In the interwar and postwar periods, writers associated with the Frankfurt School, like Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, explored how bourgeoise society and ideology cultivated fascism in the hearts, minds, and practices of its inhabitants (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, 1993). Reich, dissatisfied with Marxist approaches to fascism as an “extreme representative of political and economic reaction,” instead sought to grasp its “mass psychology” (Reich 1993, 3). Reich as well as Else Frenkel-Brunswik explored the family as the site of the (re)production of fascism (Reich 1993, 30; Marasco 2018, 806). I observe these connections not to integrate Césaire into the Frankfurt School canon6 but simply to suggest that his intervention shares with them an interest in how the “normal” practices of bourgeois, capitalist, colonial societies produce the psychological conditions for fascism's emergence. Césaire's two boomerang effects (first, interpersonal dehumanization in the context of colonial domination, second, the diffusion of this dehumanization into broader European society) help us to see how practices of colonialism can transform and even destroy the metropole. This idea, that colonialism creates dehumanized and pathological psychological states, with disastrous consequences, is taken up and further developed by Césaire's greatest student, Fanon.
4 Fanon and Césaire
Fanon was a student of Césaire's, and despite many political and philosophical disagreements, Fanon admired his teacher throughout his career (Cherki 2006; Fanon 1988). Fanon frequently cites Césaire, but even more often, he engages his work without directly citing it. Despite the increased attention on the influence of Césaire on Fanon, little attention has been paid to the specific influence of the Discourse on Fanon's work. In this section, I will argue that Fanon's writing on fascism should be read as taking up and developing Césaire's analysis in the Discourse. Like Césaire, Fanon often invokes fascism for rhetorical purposes, but his invocation of fascism cannot be reduced to the rhetorical; he is interested in fascism as a practical political problem. One notable uncited engagement with the Discourse comes in the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, where Fanon writes, “the Third World is today facing Europe as one colossal mass whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding the answers to” (2004, 238). Reading this, it is hard not to think of the opening sentences of the Discourse, which declare that Europe is a “decadent” and “sick” society, incapable of solving the problems it has created, that is, “the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem” (Césaire 2000, 31). For Césaire, as we've seen, Europe's failure to solve these problems cultivates the civilizational sickness that becomes fascism. The presence of this allusion, among others, suggests that Fanon was wrestling with the ideas of the Discourse, including the “boomerang effect” thesis, while writing The Wretched of the Earth (hereafter Wretched).7 In fact, we can see various places throughout Fanon's body of work where he makes similar moves to Césaire and connects fascism and colonialism in ways reminiscent of Césaire's claims in the Discourse.
The African peoples must likewise remember that they have had to face a form of Nazism, a form of exploitation of man, of physical and spiritual liquidation clearly imposed, that the French, English, and South American manifestations of evil need to engage their attention. (1988, 171)
This is similar to a move we saw in Césaire, highlighting similarities between colonialism and fascism for a political aim. Here, Fanon aims to inspire solidarity across the African continent rather than to illuminate European hypocrisy, but the basic rhetorical move is the same. In Wretched, Fanon approvingly cites an extended passage from an article in the FLN newspaper Résistance algerienne about the French government's creation of armed urban militias to suppress Algerian resistance to colonialism.8 Portions of the French press were appalled by the creation of these militias, calling them “fascist.” The article agrees that these militias are fascistic but adds, “at the level of the individual and human rights what is fascism but colonialism at the very heart of traditionally colonialist countries?” (Fanon 2004, 48). In this case, the moral point is clear. Viewing the quasi-fascist violence of colonial practices as exceptional misunderstands what colonialism is like for the colonized. If technologies of death and ideologies of racist dehumanization are being used against you, it does not make much of a difference if they are used in the name of fascism or respectable colonial “humanism.” Like Césaire, Fanon is interested in tracing a trajectory that leads from colonialism to fascism, not just to rally his reading to the anticolonial struggle, but to better understand the nature of both. And, as we will see in the case of Fanon, to warn about sites where fascism might reemerge.
5 The Affective Embodiment of Colonialism and Its Political Implications
Fanon begins Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter BSWM) with an epigraph from Césaire's Discourse: “I am talking about millions of men whom they have knowingly instilled with fear and a complex of inferiority, whom they have trained to tremble, to kneel and behave like flunkeys” (2008, xi). Clearly, Fanon saw Césaire's Discourse, originally published two years before BSWM, as a jumping-off point for his own analysis of racialization and colonization. In the Discourse, Césaire gives a compelling, if brief, account of the affectivity and relationality colonialism produces in the colonizer. Fanon's training as a psychiatrist, interactions with patients in different colonial contexts, and sustained attention to the impact of colonialism and racialization on the mind and body situated him well to diagnose and describe the affectivity and psychopathologies of colonialism in more detail than Césaire, and, crucially, to clarify their political stakes. Fanon's descriptions of affectivity, his psychiatric work, and his articulation of the political relevance of both have been explored widely in recent years, but his comments on fascism have not, to my knowledge, been substantively engaged. I will argue that Fanon's sensitivity to the political implications of this affectivity leads him to a consideration of fascism in the former colony. In this section, I will focus on Fanon's description of affective ankylosis and affective tetanization, which I read as an elaboration of Césaire's description of the “thingification” demanded by colonialism. Such affectivities become important factors for the emergence of fascism in the post-colony. I will also outline the political functions and uses of these affectivities for Fanon in terms of revolution and anticolonial war before we see, in the next section, their implications after anticolonial revolution.
As we saw in Section 2, Césaire focuses on the types of relationships, and habits of relating, that colonialism produces. Because colonialism operates only in terms of domination and submission, it trains the colonizer to dominate others and, in doing so, degrades them. Césaire's work suggests that the colonized, but not the colonizer, can overcome colonial relationality and sees Négritude as a path for this (2000, 78). Thinkers such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres read Césaire as giving an account of the “decolonial gift”; though colonialism harms the colonized, they remain with the hope of defining a new type of humanity, which is not possible for the colonizer (2016, 452). Fanon, particularly in the conclusion to Wretched, situates colonized people and the “Third World” as holding the possibility for a new humanity, but he pays more attention than Césaire to colonialism's damage to the consciousness of the colonized. While Césaire does not spend much of the Discourse considering the psychic costs of colonialism for the colonized, he is clearly aware of the ways the colonized are psychologically and affectively damaged by colonization (the aforementioned passage that serves as an epigraph for BSWM suggests as much). Part of Césaire's approach seems to be to intentionally avoid dwelling on harms to the colonized. Rather, he focuses on contrasting the civility of the colonized to the barbarism of the colonizer. We should therefore not take Césaire's relative silence on the “pathologies” of the colonized to indicate that he denies their existence. However, Césaire's lack of focus on the psychological harms to the colonized limits his work when it comes to considering the political consequences of colonialism for the colonies.
Against the racist characterization of the colonized as having inferiority complexes because of contact with a “superior” culture, and Césaire's focus on the brutalization of the colonizer, Fanon shows, again and again, that in colonial society, everyone is pathological. In BSWM, Fanon describes the colonizer (or the white subject) as having an “affective ankylosis” (Fanon 2008, 101). Ankylosis is a rheumatological term (one of many medical metaphors throughout Fanon's work) that refers to inflammation and stiffening around the joints, which causes the joints to fuse together, restricting movement, and eventually making it impossible (Chamberlin 2018, 122; Al-Saji 2021, 186). Ankylosis involves “an inability to liquidate the past,” plotting both colonized and colonizer along a colonial narrative of progress within which no anticolonial meaning can be made (Al-Saji 2021, 187). While some (Chamberlin 2018; Whitney 2018) have read ankylosis as a condition of the racialized subject, Al-Saji argues that such readings miss “that affective ankylosis is a pathology of colonialism and whiteness” (2021, 188). The affective ankylosis of the colonizer is rigid, prevents authentic relationality and free action, and can “numb, inflame, or become gangrenous” (Al-Saji 2021, 187). This description echoes Césaire's characterization of colonial violence as causing “gangrene” and “rot” at the heart of European civilization (Al-Saji 2021, 192; Césaire 2000, 35, 48). We can see the upshot of this for both the embodied and temporal dimensions of ankylosis. As in Césaire's picture, the colonizer who is trained to do nothing but dominate becomes sick, dehumanized, and barbarized. This sickness and infection often seem to emerge through fragments of the ankylosed colonial past; heroic narratives of colonization, images of past national greatness, and fantasies of long-lost masculine dominance. Fanon's description of affective ankylosis gives us a vivid articulation of both the restrictiveness of colonialism and the way this restriction can become infected and infectious.
On the other hand, throughout his work, Fanon describes the colonized in terms of muscular tension. In BSWM, he describes the colonized and racialized as experiencing “affective tetanization” (Fanon 2008, 92). Tetanus is a bacterial infection that leads to intense muscular spasms and persistent muscular tension (Al-Saji 2021, 188; Whitney 2018, 507). For Fanon, tetanization is a crucial part of the embodied experience of the colonized. We can connect the language of tetanization in BSWM to that of muscular tension in Wretched, where Fanon describes the colonized as existing in a state of “constant muscular tonus,” of having aggressiveness “sedimented in [their] muscles” (17, 15). References to the muscles of the colonized abound throughout the first chapter of Wretched, including the language of “de tétanie musculaire,” indicating a straight line between the affective tetanization of BSWM and the muscular tension of Wretched (2004, 8; 2002, 46). Fanon describes the attempt of the colonist to achieve mastery over the colonized, to lock them into ankylosed colonial time, to turn them into a thing, a “natural backdrop for French presence,” or “an instrument of production” (Fanon 2004, 182; Césaire 2000, 42). However, such mastery or thingification is never complete, and the colonist can only ever achieve a “pseudo-petrification” of the colonized (Fanon 2004, 17). From the outside, tetanization may look like paralysis, but under this appearance of stillness is muscular tension, which consists of “rapid or hyperstimulation of muscles whereby successive contractions fuse together” (Al-Saji 2021, 188). The metaphor of tetanus refers not just to a set of symptoms but also to their origin. Tetanus is caused by contact with external bacteria, and Fanon repeatedly describes colonialism as a “pathogen, toxicity, and infection” to which tetanus is a response (Al-Saji 2021, 188). While Césaire focuses on the deformation of the colonizer through this process, Fanon deepens our understanding and shows the torturous experience of being thingified. His analysis goes beyond simply explaining the experience of this affectivity by developing an analysis of its many political consequences for the (former) colony.
For Fanon, this muscular tension and spasming erupts in all sorts of ways; in dance, embodied spirituality, ideas of possession, dreams, and “bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals,” but it can also become a tool for anticolonial revolution (Fanon 2004, 16–20, 17). As Darieck Scott (2020) argues, this muscular tension becomes an important resource for “resistance and rebellion” (57). Violent revolution, for Fanon (2004), is needed not just to overthrow the material and economic structures of colonialism but also to rid “the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude” which colonialism has cultivated in them (51). Colonialism trains the colonized for revolution by creating this muscular affectivity and adapting them to an “atmosphere of violence” (Fanon 2004, 40). Eventually, in Fanon's view, this tension of the colonized gets directed at “the only force which challenges his very being: colonialism” (2004, 20). Violence is made possible by the embodied affectivity that colonialism cultivates in the colonized, and only violence, it seems, can overcome this affectivity. However, as the later parts of Wretched show, violence is an unstable tool, one that can produce new psychological and affective problems.9 And like the affectivities that preceded them, these too have political consequences. Moreover, even if this violent revolution succeeds in gaining independence for the colony, if it fails to completely destroy the colonial world, the affectivity of colonialism can persist. Just as Reich or Frenkel-Brunswik identified the bourgeois family as a factory churning out would-be fascists, Fanon sees the colonial situation as producing pathologies and affectivities priming people for violence. But such affectivities should not be thought of as wholly determining, they require a certain political, social, and economic milieu to crystallize as a movement. For Fanon, unlike Césaire, colonialism does not just boomerang back to Europe as fascism, it can produce fascism at home. The political upshot of colonialism's affectivity is not just the possibility of revolution; this affectivity can continue to structure life in the independent former colony, to which we now turn.
6 Fascism and the Persistence of Colonialism
In the first chapter of Wretched, Fanon proposes to view decolonization as a “tabula rasa,” a “substitution” of “one ‘species’ of mankind for another” that is “unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless” (2004, 1). Violent revolution seems to be a “cleansing force” for the colonized, curing them of the psychopathologies and affectivities colonialism has cultivated in them (Fanon 2004, 51). However, as we move past the first chapter into the later parts of Wretched, the postcolonial situation does not seem to be a tabula rasa at all, rather, it remains structured by colonial dynamics, the economic exploitation of the Third World by Europe and America, and the immiseration of the masses. It seems that either violent revolution was not the panacea that it appeared to be or that the revolution Fanon called for was incomplete. While fascism is not the exclusive focus of chapter 3, it is one of the possibilities Fanon considers. My approach in this section is to take the comments he makes about fascism and fill them in by engaging with his broader analysis. This new reality for the former colony, Fanon shows us, is particularly vulnerable to fascism for a number of reasons. First, it is likely to end up in the kind of political and economic crisis in which fascism often emerges. Second, when viewed in the context of the global capitalist system, the former colony involves a new ruling class, the national bourgeoisie, which is in fact stuck in the middle, between the European bourgeoisie and the masses at home. As in many other fascisms, the postcolonial fascisms against which Fanon warns have a tendency to emerge from the middle strata of society, though they should not be understood as exclusive to that strata. Much of the population beyond just the national bourgeoisie is affectively charged by colonialism and colonial war in ways that make them personally vulnerable to the allure of fascism. Just as bourgeois society creates fascism in the metropole, colonialism can create it both in the metropole and in the colony.
As early as the end of chapter 1 of Wretched, Fanon worries about the future of (post)colonial states without a material reorganization of the global order. Formal decolonization does not end the imbalance of power held by Europe and the colonies; “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples” (Fanon 2004, 58). Fanon writes, “The sweeping powers of coercion of the colonial authorities condemn the young nation to regression. In other words, the colonial power says, ‘If you want independence, take it and suffer the consequences’” (2004, 54). Responding to decades and centuries of underdevelopment, the newly independent countries will be “required to undergo a regime of austerity, these atrophied muscles required to work out of all proportion” (Fanon 2004, 54). The former colony remains “organized along the lines dictated by the metropolis,” with the European bourgeoisie owning and controlling the means of production, and that production continuing to be organized around primary resource extraction for Europe (Fanon 2004, 106, 100). The economic exploitation of the Third World continues even as formal and direct political domination comes to an end.
Once formal impendence is gained, Fanon describes the role of the group he calls the “national bourgeoisie.” These are members of the colonized population, who had moderate amounts of privilege or education under colonial rule, and who are fashioned into the new ruling class at independence. However, they are “underdeveloped” as a bourgeoisie; far from captains of industry or political visionaries, despite bourgeois aspirations and some level of privilege, they are a bourgeoisie “in spirit only” (Fanon 2004, 122). Given the persistence of the colonial economic system, the national bourgeoisie scrambles for meager power and self-enrichment. Ultimately they come to concern themselves with “intermediary activities,” like running a tourism sector for the European bourgeoisie (Fanon 2004; 98, 101). Because of the role they are able to find, parasitic on the exploitation of the colonized masses by the European capitalists, the national bourgeoisie plays a role in keeping these dynamics in place. Far from mass anticolonial violence completely destroying the Manichean world, much of the colonial system, though formally abolished, remains in place, with a newly fashioned class, the national bourgeoisie, tasked with enforcing it.
This postcolonial situation is ripe for the continuation of colonial patterns, not just of economics and politics, but also of the affectivity colonialism has produced. Given that the political and economic structure of colonization produces all sorts of pathological affectivities, one could not reasonably assume that such affectivities will be overcome while much of those structures remain in place. Indeed, throughout the rest of the book, Fanon shows the ways that mental disorders, embodied affectivity, and Manichean antagonisms can persist after the formal end of colonialism. Moreover, in the final chapter of Wretched, Fanon goes through a number of case studies to show, in gruesome detail, how colonial war has become “a breeding ground for mental disorders” (182–183). Far from being totally liberated and purged of all inferiority complexes, the minds and bodies of the national populace have been further disfigured by colonial war, and are not, in many cases, freed of the dynamics of colonialism.
Based on Fanon's sketch, the former colony seems to be in trouble. Despite success in gaining independence, the world remains organized along colonial lines, and the colonies find themselves in economic crisis, unable to feed themselves, let alone prosper. The economy of resource extraction remains largely intact as do the affectivities colonialism produced. The national bourgeoisie, far from becoming stewards of a new era of national development and self-sufficiency, take on the role of preserving the neocolonial arrangement. The masses are suffering, leading the national bourgeoisie and political leadership to command police crackdowns to manage the situation; “the masses are hungry and the police commissioners, now Africans, are not particularly reassuring” (Fanon 2004, 114). The vast majority of the population remains hungry and desperate, not having seen much benefit from the revolution. As Fanon writes, “the shapeless mass of the people is seen as a blind force that must be constantly held on a leash either by mystification or fear instilled by a police presence” (2004, 125). Rather than reorganizing society so that people are fed, states typically choose to militarize, strengthening the punitive and carceral apparatus. In addition to acting upon the social body with force, the expansion of these arms of the state can intimidate much of the population into submission. As Achille Mbembe argues, “The key characteristic of colonial rule was thus to issue orders and have them carried out,” and this authoritarian structure of “commandment” persists in postcolonial rule (2001, 32). Here we can see the authoritarian strengthening of the state as continuous with colonial rule, and if the thingification of the colonial era persists, why would not its response tetanization? It is not just brute force that is used to respond to this crisis, Fanon also lists mystification as a tactic.10 During colonialism, Fanon describes how mystification naturalizes the situation of the colonized through narratives of racial/cultural inferiority and superiority (228) and colonial possession (135). He also argues that revolution and national unity can be demystifying, making visible the violence used to preserve colonial order (47, 163). The unification of the nation through totalizing violence in colonial war makes “any attempt at mystification…virtually impossible” (Fanon 2004, 52).
Nationalism, though important during decolonization, can, in the postcolonial state, become a form of mystification, obscuring the economic and political colonial structure of the state, and recasting hierarchies within the nation as natural. Fanon warns about the possibility of a post-revolutionary shift “from nationalism to ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism” and even to the establishment of “a genuine ethnic dictatorship” (103, 126). This mystifying ultranationalism is a self-standing tactic of pacifying the people and a way of justifying the use of force. The violence threatened against many parts of the population is tolerated, or even desired, because it gets represented as being in defense of the nation. In the aftermath of a war that has been won under the banner of nationalism, it is not hard to see how this could have purchase. The revolutionary energy of the independence war can get captured and redirected toward ultranationalism, chauvinism, violence, and extreme patriarchal politics. The tetanization of the colonized erupted in all sorts of ways before the revolution, and in the new postcolonial reality, it could easily erupt in fascist street violence. Fascism redirects the energy away from a true revolution that could reorganize the economic base and, in this way, serves the interests of the national bourgeoisie and, most of all, the European capitalist class. Here Fanon's analysis resonates with accounts of fascism that see it as a reaction to impending or attempted worker revolt (Zetkin 1983, 103). Just as the Biennio Rosso in 1919–1920 Italy resulted in a fascist backlash that was strategically supported by the bourgeoisie, and the power of socialists across Germany was crushed by Nazi reaction, the revolutionary optimism is both crushed and redirected by the possibility of fascism in the colony.
Just as the national bourgeoisie sidesteps its formative phase to revel in materialism, likewise, at the institutional level, it skips the parliamentary phase and chooses a national-socialist-type dictatorship. We now know that the short-sighted fascism that has triumphed for half a century in Latin America is the dialectical result of the semicolonial State which has prevailed since independence. (2004, 116–117)
This is a dense passage. It gets at the way fascism becomes a possibility because of the structure of a “semi-colonial” country and the specific role the national bourgeoisie plays within it. However, I think it is worth hesitating from overstating the point raised in the previous paragraph. We might view fascism simply as an ideological cover for capitalism intentionally deployed by the powerful to prevent the powerless from rising up. I think this suggests a deliberateness not always at play with fascism. Fascism is, after all, a movement of feeling, mobilizing passions, explosions of violence, and fantasies of domination. As Deleuze and Guattari, drawing on Reich, argue, the masses “were not innocent dupes…they wanted fascism ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 29). And neither should the national bourgeoisie be thought to be acting dispassionately or cynically, they can also get sucked into the allure of fascism. Many theories of fascism have identified it as a political movement with particular affinities in the middle strata (Gramsci 1978, 38; Zetkin 1983, 103; Trotsky 1983, 207). In 1922, Italian socialist Giovanni Zibordi saw the petty bourgeoisie, former service people, small–medium landowners, and small shop owners as turning to fascism because they found themselves “compressed between the weight of the large bourgeoisie and the nouveau riches pressing down from above, and the thrust of the working class pressing up from below” (Ziborbi 1983, 91). In Fanon's description, we see the so-called national bourgeoisie in a similar position. Rather than being a movement of the middle strata of a given country, the postcolonial fascism Fanon warns about here is best understood with a global analysis. The national bourgeoisie is, domestically, the most powerful group. But if we pull back we see they are in the middle, parasitic on the European bourgeoisie above and feeling the unrest of the masses from below. Calling back to the affectivity we described earlier we ought to consider how a colonized member of the national bourgeoisie, still tetanized, but invested in preserving the ankylotic status quo, might have a unique affective experience that could turn fascistic. While colonized people may play roles of enforcing colonial violence during the colonial era, they come to play a larger role in the postcolonial state that remains organized along colonial lines. A desire for domination, to be both dominator and dominated, is produced by colonialism's persistence among both the victims of a system and those one-time victims who have been tasked with its preservation.
While fascism historically has a strong affinity with the middle strata, it is a movement irreducible to a single part of society. Its composition varies from case to case. In some independent former colonies, these movements could be led by (or on behalf of) members of the national bourgeoise, but in others, such as the semi-colonial Latin American countries’ Fanon references (or various independent settler colonies), the fascist movement could be a continuation of colonial rule by settlers. Both Walter Rodney and George Padmore identified apartheid South Africa as fascistic, with Padmore calling it “the World's classic Fascist state” (Rodney 2018, 238; Padmore, quoted in Toscano 2023, 28). We can see how the ankylosis of the colonizer can turn into gangrene and rot, and how the tetanization of the colonized can lead to spontaneous violence. Our analysis ought to leave open the possibility that fascism might appeal to both the colonized and the colonizer in the post-independence context, while still being sensitive to the different motivations of people from these different groups.
The picture I have sketched here by drawing on Fanon's analysis is influenced by, but goes beyond, the boomerang effect as described by Césaire. Fanon's analysis shows the first level of a boomerang effect, that colonialism transforms those who enforce it, though not the second level, its reverberation back to the metropole. It shows less a geographical displacement than an infection or inflammation of colonial affectivity in periods of crisis. It is also worth reflecting on the connection between the terms “boomerang” and “revolution.” Both imply a moving away and a coming back. In Fanon's account of revolution, as in Césaire's boomerang, the colonial tendencies that were pushed away return—the revolution is not linear progress but is vulnerable to regression, return, and reconstitution.11 This can be the authoritarian structure of command or the less instrumental and predictable swirl of fascist desire. Fanon's analysis shares with Césaire's a close attention to how colonialism produces affective and psychological dynamics that are amenable to fascism. Fascism is not determined by these dynamics alone, but emerges in periods of crisis, and typically across and beyond various classes and subclasses. The persistence of colonial dynamics after independence should not be thought to be stagnant or eternal but, rather, vulnerable to mutation, gangrene, and rot.
7 The United States as Rising Hegemon
So far, I have taken Césaire's treatment of fascism to exclusively concern Europe and used Fanon to expand his analysis to the (former) colony. However, this interpretation is complicated by one facet of Césaire's work. Both Fanon and Césaire are grappling with the shifting geopolitics of the post-WW2 world they are writing in, and seeing a new imperial superpower rise to prominence: the United States of America. After outlining the boomerang effect thesis and describing the increasing brutality of European society, Césaire writes, “at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed—far surpassed, it is true—by the barbarism of the United States” (2000, 47).12 We should not think that all “barbarism” is necessarily fascistic, and Césaire does not explicitly use the language of fascism here. Nevertheless, after describing Nazism as the pinnacle of European barbarism, Césaire goes on to claim that America has surpassed Europe in terms of barbarism; it seems that an American neo-fascism could be part of what he is warning against. By identifying the United States as being on the same path of capitalist development and colonial/imperial intervention, both militarily and economically, we can imagine that fascism could emerge there, just as it did in Europe.
what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of production rates. No, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. (2004, 238)
While, like Césaire, Fanon sees promise in the Third World, he also sees its vulnerability to the brutality and dehumanization that has manifested in Europe and the United States. “Catching up” appears as a possible solution to the challenges that face the colonized world, but Fanon sees this attempt to follow the path of ankylotic history as one of mutilation, brutalization, and, perhaps, fascism. Fanon's sustained focus on the psychological and affective costs of colonization on the colonized makes him sensitive to the paths colonized countries might follow. This contrast reflects a salient difference between the two thinkers. Whereas Césaire is focused on the evils of Europe and the possibilities of salvation for the “Third World,” and especially Africans and the African diaspora through Négritude, Fanon's work is characterized by an ambivalence and a concern for the future of the Third World.
As Césaire elegantly shows, the humanism of a Europe poisoned by capitalism and colonization is incapable of “establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics” (2000, 37). Capitalist exploitation, with or without the fetters of liberalism, cannot restrain the brutalization that such exploitation involves, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In the post–Cold War era when the terminology of “First,” “Second,” and “Third World” was replaced by “developed” and “developing” economies, and “Structural Adjustments” were viciously imposed alongside new imperialist wars, Fanon's warning about “catching up” seems even more profound. Fanon and Césaire show that this path of capitalist development will always leave the Third World behind, refusing to reimburse them for creating Europe. But even if “catching up” were possible, the Third World would fall victim to the “law of progressive dehumanization” (Césaire 2000, 68) and even fascism, to which Europe succumbed and to which America seemed vulnerable.13 This “catching up” could intensify and augment the colonial affectivity we discussed in the previous section. In a world where fascistic movements have thrived in countries profoundly shaped by colonialism, the push to “catch up,” coercively imposed by capitalist development, seems to bear at least some responsibility.
8 Conclusion
The work of Césaire and Fanon provides crucial insights into how fascistic affectivity is produced by colonialism. While Césaire's work shows the disfiguring effects of colonialism for the colonizer, and the way they can mutate into fascism, Fanon investigates the pathologies of colonialism, and sees the risk of fascism in the colony as well as in the metropole. While I have sought to show how Fanon and Césaire's work is in conversation, and is in some ways compatible, I also hope to have clarified some important differences between the two thinkers. Fanon's work represents the colonized (and postcolonial) world as ambivalent, with real possibilities, but also real dangers, especially if broader colonial dynamics are not overcome. In the work of both thinkers, the connection of affectivity to fascism is suggestive, though incomplete, and further work is needed to develop their insights. In addition to helping us better understand the work of Fanon and Césaire, these insights have political implications. If colonial dynamics create affective conditions for fascism, we should be skeptical of appeals to return to (neo)colonial capitalist normalcy in order to oppose the threat of fascism. If we are to try and resist the resurgence of fascism, perhaps a worthwhile focus is undermining the world's colonial structure through global reparations within and between countries, as Fanon, and more recently, Olúfęmi O. Táíwò, have suggested (Fanon 2004, 52–62; Táíwò 2022). Both thinkers, through Négritude in the case of Césaire, and the vision of creating a “new man” and “national consciousness” for Fanon, advocated for the development of new cultural forms that could guide colonized peoples beyond the dangers of the European path. Fanon and Césaire's work gives us crucial insights into the nature of present and historical fascist movements, and the affectivity that undergirds them. The rise of fascism around the globe should not be thought of as some kind of unexplainable mass hysteria, or an aberration before the end of history, but rather as a predictable (which is not to say inevitable) development in a world that continues to be structured by colonialism. Only a reconfiguration of that world, it seems, can keep these movements at bay.14
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