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Example research essay topic: Cultural Studies Third World - 2,494 words

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Frantz Fanon Frantz Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Martinique. He moved out of Martinique and volunteered to fight with the Free French in World War II. He later started writing political essays and plays that remain controversial even today. Fanon's biography can be looked through two different prisms, despite the fact that Frantz Fanon is among the 20 th century's greatest theoreticians on philosophy of liberation emanating from the Third World.

Psychiatrist, philosopher, sociologist, revolutionary, he posed pressing concerns that span the scope of many disciplines. Fanon was a complex figure; however, there is no absolutely complete and objective biography on him written. The myths that have grown up around Fanon can be revealed only after reading of several different sources. Still, it is not possible to rely upon already written biographies of Fanon, and I think that life of this great man should be studied more deeply. The fact that there are different biographical approaches to the life of Frantz Fanon is easy to understand, since Fanon for some remains to be a friend and for others an enemy. For some Fanon is hero, because of his revolutionary ideas, for other Fanon is genius psychologists, and for many Frantz Fanon is the person who in his writings promoted violence and terror.

Therefore, it is hard to make a compromise and to tell exactly, whether Fanon deserves to be condemned or praised, which greatly affects the accuracy of Fanon's biographies. David Macey began reading Fanon around 1970, when Third World charisma had broad appeal. Today Mr. Macey notes that Fanon had a talent for hate and advocated violence that his biographer can no longer justify. However, as a good-hearted liberal, Mr. Macey labors to see Fanon in a gentle light, It was his anger that was so attractive.

Well, no, it was his anger that was least attractive, because it blinded him to the consequences of his words, despite Fanon did not know what consequences his words would bring in the future. Before Fanon left France, he published an article that deals with racism and colonization titled Black Skin White Mask. The book was part analysis because it deals with his personal experience and colonized relationship. Black Skin and White Masks (BSWM), originally titled An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks, in part based on his lectures and experiences in Lyon. BSWM is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon's personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer / colonized relationship is normalized as psychology. Because of his schooling and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorientation he felt after his initial encounter with French racism decisively shaped his psychological theories about culture.

Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the black man. Fanon's burgeoning popularity and influence on more recent post-colonial readings of black liberation and nationalism perhaps serve as an index of his centrality to the movement for Algerian self-determination in the 1950 s that shaped (and, in turn, was shaped by) his diverse career as a political activist and critic. In the late 1960 s, the name of Frantz Fanon became associated with the idea of an armed revolution in the Third World. Macey shows Fanon to have been a man formed in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism, and traces Fanon's intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of post-war French culture. David Macey has done justice for the first time to the extraordinary life of a complex figure, flawed in some respects but fundamentally a humanist committed to the eradication of colonialism, a man whose angry and eloquent writings are still of fierce relevance today.

After leaving the army, Fanon trained as a doctor before specialising as a psychiatrist. During his training in France, he came under the influence of the Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles. Tosquelles had been a support of Catalan nationalism as a young man but by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was an active member of the Partido Obrero de Unifacion Marxist or POUM. He served on the Aragon front, where he helped to organise a psychiatric service, and selected soldiers for machine-gun and tank units. From early 1938, he was responsible for psychiatric services for the whole of the Republican Army. After the Republican defeat, Tosquelles fled Spain to France, crossing the Pyrenees on foot.

It appears that Fanon was a diligent student and an idealistic and hard working doctor. He participated in innovative movements that were leading towards more humane treatment of psychiatric patients. Fanon primarily employed medical approaches to the treatment of mental illness but was well able to place symptoms in their social context, not something all doctors or psychiatrists can do easily to this day. He did not adopt the fashionable approach of the time, based on Freudian psychoanalysis.

Freud and his followers traditionally observed politics (Freud famously gave this advice to his adherents in Germany on the coming to power of the Nazis). By this time he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with France, with mainstream medicine and psychiatry. Because Fanon studied in France, he conceived of himself as French because of his background. Fanon believed that the French associated blackness with evil and sin, and in an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask. I think he was referring to him self when he was discussing this issue. Because he grew up in France, he felt that way.

He thinks that black or white do not exists without the other. Once Fanon moved to Algeria, once he gave up his as simile interpellation and joined the colonized in their desperate, bitter struggles in the colonies, he turned his gaze totally away from the colonizers. Nevertheless, in his writings Fanon continued to be extraordinarily careful not to move too quickly or too easily from the dialectical operations of colonial domination to anti-colonial nationalist resistance. Recent debates over Fanon's work miss the mark in placing the central tension of the Fanon's oeuvre on the issue whether his theory privileged Manichean, polarized opposition between colonizer and colonized or, conversely, exposed the futility of such binary demarcations of identity and community. A careful reading of Fanon's writings would reveal that he in fact moved back and forth between these two poles. Sometimes it happened fitfully and haphazardly, but quite often Fanon was as a heuristic tactic to apprehend the colonial dialectic both at moments of centered, consolidated, and brutal rigidities and at moments of flux, of the play of energies, forces, and desires that exceed the conscious, intelligible, and rational internationalities of the actors in the agony of colonization and resistance.

In Algeria Fanon continued his pioneering work. He helped found the first psychiatric day hospital in Africa and attempted to introduce social treatments. Soon, however, Fanon was distracted by the outside world. During his tenure in Blida, the war for Algerian independence broke out. Frantz Fanon was horrified by the stories of torture his patients both French torturers and Algerian torture victims told him. In Algeria Fanon became involved with the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), the main Algerian nationalist grouping.

Fanon began by treating wounded FLN fighters and then became a journalist in the FLN press. He was forced soon to resign his medical position and to leave the country as his life was in danger. He became a sort of roving ambassador for the struggle in a number of African capitals and a FLN spokesperson at international conferences. The Algerian War consolidated Fanon's alienation from the French imperial viewpoint, and in 1956, he formally resigned his post with the French government to work for the Algerian cause.

His letter of resignation encapsulates his theory of the psychology of colonial domination, and pronounces the colonial mission incompatible with ethical psychiatric practice, If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people. (Toward the African Revolution 53). In the words of his biographer, David Macey in his new book Frantz Fanon: A life, Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism, and the spokesman of a Third World ism which held that the future of socialism - or even the world - was no longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth. Beyond the evocative power of Fanon's work for such mass movements, his writings have been of great interest for critics and theorists of the new national literatures of Africa, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean, as well as for cultural critics of oppositional movements of women and minorities in North America and Europe. In this particular regard, Fanon's theory of the stages in the evolution of the literature of all colonized peoples has been widely applied, often rather schematically. According to this theory, the first stage in the emergence of the national literatures of the colonized world, which Fanon describes as a derivative, imitative stage, is a stage of apprenticeship to the traditions and models of the colonizing countries.

The second stage is characterized by the rejection of the authority and dominance of the colonizers paradigms and traditions and, simultaneously, nostalgia for the indigenous, autochthonous traditions of the colonized. The third and final stage in this process is for Fanon a fighting stage that produces a genuinely revolutionary literature, a peoples literature that forges new forms and themes closer to the movement to end colonial rule and to construct a genuinely democratic and egalitarian postcolonial culture. Another perceived salience of Fanon's work for contemporary critical theory lies in the ways his writings seemed to prefigure current theoretical obsessions with issues such as subject formation, otherness, and austerity; identity politics; and the centrality of psychoanalytic and linguistic paradigms for literary and cultural studies. Many biographers tell from Fanon's writings that he was not much interested in the insights to be gained through psychiatry. He was a blamer who taught others to blame. His approach to truth was purely political: Truth is that which dislocates the colonial regime, that which promotes the emergence of the nation.

In other words, he traded thinking for propaganda. Yet he was still regarded as an intellectual. In his writings psychiatrist Fanon romanticized murder. He argued that violence was necessary to Third World peoples not just as a way to win their liberty but, even more, because it would cure the inferiority complex that had been created by the teachings of white men.

Once liberated by violence, the formerly subject populations could help bring peace and socialism to everyone. For the young in many parts of the world, he perfectly expressed the spirit of the times. He was the talk of revolutionary Paris in the 1950 s, when the young Salt Sar, not yet known as Pol Pot, lived there. Later, in America, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers loved to quote him. The book in which Fanon clearly articulated his theory, The Wretched of the Earth, went into six editions in Arabic. Today it is hardly necessary for revolutionaries to read him.

His poison flows through the bloodstream of everyone who kills joyfully for an imaginary future. Whilst Fanon has been lauded since his death, the reality is that he had little influence over the direction of the FLN when he was alive. His writings were more influential after his death, and then outside Algeria and France. For a period in the late 1960 s, his name and ideas were invoked by a bewildering variety of causes and groups. In the US, Black Panther leader Solely Carmichael claimed Fanon as one of his "patron saints" and Eldridge Cleaver boasted that every brother on a roof top could quote Fanon (despite this Fanon could certainly not be described as a black nationalist).

While in Ghana, Fanon developed leukemia, and though encouraged by friends to rest, he refused. He completed his final and most fiery indictment of the colonial condition, The Wretched of the Earth, in 10 months, and Jean-Paul Sartre published the book in the year of his death. On the day, when news of his death reached Paris his most famous book The Wretched of the Earth was seized by the police on the grounds that it was a threat to national security. Different versions of Fanon's death exist today. The commonly accepted one is that Fanon died at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he had sought treatment for his cancer, on December 6, 1961. However, even today biographers are not sure yet how Fanon was buried.

According to David Decker, body of Fanon was flown back from America and carried across the militarized border between Tunisia and Algeria for a secret nighttime burial on occupied territory. According to Home Bhabba, Fanon's body was buried with honors by the Algerian National Army of Liberation. Fanon worked for a disciplined revolutionary movement and became a spokesperson for its set objectives and program. His mode of radical, innovative cultural analysis ranged across disparate disciplines and domains: from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to economic theory, literature, and popular culture; and from linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical investigations to uncovering the play of sexuality, the affects of the body, and the dispositions of the psyche. Given this range and complexity of Fanon's work, his continuing relevance for cultural studies, especially in contested social and political spaces, seems solidly assured. Bibliography: Home, Bhabba.

Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition, Foreword to Black Skin. White Masks (1986) Hussein Abdulahi Bulhan. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985) Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography, St Martins Press (2001) Irene L.

Gender, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1974) Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York (1965) Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge (1995) Miami, Albert. The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon.

Massachusetts Review (1973) Toward the African Revolution. New York (1967) Decker, Jeffrey. Terrorism Unveiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algeria, Cultural Critique 17, (1991) Perinbam, Barbara. Holy Violence, The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon: An Intellectual Biography (1982) de Beauvoir, Simone.

Force of Circumstance. New York: Putnam (1964)


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Research essay sample on Cultural Studies Third World

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