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Fanon, Camus and the global colourline: colonial difference and the rise ofdecolonial horizonsAlina Sajed aa University of Hong KongPublished online: 13 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Alina Sajed (2013) Fanon, Camus and the global colour line: colonial differenceand the rise of decolonial horizons, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1, 5-26, DOI:10.1080/09557571.2012.734788

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Fanon, Camus and the global colour line: colonialdifference and the rise of decolonial horizons

Alina SajedUniversity of Hong Kong

Abstract I focus here on the political stances of Frantz Fanon and Albert Camusregarding the AlgerianWar of Independence. By examining their reflections on this violentanticolonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial difference and of racialhierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s position relies on an ethos ofdecolonization and on an ethics of difference that—while specific to the Algerian context—also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught in the violence of imperialencounters. Camus’ conciliatory approach, however, and his moral equalization of theviolence perpetrated by both sides enunciate the inherent racial hierarchies underpinningliberal narratives. I argue that the limits inherent in Fanon’s thought—but also its latentpotentialities for decolonial thinking—become apparent when examined through the lensof the contemporary activism among North African migrants and their descendants inFrance. The emergence of self-proclaimed decolonial movements constitutes an attempt toenact a decolonial transnational citizenship, which contests the racial boundaries of FrenchRepublicanism. But it also signals a different vision of the universal—one that isentrenched in a terrain of historical specificity and which holds more promise in contestingthe global colour line.

Introduction

To claim that the discipline of international relations (IR) has consistentlyoccluded the question of race both in narratives of its disciplinary founding and inits analyses of global relations is an understatement. Several IR scholars havediscussed the elision of ‘race’ from these narratives and indicated its continuingsalience as a category structuring global politics past and present (see Doty 1996;Manzo 1996; Persaud 1997; 2004; Vitalis 2000; 2005; Krishna 2006; Shilliam 2009).Indeed, Robert Vitalis remarks that while racism is an established institution inglobal politics today, IR scholars have little or nothing to say about it (2005, 160).As Randolph Persaud pointed out, the discipline operates with a reified notion ofthe nation-state seen as a self-contained entity emptied of all complexitiesregarding identity formation and negotiation (2004, 60). In this way, explorationsinto how complex configurations of race, gender, class, ethnicity and religionshape ‘national identity’ and constitute the ‘nation-state’ are conveniently left tothe fields of sociology and anthropology. However, as this article argues, not onlyare the suppression and domestication of such competing challenges to thepresumed homogeneity of national identity central to nation-state formation,

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013Vol. 26, No. 1, 5–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.734788

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but the very constitution of ‘global relations’ is unthinkable without attention tothe historical construction of racial hierarchies.1

While this article aims to highlight both aspects by focusing on a particulargeopolitical configuration, it also draws on a larger project that explores a tension,within critical conceptualizations of political violence in IR, between thedecolonial promise of transcendence and liberation, and the Foucauldiansuspicion of emancipation narratives (see Sajed forthcoming). I choose to explorethis tension by engaging Frantz Fanon’s and Albert Camus’ positions on theAlgerian War. By examining their reactions, engagements with and reflections onthis violent anticolonial struggle, I seek to highlight the role of colonial differenceand of racial hierarchies in the constitution of global politics. Fanon’s writingshave become paradigmatic anticolonial (and decolonial) texts whose anger andpathos have inspired students of colonialism and activist movements for severaldecades. On the other hand, interest in Camus’ writings has waxed and wanedover the decades since his death in 1960, and has recently been resurrectedthrough the publication of several biographies and studies. One common trait ofthese recent studies of Camus’ life and politics is their painstaking effort to recastCamus as an Algerian, and (French colonial) Algeria as the imaginary space thatmade his writing possible.

I approach Camus’ thought not with the purpose of refashioning him as anAlgerian but rather to read him contrapuntally (to use Said’s expression) againstFanon. What I mean by a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of Fanon and Camus through theprism of colonial difference is not a reductionist ‘Fanon versus Camus’ approachbut rather an analysis of their ‘discrepant experiences’ (Said 1994, 32–33) ofFrench colonialism and anticolonial resistance. Fanon’s endorsement of violentresistance and his rejection of ‘reconciliation’ as a desirable solution speak of anethos of decolonization and of an ethics of difference that—while specific to theAlgerian context—also reverberated profoundly among other societies caught inthe violence of imperial encounters. On the other hand, Camus’ conciliatoryapproach, his moral equalization of the violence perpetrated by both sides, and hisfervent rejection of the two states solution gesture towards the inherent racialhierarchies underpinning liberal humanist narratives.

I begin by scrutinizing the differentiated visions of Algeria in Camus’ andFanon’s writings. The militant tone and engagement of Fanon in the Algerian Warcould not be further from Camus’ conciliatory attitude that refused to envisage anAlgeria independent from France. Contrary to some overly generous interpret-ations and studies of Camus’ engagement in Algeria, which aim to recast Camusas a lonely moral voice in an immoral world (see Carroll 2007; Tanase 2010), I seethe relation between his literary narrative spaces and his political writings as oneof mutual constitution. His political solution aimed to circumvent the colonialdilemma altogether (how to enfranchise the natives without letting go of colonialprivileges and hierarchies?) and thus escaped into a (supposedly) neutral‘universal and humanist problematic’. His vision of a multiethnic andmulticultural Algeria federated to the French motherland stems from his viewof colonization as the ineluctably forward movement of (Western) civilization asHistory, and hence a fait accompli requiring no interrogation. This paternalistic

1 I borrow the term of ‘global relations’ from Persaud (1997, 170).

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and Eurocentric vision is mirrored by the narrative landscape of his literaryworks, which imagine an Algeria in which the ‘indigenous Arabs’ are (almost)always nameless, part of the scenery, ‘the natural background to the Frenchpresence’ (Fanon 2004, 182). Camus’ sincere belief in assimilation as the politicalsolution to the Algerian War (whereby the French Republic should live up to itspromise and turn the natives into true French citizens) is a strange response to theconflict given that the French colonial policy of assimilation was always meant tofail (see Colonna 1997). To Fanon’s illustration of the inevitability of violence incolonial Algeria, Camus answered with desires of assimilation of the colonizedinto the bosom of the metropole. Fanon’s ‘new man’ did not desire assimilationbut cultural and political autonomy. Fanon’s ‘new man’ aimed for liberation fromthe anomie that characterized the French mission civilisatrice: the promise ofequality rested upon a logic of inferiority, objectification and de-humanization.This anomie of assimilation mirrors the dilemma faced today by postcolonialmigrant populations in contemporary France who are expected to integrate, that isto erase their difference and blend in seamlessly without disturbing the Frenchnational body. If Camus’ dilemma was how to ‘end colonialism and leave [whiteprivilege] intact’ (Ronald Aronson quoted in Carroll 2007, 213 n8), thecontemporary dilemma of the liberal multicultural state is how to deal withdifference and leave white privilege intact.

Next, I build on the insights from the contrapuntal readings of Camus andFanon’s Algerian experience to reflect on the possibilities and limits of decolonialthought and action. One of the concerns expressed here is that the decolonialpromise is perceived at best as a (fleeting) strategic position from which tointerrogate the complicity of knowledge production with structures ofdomination (and hence ineffectual in destabilizing the global colour line), andat worst as an essentialist stratagem that fails to grasp that all knowledge isimplicated in power relations and thus inevitably contaminated. This scepticalperception of the decolonial promise has long been adopted by post-structuralist/postmodern frameworks, which look with a Foucauldian suspicionat all narratives of liberation and emancipation. It is at this point that I turn toechoes of Fanonian liberation theory within contemporary activism among NorthAfrican migrants in France.2 The emergence of the Mouvement des Indigenes dela Republique (Movement of the Natives of the Republic)—as a self-proclaimeddecolonial movement—constitutes an attempt to enact a decolonial transnationalcitizenship that contests the racial boundaries of French Republicanism.In critically examining this movement, the analysis points to opportunities ofdecolonial futures made possible by taking seriously the salience of colonialdifference, but also to its limits and caveats. This final section thus seeks tounderstand what is at stake in perceiving all activist and emancipatory efforts asinevitably contaminated by power and potentially creating new totalizingdiscourses; and to make visible that such a posture of Foucauldian suspicion isunsustainable when read against the racial hierarchies put in place by colonialviolence. The contrapuntal reading of Camus’ scepticism towards anticolonialrevolt against Fanon’s efforts to make visible the specificity of colonial domination

2 The idea of viewing specific North African migrant activisms emerging today asFanonian echoes in contemporary France belongs to Kipfer (2011).

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serves to illustrate that to embrace this sceptical position is to occlude one’s ownprivileged position in the established racial hierarchy.

Irreconcilable visions of (post)colonial futures: Camus, Fanon and the Algerian

War

I undertake here a contrapuntal reading of Fanon’s and Camus’ discrepantexperiences and visions of the Algerian War. Sankaran Krishna notes that ‘[o]necan scarcely conceive of a discipline more hostile to contrapuntality thanmainstream IR discourse’ (2006, 91). He then suggests that to make sense of IR’s‘amnesia on the question of race . . . one has to contrapuntally restage theencounters between the West and the rest’ (2006, 91). Thus to read the colonialexperience contrapuntally entails not simply creating space for voices fromelsewhere, but something more substantive, namely understanding theproduction of the global colour line as a violent enmeshment between‘metropolitan history’ (Said’s term) and other histories ‘against which (andtogether with which) . . . [it] acts’ (Said 1994, 51). To put this matter differently, acontrapuntal reading allows me to highlight two things: the role of colonialdifference in the historical constitution of the global colour line, and how such adifference continues to be relevant to understanding contemporary postcolonialmigrations. Contrapuntality indicates here the making together of (post)colonialviolence in a manner that makes poignant the limits of the liberal humanistnarrative of freedom and equality, and the limitations of vision and awareness inthe Western critical ‘canon’ in general when confronted with the issue of colonialdifference. A contrapuntal reading thus not only renders suspect the Foucauldian(and Camusian) claim that all resistance or liberation gestures are inherentlycomplicit with a will to dominate,3 but also makes such a claim difficult to sustainin a global context of (post)colonial violence and racial hierarchies.

Fanon’s militant rejection of colonialism is widely known, but Camus’ attitudetowards it much less so. Chroniques algeriennes 1939–1958 (Actuelles III), thecollection comprising Camus’ essays and articles written for various periodicalson the subject of Algeria, reveals his position on colonialism, which he sees as anhistorical fait accompli that requires no further critique other than to remind themetropole that it needs to live up to its promises of assimilation of the ‘natives’(see Camus 1958, 108–113). Consider, for example, the statement made in anarticle written for L’Express in 1955–1956:

Whatever we may think of the technical civilization, it is the only one, itsshortcomings aside, that can offer a decent life to underdeveloped countries. And itis not the Orient that will physically save the Orient, but the West, who, in its turn,will find its nourishment in the civilization of the Orient. (1958, 150)4

This passage encapsulates the assimilationist credo of Camus, which is adominant leitmotif in his political thought. His implicit prescription for whathe calls the ‘political malaise’ of Algeria (the rise of anticolonial nationalism) is thereform of colonial rule: assimilation through political enfranchisement of the

3 I thank the anonymous reviewers for suggesting I make this clarification.4 Quotations from French sources, unless otherwise indicated, are my translations.

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‘natives’, and export of grain from the metropole to the famished colony (Camus1958, 63–64). Colonialism thus becomes just another phase in the forward marchof civilization as History, and thus one has to accept it, reform its excesses anddissolve the ‘temporary’ antagonism. In ‘Misere de la Kabylie’, Camus claims that,

if there is any excuse for the colonial conquest, it must be found in the degree towhich it helps the conquered peoples maintain their personality. And if we haveany obligation to this country, it is to allow one of the proudest and most humanepeople in history to stay true to itself and to its destiny. (1958, 89)

There are two questions that emerge from reading this passage: Firstly, why is itthat ‘they’ (the conquered people) need to be guided and helped to stay true tothemselves? This is a question that Camus never poses. Secondly, if ‘the originalsin of the colonial conquest could be atoned for by delivering the “conquered” totheir “profound grandeur”’, then the logical conclusion is that failing to do soentitles the conquered to reject and rise against the occupation (Le Sueur 2005,104). But, again, this is a conclusion that Camus, in his fervent rejection of theAlgerian anticolonial revolt and the violence that ensued, never entertains. Butwhat is deeply unsettling is not his opposition to Algeria’s independence, butrather his failure ‘to grasp the complexity of the colonial situation, thefundamental injustice of colonial rule, and his implication in it’ (Lazreg 2008,232, original emphasis).

The political malaise that Camus attributes to Algeria is mainly the malaise ofthe pied noir community, of which Camus was a member.5 To acceptresponsibility for the violence of colonial conquest and for their role as ‘usurpers’in the everyday oppression of the colonized would be tantamount to denying theirright to be in Algeria.6 One could use the Sartrean term of ‘bad faith’ to describethis attitude of denial and self-deception. Lewis Gordon notes that ‘[t]he everydaydimension of racism in a racist society breeds a comfortable facticity of bad faith’(1995, 39). Bad faith, in this context, implies someone’s effort ‘to hide from one’srole in oppression, or even from encouragement of oppression’ (Gordon 1995, 62).While Camus deemed it appropriate to enlist in the French Resistance andunambiguously rejected the Nazi occupation, he saw no contradiction in denyingthe colonized their claim to independence and their rejection of Frenchoccupation. What he never considers is the idea that colonial occupation is apeculiar type of domination, different from the Nazi occupation, since itde-humanizes the conquered people. This is the colonial difference, which Fanonpoignantly articulated:

We must remember in any case that a colonized people is not just a dominatedpeople. Under the German occupation the French remained human beings. Underthe French occupation the German remained human beings. In Algeria, there is notsimply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory.The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form alandscape, the natural backdrop to the French presence. (Fanon 2004, 182)

5 The term ‘pied noir’/‘pieds noirs’ refers to French or European settlers living incolonial Algeria (especially those born in colonial Algeria). Camus was born in 1913in French Algeria to poor pied noir parents. He describes the episode of his birth in detail inhis autobiographical novel Le premier homme (The first man) (see note 12 below).

6 On the role of the colonizer as ‘usurper’, see Memmi (1985, 72–76).

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As Lewis Gordon remarks, ‘it wasn’t the case in occupied France that everyFrenchman was “guilty” of being French’ (1995, 61). However, in the colony every‘native’ is a suspect, not because of a concrete action or flaw but simply because ofwho they are or, as Fanon put it, ‘the colonized subject is always presumed guilty’(2004, 16). This is the colonial difference that Camus fails to identify andacknowledge, which entails not only the de-humanization of colonized subjectsbut also their relegation to the bottom rungs of a global racial hierarchy. Thisfailure continues to operate in contemporary critical discourse as the inability ofFoucauldian critiques to grasp the specificity of colonial violence flattens alldomination and resistance in a predictable cycle of violence and counter-violence.

Throughout the Algerian War, Camus denounced the tactics of torture anddisproportionate violence of the French army, but he always placed them on thesame moral level of responsibility with the Algerian Front National de Liberation(FLN)’s acts of violence (which he condemned as terrorism). Throughout hiswritings, whether political or literary, Camus’ claims to solidarity with theAlgerian people designated the subject of ‘Algerian people’ as a vacuous entitythat encompassed both pieds noirs and the ‘natives’, two people ‘united’ underthe protective gaze and patronage of the motherland (1958, 174–175). Camus’vision of Algeria was that of a multiethnic, multicultural land, part of a French‘commonwealth’ and thus forever attached to France through ties of gratitude (seeIsaac 1992, 204; Le Sueur 2005, 98; Carroll 2007, 5; Tanase 2010, 186).7 Politically(and affectively I might add), Camus remained a Frenchman in his stance on theAlgerian War. In a talk given in Algiers in 1956, which appealed for a civilian trucein the Algerian War, Camus referred to Algeria as ‘our [French colonial settlers’and Arabs’] common land’, and constantly reminded the audience that the voicesof liberal French settlers (such as himself) can only prevail if ‘moderate Arabs’(sic!) speak out in favour of reconciliation (1958, 176, 179–180). Otherwise, suchliberal minds will have to turn back towards the only ‘living community thatjustifies their existence, which is of course France’, since they cannot accept thatthis struggle (of the Algerians) ‘should come at the expense of France’s definitiveruin and of its foreign ambitions’ (1958, 179–180).

Amar Ouzegane, an Algerian communist (later on in post-independenceAlgeria he served in important ministerial positions) whom Camus met when hewas a member of the Algerian Communist Party, rightly diagnosed the inability ofmany on the French left to grasp Algerian realities. He claimed that ‘at best they

7 In 1958 Camus publicly supported the Lauriol Plan, put forth by a law professor at theUniversity of Algiers, Marc Lauriol (see Camus’ last article, entitled ‘Algerie 1958’, in hisChroniques algeriennes). The plan envisaged Algeria as part of a federated politicalarrangement under the auspices of the French Commonwealth, resembling the Swisscantonal federate model (Horne 2006, 235). This arrangement entailed the division ofAlgeria into canton-like departments along ethnic lines and would subsequently bereflected in the composition of the French parliament, where—following proportionalrepresentation—the number of ‘native’ representatives would outnumber those of thepieds noirs (2006, 235; see also Carroll 2007, 213–214). This plan was unacceptable both topieds noirs, who would see their colonial privileges severely curtailed, and to pro-independence Algerians such as the FLN. Lending support to this plan, as Ronald Aronsonrightly observed, was Camus’ way of avoiding the issue of the colonial occupation ofAlgeria while serving the interests of his own community (cited in Carroll 2007,113,213–214).

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display a paternalistic attitude and their goodwill serves only to detract fromthe real objectives of the Algerian people’s struggle’ (cited in Tanase 2010, 66).This diagnosis fits perfectly Camus’ case, who, even at his most tender towardsAlgeria, ventriloquizes the paternalism and veiled racism of the ‘colonizer whorefuses’—to use Albert Memmi’s expression (1985, 43–66). Indeed, a survey ofCamus’ narrative landscape reveals not only the remarkable absence of Algerians,but that even when they are present they are nameless (their anonymity ispuzzling—they are always ‘the Arab’) and quasi-voiceless.8 The Algeriasummoned by Camus’ narrative scene is a pied noir territory devoid of ‘Arabs’or in which ‘Arabs’ are simply part of the ‘natural background to the Frenchpresence’ (Fanon 2004, 182).

His autobiographical novel, Le premier homme (The first man), on which Camuswas working when he died in a car accident in 1960, epitomizes this specific visionof Algeria but also throws further light on his positioning as a pied noir in a landconvulsed by anticolonial struggles. The novel follows the story of Jacques Cormier,a pied noir living in a poor district of Algiers, from his birth all the way to hisadulthood. The novel is divided into two parts: ‘Recherche du pere’ (Searching forthe father) and ‘Le fils, ou le premier homme’ (The son, or the first man). The lastscene of the first part (which constitutes also the core of the novel) retraces the storyof Algeria’s colonization as a settlement of empty lands in the second half of the19th century, a ‘Promised Land’ (‘la Terre promise’) for the French settlers (many ofthem unemployed in France at the time) (Camus 1994, 172). The reminiscing aboutthe founding of Algeria closes Jacques Cormier’s quest for information about hisfather, who had died in World War I, months after Jacques was born. The quest forhis roots thus takes him to the founding of the colony, which the first settlersexperienced as ‘an unknown land’, ‘a savage and bloody land’, ‘a miserable andhostile place’, presided over by a ‘ferocious sun’ (1994, 173–177). Algeria was thusfounded and built through the hard work and sacrifice of the settlers who toiled thelands given to them (whose lands were those?).9 This genealogical journey to

8 For an in-depth discussion of Camus’ treatment of ‘Arabs’ in his literary narratives,see Sajed (forthcoming)

9 I find this question to be the most important silence in Camus’ works, since it is asilence that directly concerns his identification as ‘the first man’. This novel opens with thearrival of Jacques Cormier’s parents at the small isolated farm in rural Algeria. Upon theirarrival, Jacques’ heavily pregnant mother goes into labour and gives birth to him. Camus’parents were both pieds noirs born in Algeria. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, had anAlsatian background (at least as claimed by his family), and was ‘the descendant of the firstgeneration of Frenchmen to settle in Algeria’ (Todd 1996 [1997], 3; see also Tanase 2010, 12–13). His mother, Catherine Helene Sintes, was of born in a very poor family of Spanishsettlers in Algeria. Camus’ father’s Alsatian background is extremely important to situatingCamus’ pied noir identity in colonial Algeria. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War(1870–1871), in which France was defeated, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine werehanded over to Prussia as part of the settlement. Many people who remained loyal toFrance fled the provinces and migrated to Kabylie in Algeria as political refugees. Therefugees’ settling of Kabylie had been made possible by France’s confiscation of ‘the richlands around Algiers, Bone (Annaba) [where Camus was born], and Oran’ (Weil 2005[2008], 214). The French government allocated ‘[o]ne hundred thousand hectares of Kabyleland’ to the newly migrated colons by expropriating the Kabyle peasants of their most fertilelands and thus driving them into abject poverty (Gibson 1999, 24–25). Ironically, many ofthese impoverished Kabyle peasants subsequently migrated to France as unskilled

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Algeria’s founding takes Cormier to the massacres of settlers by enraged ‘Arabs’.The storyteller deems these massacres to be the ‘Arabs’’ retaliation for their colonialconquest, who in their turn had massacred ‘the first Berbers, and who in their turn. . . now we arrive at the first criminal, you know, his name was Cain’ (1994, 177).This passage produces two erasures: one is the specificity of colonial violence,which is seen as simply another episode in the long history of human violence; theother erasure is the denial of any claims to authenticity by the ‘natives’ (indigenes).10

Simply because their arrival was prior to that of the French does not give their claimto an ‘ultimate origin’ any more weight than that of the pieds noirs (Camus 1958,175; see also Carroll 2007, 171). Thus colonial violence is not a historical and context-specific phenomenon of Europe, but is instead conveniently inscribed in anahistorical, quasi-mythical, ‘original, precolonial violence . . . the struggle of allinhabitants with a land that “refused to be occupied and took its revenge onwhatever it found”’ (Carroll 2007, 172).

Camus’ claim to an ‘ultimate origin’ (he claims he feels as though he were the‘first man’; 1994, 257) echoes Fanon’s vivid portrayal of the mythology of thecolons, who see themselves as ‘the very beginning’ and their lives as ‘an epic, anodyssey’ epitomized by the claim, ‘We made this land’ (2004, 14; see also Macey2000, 472). Camus’ ‘first man’ is thus unambiguously European, and his arrival onthe land signals the beginning, the moment of founding and the voice that authors(and authorizes) history. As Carroll remarks, ‘Camus’ “first man” is the antithesisof the “new man” of Fanon and Sartre’ (2007, 171). Fanon’s ‘new man’ constitutesthe rejection of the ‘first man’s’ founding myth and of his mythology of progressthrough colonization. Fanon’s ‘new man’ is thus a denunciation of the narrative ofprogress through colonization and an attempt to reclaim history not simply as abreak from colonial domination but also as the regaining of a sense of autonomyand as ‘a complete overhauling of consciousness’ (Colin Dayan quoted in Kohnand McBride 2011, 31). For Fanon, colonialism could not simply be reformed, asCamus suggested. For, in the words of Charles Geromini—a pied noir who joinedthe FLN—how does one humanize repression (Fanon 1965, 168)? Fanon has beenaccused of providing a Manichean and oversimplified picture of colonial rule(see, for example, Gates 1999). However, such criticisms miss the point thatcolonial Algeria was ‘planned and built on Manichean lines’ (Macey 2000, 472).Fanon’s expose highlights precisely the degree to which the de-humanization ofthe colonized was a consequence of the Manichean logic that underpinned Frenchcolonial rule in Algeria. When Albert Memmi remarks about the colonizer that ‘anative mother crying over the death of her son, a native woman mourning the lossof her husband, only vaguely remind him the pain of a mother or of a wife’

Footnote 9 continued

labourers. This colonial history that made possible Camus’ family history in Algeria issilenced in his autobiographical novel and in his political writings.

10 The French term indigene can be translated by ‘native’, although indigene is imbuedwith the legacy of French colonialism in North Africa. Indigene is the French term that wasused during colonialism by the French to designate all non-French people who weresubjects of the French Empire. The term had (and continues to have) a pejorativeconnotation, since it implied someone who was not ‘civilized’ and who could not makeclaim to the status of full citizen of the French Republic. For an insightful examination of theconcept of indigene within the French colonial and post-colonial contexts, see Blanchard andBancel (1998).

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(1985, 105–106), he implies that the colonial enterprise was possible only throughthe denial of the ‘natives’’ humanity. Fanon’s unambiguous support for Algeriananticolonial nationalism and for an independent Algeria indicates therefore thatthe process of decolonization was not only necessary but also inevitable asliberation from the ‘regime of truth’ propagated by the colonial enterprise (seeSaid 1994, 268). Fanon’s vision of liberation ultimately entails the ‘dissolution ofthe inferiority complex’ and of the alienation of the colonized (Azar 1999, 26–27).

According to Achille Mbembe, colonial sovereignty relied on a conception ofstate sovereignty that was the reverse of the rights-based liberal model becausethe deployment of the notion of rights in fact entailed the right of the conquerorsto establish and promulgate laws and afford themselves the prerogatives thatstemmed from them (2001, 25). The founding violence of the colonial conquestthus entitled the colonizer to translate this violence into ‘authorizing authority’whereby the violence of colonial conquest is not only institutionalized throughlaw but also sustained and constantly reiterated in the everyday as a strategy ofensuring its stability and ‘permanence’ (2001, 25). Colonial rule was a rule of force,not of consent or hegemony (in the Gramscian sense)11 and thus repressive meanswere central to the manufacturing of colonial legitimacy. Fanon succeeds inconveying the exceptionality of colonial rule, which can only exist (in settlercolonies such as Algeria) as a permanent state of exception (see Kohn and McBride2011, 77–97). Hence the permanent everyday reality of police stations and militarybarracks that evoke an urban geography of colonial violence designed and meantto contain the colonized and to constantly reinstitute colonial sovereignty. In ‘Onviolence’, Fanon makes a compelling distinction between the mechanics of poweras hegemony in capitalist societies, ‘those aesthetic forms of respect for the statusquo, [which] instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition’, and themechanics of power as brute force in the colonies where violence is brought ‘intothe homes and minds of the colonized subject’ (2004, 3–4; see also Parry 1999,226). Thus the counter-violence of the colonized against their oppressors, whichFanon theorized in The wretched of the earth, is the means through which thecolonized reappropriate their everyday reality and directly challenge the logic ofcolonial sovereignty.

Contrary to various interpretations that chastise Fanon for advocating violencefor violence’s sake (see, for example, Arendt 1970; Le Sueur 2005), Fanon’s visionof anticolonial violence needs to be understood and situated in the context ofcolonial Algeria. From Fanon’s perspective, such violence is the logicalconsequence of a system of de-humanization that has reduced the colonized tothe ‘state of an animal’ (2004, 7). More importantly, he discusses the issue of theanticolonial violence in tandem with the psychological effects of systematicoppression and depersonalization on the individual and collective psyche of thecolonized. This is very important and it certainly is not simply a digression in thenarrative. The intimate link between the internalized oppression experienced bythe colonized as a permanent state of guilt, tension and self-destruction, and theoutburst of anticolonial violence constitutes a key element in grasping Fanon’sexpose on violence. The violence of the colonized against their own, their

11 See, in this sense, Guha (1997), who speaks of India under the British Raj as a case of‘dominance without hegemony.’

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‘muscular dreams’ of escape and of ‘aggressive vitality’ and their refuge inpractices of mysticism and in beliefs of ‘magical, supernatural powers’ arepsychological tactics, according to Fanon, that allow the colonized to escapemomentarily their alienating everyday reality (2004, 15, 19). In his letter ofresignation from his position at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria,Fanon stated that ‘the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in astate of absolute depersonalization. What is the status of Algeria? A systematizedde-humanization’ (1967, 53). Anticolonial violence thus makes sense as an act thatprompts the colonized to confront head-on the reality of colonialism and freethemselves from its objectification: ‘After years of unreality, after wallowing in themost extraordinary phantasms, the colonized subject, machine gun at the ready,finally confronts the only force, which challenges his very being: colonialism’ (2004, 20,my emphasis). As Richard Keller notes, ‘[v]iolence shapes identity as it becomesthe subject’s principal register for framing the local social world and, in turn,individual and collective action’ (2007, 165).

In light of colonial Algeria’s violent realities and of the profound alienatingand de-humanizing condition of being a colonized subject, Camus’ prescription ofassimilation and of ‘mutual recognition between colonizer and colonized’ (Isaac1992, 198) seems disconnected from Algerian realities. For mutual recognition toemerge between two human beings locked in a violently unequal relation, theyneed to demolish the racial hierarchies that sustain this relation. To Fanon’sillustration of the inevitability of violence in colonial Algeria, Camus answeredwith liberal humanist desires of assimilation of the colonized into the bosom of themetropole. But Fanon’s ‘new man’ did not desire assimilation but cultural andpolitical autonomy. Fanon’s ‘new man’ aimed for liberation from the anomie thatcharacterized the French mission civilisatrice: the promise of equality rested upon alogic of inferiority, objectification and de-humanization. Jacques Berque nicelyexpresses this idea when he states that ‘[t]he Arab revolt . . . was not merely arevolt against the individual who oppressed but also against the “destiny” that hadcreated oppression’ (quoted in Le Sueur 2005, 247, my emphasis). This is a destinywhose inherent racist logic Camus’ ‘first man’ both upholds and convenientlyoccludes when he engages in a moral equalization of the colonizer’s andcolonized’s violence. In his eyes, the violence of colonial rule (with its attachedfanatic belief in its mission) is no different from the violence of anticolonialresistance. They are both equally fanatic and morally culpable. Alice Cherki, in thepreface to the 2002 French edition of Les damnes de la terre, questions this moralequalization of the Algerian War and indicates that it obscures the deeplyunequal relationship that bound the two sides, reinforced by steep hierarchies andbrutal exploitation (2002, 14). It is a logic that continues to frame both the memoryof the Algerian War and contemporary North–South violence (see Orford 2003;Ayoob 2004).

There is thus a clear disconnect between Camus’ proclaimed liberal humanismand the kind of ethical positioning that surfaces from his narratives. Hishumanism gestures towards a (supposedly neutral) universal ethics, according towhich all human beings are equally worthy and all human life is sacred. Hence theimpossibility of justifying violence in the name of any cause. According to thislogic, the polarity imperialist/anti-imperialist and colonial/anticolonial ‘wassimply another invidious binary opposition destined to produce suffering,violence, and authoritarianism’ (Isaac 1992, 179). To Camus, Third Worldism as an

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‘ideology [is] . . . another version of that typically modern hubris which claims tohave discerned the true direction of history’ (Isaac 1992, 178–179). In L’Homme

revolte, Camus argues that the paradox of all historical revolt is that it sacrificesfreedom in the name of justice, since the transition from revolt to revolution entailsa totalitarian dimension that must demand the ‘suspension of freedom’ toaccomplish justice (1951, 139). Roger Quillot claims that for Camus this is acontradiction that cannot be resolved, which is why Camus chooses freedombecause, even when justice fails, freedom creates the space to protest againstinjustice and thus allows free expression (1965, 1619). But this is an impossiblechoice for Algerians. How would such a choice between freedom and justicetranslate in colonial Algeria? To what sort of freedom could the colonized havelaid claim in a system that produced them as subjects not as citizens? Besides evenif citizenship had been granted to the Muslim Algerians, would such an act makethem free? And what if freedom for the Algerians meant freedom from colonialoccupation? How should such freedom be attained? It is here, with the colonialdifference of Algeria, that the limits of Camus’ liberal humanism emerge. It seemsthat his vision of freedom makes sense only in so far as it is circumscribed within aWestern ontology: freedom for Algerians can easily (and only) be attained as longas France grants them citizenship and democratic reforms. This is a vision offreedom that stands in profound dissonance with Fanon’s radical anticolonialhumanism.

Fanon’s radical humanism is embedded in the historical anticolonial struggleof Algerians. But this situatedness does not take away from its aspiration towardsa universal horizon of ethics. As Michael Azar remarks, Fanon chose to be part of‘this historical formation’; he assumed it as his identity and ‘designated it as afoundation for a new humanism’ (1999, 23). Fanon’s radical humanism exposesthe mystification of Western universal humanism that masks the racializedhierarchization of the modern world. His work makes visible the colonial differenceat work in ‘the theoretical elaborations produced by the culture of Western latecapitalism’ experienced by the colonized as cultural oppression and ‘colonialenslavement’ (see Said 1994, 268). To paraphrase Jacques Berque, Fanon’s vision ofliberation is about liberation not simply from oppressors, but, more importantly,from the oppressive logic of colonialism—from its objectifying and de-humanizing frame. His radical humanism is radical because it emerges from thestandpoint of the de-humanized, the ‘natives’ (see also Shilliam 2009; Muppidi2009). Therefore Fanon’s humanism, while it may bear vague traces of theEnlightenment, aims to accomplish what Camus’ liberal humanism cannot: todislocate the idea of ‘human’ from the Eurocentric shackles that contain it (or whatMignolo (2000) calls ‘post-occidental reason’) (see also Shilliam 2009, 129–134).What separates Fanon’s from Camus’ humanism is colonial difference, or asHimadeep Muppidi noted, ‘the postcolonial difference’ (2009, 156). The idea andexperience of colonial difference is thus inextricable from an awareness of one’sposition within a global racial hierarchy. It relies thus not simply on an awarenessof a racialized and discrepant experience of history, but also politicizes suchconsciousness into specific forms of transnational mobilization (as I examinebelow). As Fanon remarked, the ‘colonized, underdeveloped man is a politicalcreature in the most global sense of the term’ (2004, 40).

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Colonial difference, contemporary migrant activism in France and thedecolonial promise

Camus’ scepticism towards Third Worldism as just another instantiation of themodern hubris, which dissolves the specificity of colonial and Third Worlddifference, was made possible by his refusal to believe in ‘definitive revolutions’,since ‘[a]ll human effort in history is relative’ (quoted in Isaac 1992, 180). WhereasCamus situates anticolonial revolt within the logic of modernity, Fanon quite self-consciously eschews the paradigm set out by Western modernity and aims toprovide an alternative. Fanon’s conceptualization of anticolonial liberation as ‘acritique of the modern notion of Totality’ aims towards ‘decoloniality’, whichMignolo pace Quijano understood as a practice of ‘delinking’ (Mignolo 2007, 451–452). Inspired by Anibal Quijano’s work on ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’,Mignolo understands the practice of ‘delinking’ as, among other things,denouncing the ‘pretended universality’ of the West and of its structuringcategories (nation-state, nationalism, citizenship) and processes (capitalism,colonialism) (2007, 453). Mignolo defines this practice as ‘epistemic geopolitics’,involving a decolonization of the category of ‘universal’ and allowing otherarticulations of the ‘universal’ to become visible (2007, 485). Secondly, delinkingentails an ‘epistemic body politics’, which probes into the embodied difference,affective, corporeal and psychic, of colonial human realities (2007, 485, 487).According to Mignolo, the radical dimension of Fanon’s theory of liberation is thathe engages in both practices of delinking. In The wretched of the earth, he movesbetween both levels of delinking: he investigates the distortion of the colonized’shistory, minds, bodies and souls, but he also moves to address the geopoliticalimplications of anticolonial liberation: ‘if we want humanity to take one stepforward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe hasplaced it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers’ (Fanon 2004, 239, myemphasis). In advocating for a kind of ‘newness’ both of thinking and of practice,Fanon was also aware of the caveats and pitfalls that might and indeed wouldattend both the imagination and instantiation of ‘newness’. But he was willing totake risks and believed that the promise that lay ahead was worth taking thoserisks.

Benita Parry (1999) takes issue with those voices that dismissed Fanon’scontinuing relevance to theorizing the colonial as ‘essentialist’ renditions ofdomination and resistance. She warns that these voices, adhering to apostmodern/Foucauldian suspicion of unified visions of resistance, by focusingexclusively on the multiple and fragmented subjectivities of both ‘colonizers’ and‘colonized’ foreclose ‘the possibility of theorizing resistance’ and of ‘accord[ing]center stage’ to the voice and perspective of the colonized (1999, 216). Instead,postcolonial critics should take seriously the tactical significance of Fanon’s claimsto the necessity for a national culture and thus for more coherent and unifiedcommunal identities (1999, 220). To talk about such collective identities is not anexercise in precolonial nostalgia whereby a pure and undimmed glory can berestored, it is rather a conscious recapturing of the colonized’s culturalautonomy—an autonomy denied by the colonial project (see also Shohat 1992).What emerges here is a tension identified at the beginning of this article betweenthe promise of transcending (post)colonial violence and the Foucauldian vision ofknowledge as enmeshed in power relations and thus inherently compromised.

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This tension structures the debate between recent efforts to conceptualize thenotion of decoloniality, understood by Mignolo (2007) as decolonization ofknowledge and of being, and postmodern tendencies to perceive such efforts asutopian and hence uncritical of the pitfalls attending them. As suggested in theprevious section, a contrapuntal reading of discrepant colonial experiencesillustrates that the Foucauldian critique is not sustainable in a context in whichcolonial and metropolitan histories are co-constituted. The critical distanceFoucauldian/postmodern approaches assume vis-a-vis colonial history andpostcolonial liberation discourses entails a neutral stance that masks a refusal toaccount for their own implication in (post)colonial violence (see Sajed 2012a). Sucha stance also implies that while the postmodern self aims to decentre itself andhence thrives on contingency (because wary of totalizing identity claims), it is yetunable to effect its conscious decentring from continuing racial hierarchies thatfeed its privileged stance. Thus Camus could afford himself the luxury ofcondemning violence on both sides of the Algerian War and clamouring forreconciliation, since to him colonial rule in Algeria was simply another episode ina never-ending process of human violence. This seemingly ‘neutral’ stancemasked in fact his refusal to engage honestly with the specificity of colonial rule(made possible, as noticed by Fanon, by a systematic de-humanization of the‘natives’), and with his deep implication in this system (see also Lazreg 2008, 232–233). The dynamics of this tension can be seen in the politics of contemporarymigrant activism in France, and more specifically in claims advanced by activistgroups or individuals which self-consciously adopt a decolonial platform for theirpolitics. What is at stake, then, in perceiving any emancipatory movement asinevitably contaminated by violence and hence unable to shake off the will todominate, especially in the context of postcolonial migrants’ mobilizations inFrance?

One of the newest migrant activist groups in France, Mouvement desIndigenes de la Republique (MIR—Movement of the Natives of the FrenchRepublic), appropriates the colonial term indigene (native) for its political identity.The MIR was established in 2005 in a tumultuous geopolitical context: theonslaught of the ‘war on terror’ (which involved the securitization of Muslimcommunities in Western societies); the headscarf debate (which had ended upwith the adoption in 2004 of legislation that prohibited the wearing of obviousreligious symbols in French schools); not to mention the very controversial lawadopted in February 2005 that aimed to present in a positive light, in Frenchhistory textbooks, the accomplishments of French colonialism in its formercolonies. The MIR announced its existence through a public statement launched inJanuary 2005, entitled ‘We are the natives of the Republic’ (Nous sommes lesindigenes de la Republique). The statement outlines the continuing state ofdiscrimination of North African migrants and their descendants within the FrenchRepublic and unambiguously declares that France was and continues to be acolonial state. It then launches a call for the decolonization of the Republic andcommits the MIR to transnational links of solidarity with other marginalizedgroups both within and outside France.

The group is constituted of intellectuals who quite consciously draw onpostcolonial literature and employ a political language that would resonateperfectly with postcolonial intellectuals in the anglophone academy. They adoptan oppositional political identity that aims to draw attention to the racialized

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structure of French society (and to its connection with existing global racialhierarchies), and to the necessity of bringing forward the repressed colonialmemory of domination and oppression. Thus they describe their political positionas one of postcolonial anticolonialism (see Robine 2006; Kipfer 2011). To theinjunction of integration/assimilation, they respond with a call to liberation. Morespecifically, the MIR points to the dismal social and political marginalization of thebanlieues whereby some French citizens are consigned to the ‘native’ status thatused to govern the ‘natives’ in the colonies as mere subjects of imperial France andhence non-citizens. They understand the postcolonial situation of North Africanmigrants in France not simply as one of linear continuity with colonialism butrather one of recomposition, whereby ‘new forms of ethnic discrimination’ (SadriKhiari quoted in Kipfer 2011, 1159) are invented to keep liberal sensibilities intactwhile reinforcing the colour line between the ‘real’ French and the rest. Thepostcolonial situation as colonial recomposition stems from the territorial andspatial organization of racialized bodies that confine postcolonial subjects to theedges of the French social and political space (Kipfer 2011, 1156–1157). Accordingto MIR activists, the space of the banlieue should be better conceived as aneocolonial space whereby the French Republic segregates its undesirables.12

The discourse of MIR reflects the ongoing debates in French intellectual andmedia circles (to which MIR activists have contributed substantially) on the issueof the ‘colonial continuum’, which refers to the continuity between colonialismand contemporary immigration policies. There are many intellectual voices inFrance who perceive the idea of ‘colonial continuum’ as no more than a media-circulated buzzword with little reflection in the reality of immigration in Frenchsociety. Even highly respected intellectuals such as Gerard Noiriel, an eminentcritic of French policies towards migrants, consider that the link betweencolonialism and immigration is not ‘scientifically [sic!] credible’ (2006, 218). Quiteapart from the puzzling assumption that one needs to prove the link‘scientifically’, the reality of the continuity between colonization and postcolonialimmigration is primarily a ‘corporeal’ one, as Alec Hargreaves rightly notes (2007,28). This corporeal dimension refers to the highly visible presence of migrantsfrom France’s former colonies in the heart of the metropole and to their systematicsegregation and marginalization over the decades. Randolph Persaud suggeststhat colonial racism is not simply ‘a (superstructural) consequence of economicimperialism’ but rather its ‘organizing principle’ (1997, 175). Thus the postcolonial

12 This argument is not novel, having been championed by other intellectual groups,such as ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’AfriqueContemporaine—Association for the Historical Investigation of Contemporary Africa).This is a group of French researchers from various disciplines in the humanities and socialsciences who examine the discursive mechanisms behind the representations of thecolonized and of the colonies, and their connection to contemporary representations ofpostcolonial migrations in France (see ,www.achac.com . ). Pascal Blanchard andNicolas Bancel are perhaps the best-known intellectuals associated with this group. One ofthe differences between ACHAC and the MIR is that the former is largely constituted ofwhite French academics whose work is primarily academic whereas the latter is largely iscomposed of young people of migrant background (some of whom are academics) andwhose primary operational arena is an activist–mediatic one. The latter aspectdistinguishes the MIR’s self-avowed political engagement and aspiration from theACHAC’s academic orientation.

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migration of people from the Third World to the West is presented in geopoliticalterms as a threat to the identity and the ‘Western way(s) of life’, and thus a matterof national security (Persaud 1997, 180). As Persaud notes, the category of race(and racial hierarchies) is ‘politically and culturally activated in struggles over thenature of world order’ (1997, 183).

Thus, as Jeremy Robine remarks, the term ‘colonial continuum’ implies ageopolitical representation—an analytical device that makes apparent theconjunction between colonial policies, France’s foreign policy (and Westernstates’ foreign policies in general) towards former colonies, the underdevelop-ment of Third World societies, the demonization of Islam in Western societies, andthe marginalization of non-Western migrants in Western societies (Robine 2006,127). Robine points out that the merit of an activist movement like MIR is toprovide a cogent analysis of the roots of migrants’ discrimination in colonialpolicies, something antiracist organizations in France had completely overlookedin their concern to erase ‘artificial differences’ and thus promote acceptance (2006,135).13 But the MIR’s voices need also to be contextualized within a powerstruggle among various activist organizations in France which claim to speak onbehalf of the postcolonial ‘natives’ and thus to be the legitimate (authentic)intermediary between power and the powerless (see Robine 2006; Hajjat 2008). Onthe one hand, there are antiracist organizations such as SOS Racisme, establishedin 1984 in the aftermath of the Marche pour l’Egalite—an antiracist march thattook place in 1983 and 1984 under the leadership of beurs activists.14 Suchorganizations have a profound secular orientation advocating for the eliminationof racial discrimination through better integration of (North) African migrants.They embraced the official multicultural discourse whereby difference can beaccommodated within the space of the French nation and thus celebrated thearrival of postcolonial hybridized identities (see, for example, Sebbar 1988).

On the other hand, there are migrant activist groups who keep a low publicprofile and prefer to engage in an everyday activism through grounded andgrassroots mobilizations in the banlieues, such as Mouvement de l’Immigration etdes Banlieues (MIB) established in 1995. The movement has worked closely withfamilies of imprisoned North African migrants to provide them with legalrepresentation and resources to which they had no access. More specifically, theyengaged in an assiduous mobilization against the ‘double peine’ legislation,which stipulated that an immigrant imprisoned for a criminal activity would beimmediately deported on their release. Such an activism is deeply embedded incontingency, and rooted in the space of the neighbourhood, and steers clear frompolitical affiliations (antiracist organizations have generally been affiliated in

13 For more on the politics of activism among North African migrants in France, seeBouamama (2008), Hajjat (2008), Kawtari (2008) and Sajed (2012b).

14 Beur is a term whose etymology is quite contested. Initially, it was used in France todesignate, in a pejorative way, Arabs. In the 1980s the term was adopted subversivelyby young Arabs as a way to emphasize their different status in French society, but also todemand recognition. Other opinions suggest that this term was used by Arabs to referto themselves, originated in the projects (banlieues) and represents the inversion of the twosyllables composing the word ‘Arab’ in French, ‘a-rabe’. The word beur has thus come tosignify a French citizen of North African origin. However, as I show elsewhere (see Sajed2010; 2012b), this word discriminates also according to socio-economic status, usuallyreferring to French people of North African origin living in or coming from the banlieues.

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France with leftist parties) and from attempts to theorize their struggles within a(post)colonial framework. Tarik Kawtari, one of the founders of the MIB, criticizesthe MIR both for their disconnect from the space of the banlieues and thus from anexperience of grounded activism, and for their discourse of self-victimizationpublicized through the French media (2008, 214). Kawtari opts for a discourse ofresponsibility, refusing both victim and hero status. His concern (and approach) isfor the ‘here and now’: improving the situation of migrants by mobilizing aroundand solving specific practical issues. From this perspective, the MIR are seen asnothing but an exclusively intra muros Parisian phenomenon who attempt tocompensate for their deficit of political legitimacy (and authenticity) by engagingin provocative discursive manoeuvres aimed at attracting maximum mediaattention (Hajjat 2008, 258).

While engaging in depth the fractures among antiracist and pro-migrantorganizations in France is beyond the scope of this article, the purpose of thisdiscussion is to illustrate the politics of visibility among migrant organizations, andtheir claims to work for the political emancipation (and liberation) of the postcolonialsubject. Moreover, the paper also indicates the complex terrain migrant activistgroups have to negotiate when making claims for or on behalf of the ‘subaltern’migrant. A Foucauldian perspective could easily make the argument here that suchinstances exemplify the inevitable cooptation of resistant efforts by hegemonicdiscourses of Frenchness, nationhood and belonging, but I argue that somethingmore complex is going on. Organizations such as SOS Racisme, Ni Putes Ni Soumises(Neither Whores Nor Submissive) and MIR have been at the centre of mediacampaigns and debates about the link between racism, gender and immigration inFrance. What is striking about the MIR’s form of mobilization is the conjunctionbetween various elements, all novel in their own right: the very defiant tone adoptedin their public communiques, their media interviews and their declarations at theirpublic events unambiguously situating French society as a neocolonial space; theirpublic adoption of indigene as their political identity, a term that had long been seen asderogatory, politically incorrect and highly controversial; their public marking ofevents associated with colonial memory, such as the anniversary of the Dien Bien Phubattle, the ill-fated protest of 17 October 1961, the Haitian Revolution, the anniversaryof the Nakba (many MIR activists have close ties with pro-Palestinian groups inFrance), various moments of the Algerian anticolonial struggle, and others; the self-avowed translocal and transnational scope of their mobilization and activism thatseeks to forge solidarity links with other decolonial struggles whether within Franceor abroad;15 their self-conscious deployment of postcolonial terminology andthemes; and their assiduous efforts to theorize their struggles and the situation of theimmigres from a postcolonial standpoint.16 It is the combination of all these elements

15 Although Stefan Kipfer uses the term ‘counter-colonial’ to describe the politicalpositioning of the MIR, I think the term ‘decolonial’ has been used far more widely byHouria Bouteldja and Sadri Khiari, both considered to be key figures and theoreticians ofthe MIR (see Robine 2006; Kipfer 2011).

16 I make a distinction here between the MIR’s deployment of a decolonial politics andtheir reading of anticolonial theorists, on the one hand, and the type of postcolonialtheorizing influenced by post-structuralism and associated with well-known postcolonialfigures such Spivak or Bhabha. However, I also refer to the MIR’s use of postcolonial themesand terminology to entail the larger field of postcolonial studies, which encompassestheorists of various ideological persuasions.

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that makes the MIR a unique phenomenon for the French media and public opinion.Their political vocabulary draws on anticolonial authors such as Frantz Fanon, AimeCesaire, Albert Memmi, Amilcar Cabral, Edward Said and iconic militant figuressuch as Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, James Baldwin and others, and notso much on ‘classic’ postcolonial intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha or Spivak.

Their political position is thus, as already mentioned, that of a postcolonialanticolonialism, which is staunchly oppositional in orientation. Theirs is a revivedThird Worldist political engagement combined with a cosmopolitanism of theGlobal South. The former is visible in their oppositional politics and in theirpublic(ized) marking of colonial events, which produces a ‘past as present’postcolonial discourse. The latter is evident in their articulation of solidarity withcontemporary translocal and transnational movements whether in Western ornon-Western societies with whom they share a similar political vision and acommitment to the decolonial.

The relentless presence of the MIR in the media spotlight has not only a tacticalrole, namely to shock and sensitize public opinion with respect to the continuingcolonial framework of French society; it should also be read in light of otherunintended effects: while they publicly pour scorn on official multiculturalism andon the rhetoric of integration, their subversion operates within the larger globalcontext of ‘becoming visible’, expressed by Rey Chow in terms of the attempt ‘toanchor one’s identity . . . in to-be-looked-at-ness’, and thus to fetishize a particularidentity (2007, 12–13). Thus their public postures as indigenes of the FrenchRepublic, as victims of continuing colonial domination and hence as champions ofpostcolonial anticolonialism, have both productive and counter-productive effects.On the one hand, they do raise questions and prompt debates about the linksbetween colonialism and immigration in France. The MIR’s uncompromisingdiscourse also articulates the discrepancy between the purported ideal of equalityand belonging promised by French nationhood, and the de facto impossibility ofsuch an ideal that relies for its success on the systematic oppression and erasure ofdifference. Moreover, they are arguably the most vocal migrant movement inFrance not only to articulate clearly this anomie (and thus reject the assimilationistcredo), but also to situate it unambiguously within a structural historicalcontinuum of colonial violence. On the other hand, their desire for high-profilevisibility and their intellectualized critiques coupled with their absence from thegrassroots of the banlieue (while proclaiming their plans to establish the Party of theNatives of the Republic, PIR, Parti des Indigenes de la Republique, as themouthpiece of the quartiers populaires, that is, the banlieues) have the effect offetishizing the indigene identity as little more than postcolonial chic. A fewimportant questions emerge here: Does the MIR’s visibility also spell thecontinuing invisibility of the indigenes trapped in the banlieues? Is the MIR’s mediastrategy a confirmation of the Foucauldian warning against ‘subjugated knowl-edges’ being incorporated into the mainstream of knowledge as soon as they are‘brought into light’, and thereby running the risk of ‘recodification’ and‘recolonization’ (Foucault 1980, 86)? Or is it perhaps the case that such a line ofthinking is self-defeating in its utopian expectation that authentic resistance remainuntouched and unsullied by power? This question conjures Camus’ agonizing onthe impossibility of modern revolt because every revolution and platform that aimsto bring about justice inexorably curtails the idea of freedom and is thus doomed tofail. As suggested earlier, he frames the question of revolt as a choice between justice

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and freedom, out of which he chooses the latter. This unspoken desire for theauthenticity of resistance is, in a sense, present in contemporary Foucauldiancritiques of postcolonial revolt, which implicitly posit a desired freedom (frombeing tainted by violence and the possibility of domination) over an ideal of justice,which would inevitably entail concrete political choices and the potential ofviolence (symbolic and/or material). Moreover, as with the indigenes in colonialAlgeria, what does the choice between freedom and justice mean for thepostcolonial migrant living in the banlieues, segregated on the periphery of Frenchsociety, deprived of de facto citizenship and belonging?

In the case of the MIR, the problem of the authenticity of resistance lies at thecore of the split between theory and praxis: the MIR is seen as engaged in atheorization of the ‘rupture from the French nation’ (la rupture avec la nation)unaccompanied by praxis, whereas the indigenes rioting in the banlieues engage inthe pure praxis of rupture without any attending theorization. Jeremy Robinesuggests that only the rioting indigenes can enact the rupture with the Frenchnation—periodically, locally and only momentarily (2006, 148). What the MIR isdoing, according to Robine, is only a discursive rupture that is ultimatelyineffective in bringing about political change. While Robine’s critique is on target,there are other aspects to consider as well.

In his analysis of contemporary forms of Third World protest, Rahul Raopoints to the dilemmas of resistance where violence is perpetrated by variousactors, some of whom can be simultaneously both victim and resister (2010, 2–4).The question at the heart of his excellent book is the following: ‘what sort ofprotest sensibility would be appropriate to a world in which there is no singularlocus of threat?’ (2010, 4). This question is incredibly apt in the case of a movementlike the MIR, who engage in public statements declaring their unquestionedallegiance to groups such as Hamas (and other armed militant groups) simplybecause they are seen as resisters against the colonialism of Western and Israelistates (see MIR 2009). Overlooking Hamas’s own abuses of civilians and theirconservative approach to women’s rights in the name of a ‘total anticolonialism’raises questions both about the political maturity of the MIR and about the limitsof an anticolonial solidarity that does not discriminate among various types of‘resistance’. Rahul Rao is critical both of the cosmopolitan orientation of ThirdWorld activism (with an unqualified embrace of the international) and of thecommunitarian orientation (with its whole-hearted adherence to nationalism)advocating for a ‘protest sensibility’ that is critical of both. In a sense the MIR istrying to accomplish just this, to throw their weight behind both transnational andlocal movements and struggles. What they lack is the sense of critical distance andironic tension between the two orientations which allowed someone like EdwardSaid to be both a fervent advocate for the Palestinian bid for statehood and a fiercecritic of nationalism. It is this critical tension that, in my estimation, links the gapbetween theory and praxis. Adopting a ‘protest sensibility’ that recognizestensions, inconsistencies and the need for critical judgment of the very actors oneseeks to emancipate and with whom one is solidary would constitute the MIR as amore authentic form of postcolonial anticolonialism. Their adherence to atotal(izing) anticolonialism glosses over the multiple fractures along lines of class,gender and race inhabited by the subalterns whose representatives they deemthemselves to be. As mentioned earlier, it is tempting to read this instance ofpostcolonial activism as nothing more than another example of the modern hubris

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of revolt (as Camus would have it) that claims to eradicate violence and restorejustice but ultimately cannot but be trapped in its own violence and totalizingclaims. However, such a sceptical stance can be sustained only if one accepts thatresistance and mobilization can only be authentic if they operate in anenvironment uncontaminated by the workings of power. Fanon, however, wasfully aware of the dangers attending emancipatory movements, and in the Thewretched of the earth he devotes a chapter to the pitfalls of national liberationprojects. His cautionary analysis of postcolonial woes is fraught with theambivalence of such projects, and his vision of national consciousness should notbe mistaken for a rigid nationalist agenda. From his perspective, it is not ‘culture’,understood as a predetermined set of traditions and norms, but the process ofstruggle and resistance against colonial occupation that creates a ‘nation’ (2004,159). His vision of nationhood is thus not that of an organic ethnic community,bound by parochial attachments, but rather that of a ‘dual emergence’ wherebynational consciousness, ‘which is not nationalism’, makes sense only in intimateconnection with international consciousness (2004, 179–180, my emphasis). TheMIR have adopted precisely this dual strategy of grounding their mobilizationlocally within the French context of postcolonial migrations but also forgingsolidarity links translocally with other similarly oriented movements. This dualorientation points to the complexities of the terrain they engage but also to some ofthe limits of Fanon’s decolonial vision.

As a decolonial movement, the MIR has adopted quite self-consciouslyFanon’s radical anticolonial humanism, which aspires towards a history ofhumanity whichhat takes heed of both ‘the prodigious theses maintained byEurope’ and the atrocities, oppression and violence undertaken in the name of itsexceptionalism (Fanon 2004, 238). The ethical horizon of their decolonial politics isa Fanonian belief in the urgency of demystifying History. However, there are cleartensions between the activists’ vision of the decolonial and Fanon’s own vision.Fanon was cautious of colonized intellectuals’ practice of adopting dual identities(suggesting that a more politically enabling position would be to affirm one—namely the colonized one). Fanon’s caution should not be read as a denial ofhybridity or the embrace of monolithic oppositional identities. Rather it must beseen as an injunction for colonized intellectuals to locate (not vacate) their politics(in the context of the Algerian War). Unlike Camus and other intellectuals duringthe Algerian War who claimed to inhabit two positions (as an Algerian and aFrenchman), Fanon called for a clear political positioning. The MIR, on the otherhand, is quasi-celebratory in the adoption of their dual political positions (Frenchand Algerian, French and African, French and Moroccan, etc). But in the context ofpostcolonial migrations within the former colonial metropole they cannot butaffirm both their right to Frenchness and their right to difference. For thepostcolonial migrant living in the heart of the metropole locating their politicswithin one identity alone would disable their claim to French citizenship andinadvertently re-enforce the purported homogeneity of the French nation. This is adilemma that the MIR has tried to alleviate by reaching both transnationally toother decolonial movements but also internally within France to include variousracialized groups. However, the dilemma continues to persist in the followingguise: how to forge a political identity based on an idea of domination that isconceptualized primarily in specific ethnic terms pertaining to the North African

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experience (and, even more so when the image of the native [indigene ] is primarilyAlgerian)?

A contrapuntal examination of discrepant colonial experiences, which makesvisible the co-constitution of ‘metropolitan’ and ‘other’ histories but also theiralways unequal relationship steeped in a global colour line, illustrates thenecessity to understand ‘global relations’ in their historical and structuralcomplexity. Understanding the roots of current racial hierarchies is not simply asociological endeavour, but should be seen as central both to the preoccupations ofIR as a discipline and to global politics as practice, since the discipline in itscurrent form is a product of global colonial relations (see Inayatullah and Blaney2004; Beier 2005). A contrapuntal reading also indicates the limits of Westerncritical narratives, and more specifically those which adopt a Foucauldianscepticism towards projects of liberation/emancipation coming from the ThirdWorld/Global South. As much as I applaud the need for a critical posture, I alsofind such a stance to be politically disabling and blind to its own complicity in theperpetuation of ‘white privilege’ and the global colour line. A far more productiveapproach would be to acknowledge such projects on their own terms, critiquetheir inconsistencies when necessary but also make visible the political spacesthey do create and the contestations that become possible.

Notes on contributor

Alina Sajed is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University ofHong Kong. She researches on the politics of the Global South, postcolonialapproaches to IR, and political Islam. Her work has been published in the Reviewof International Studies, Citizenship Studies, and Cambridge Review of InternationalAffairs. She is the co-author, with William D Coleman, of Fifty Key Thinkers onGlobalization, published by Routledge. Her book, Postcolonial Encounters inInternational Relations: the Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb, is forthcomingwith Routledge.

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