Refusing pathology: Black redaction in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Abstract

The final chapter of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth includes several psychiatric case histories that speak to the indelible effects of the deathly atmospherics of colonialism on the psychology of the colonized. Though Fanon reveals that these case histories are drawn from his own clinical practice in Algeria, he almost entirely refuses to contextualize their inclusion in the text, and even warns that his presentation intentionally ‘avoid[s] any semiological, nosological, or therapeutic discussion’. In this article, I read Fanon’s case histories in Wretched in terms of Christina Sharpe’s notion of Black redaction, which she adumbrates in her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as a critical strategy for ‘imagining otherwise’ that seeks to counter the generalized anti-Black atmosphere that still governs the world in the wake of transatlantic slavery. My argument is that in presenting the case histories of Wretched in refusal of dominant psychiatric discourses, Fanon engages a Black redactive strategy that aims to imagine the psychological effects of colonization otherwise than through the pathologizing colonial frames by which racialized and colonized lives are systematically rendered invisible. Further, I contend that reading Fanon’s case histories in such Black redactive terms enables us to recognize that his clinically inflected political thought is not premised on a valuation of pathology, as has been argued by his Black optimist (Fred Moten) and Afro-pessimist (Jared Sexton) readers alike. In fact, as I conclude by arguing in response to these readings, at play in Fanon’s Black redactive strategy in Wretched is not a valuation of pathology, but the matter of its transvaluation.