At home in Fanon: Queer romance and mixed solidarities in contemporary African fiction

Smit, Sarah Johanna

At home in Fanon: Queer romance and mixed solidarities in contemporary African fiction

Master Thesis

2016

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Throughout the recent iterations of student activism that have gripped South African universities, Frantz Fanon has been continuously disinterred. But the figure of Fanon often remains both abstract and plural within its articulations - interpretations of his body of work performing sometimes only partial allegiances to the whole. This means that centralising a Fanon within political discourse stands to reproduce the losses implicated in his mythification, rather than to recover new critical imports in his work. In other words, the simplification of Fanonist rhetoric fails to deal with the "un-political" dimensions of Fanon. As such the more troubling of Fanon's work, namely Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is often left un-interrogated, while The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is read like a manifesto for purposive change. Black Skin, White Masks it seems is deemed "not radical enough" because of what appears to be a problematic preoccupation with 'love and understanding.' In the following intervention, I argue that what makes this centrality of 'love and understanding' so unpalatable to radical activists is a misappropriation of Fanon's formulation of desire. This is in part, I believe, one of the flaws of Fanon setting up the dynamic of racialised desire within cisgender, heteronormative models for potential interracial relationships - "The Woman of Colour and the White Man" and "The Man of Colour and the White Woman." Hence, I consider what queering these relationships does to the way in which we read the political dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks, and whether or not this allays the allegory of revolutionary solidarity of the generic teleology of the heteronormative romance. The object of this thesis is to elucidate what possibilities for political solidarity are generated through the queered dynamic of interracial love, explored in the literature of the contemporary African diaspora. New African writers take seriously what Fanon recognised as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," by emptying out the category of the nation and engaging with the intersections of a trans-national, trans-gender and trans-racial politics. To demonstrate the ways in which a queer analysis of interracial romance might reimagine a raced identity politics, I analyse novels produced by members of the contemporary African diaspora, whose works deal with mixed race identity. Through my reading of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Yewande Omotoso's Bom Boy (2011), and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), I hope to demonstrate that contemporary African literature is concerned with the formation of an identity that estranges the category of blackness from itself through its entanglement with a queer identity politics.

Keywords

English Language and Literature

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