To Fanon, With Love: Women Writers of the African Diaspora Interrupting Violence, Masculinity, and Nation-Formation Open Access

Abstract

To Fanon, With Love: Women Writers of the African Diaspora Interrupting Violence, Masculinity, and Nation-Formation

By Yolande M. S. Tomlinson

As the epistolary inscription of its title suggests, this project undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. To this end, I deploy Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory-- as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations. This task unfolds in three parts. In Part I, I begin by undertaking a close reading of Fanon's two seminal texts, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, to argue that Fanon's ‘masculinist' politics and drive toward mastery and nation-formation are embedded in his articulation of homelessness and the black male body as a closed-system and an agent of violence. Conceptualized through a corporeal lens, this approach contests some feminist scholars' claims that Fanon's revolutionary project offers liberatory possibilities for women and other vulnerable populations. In Part II, I place the above novels in dialogue with three key issues I find central to Fanon's project of liberation: the master/slave relationship; his revolutionary subjectivity; and, the relationship between violence and nationhood. Throughout this analysis, when the body and healing are analytically privileged above the nation, what emerges is a movement from the language of fragmented bodies (masculinist/nationalist violence) to fragmented geographical borders (diaspora) and a reconstitution of traditional masculinity, community, and belonging. In the final part, the afterword, I explicate the title as an act of "writing back to" Fanon and his feminist interpreters and outline -via Toni Morrison's Love-a new model on which to recuperate Fanon and masculinity for a contemporary feminist anti-violence politics of liberation. Ultimately, this project argues that we must be willing to ‘interrupt' problematic formulations of gender--men as agents of violence, women as victims--and begin to articulate new paradigms of love, gender, and community.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Interrupting Fanon and His Feminist Interpreters …………………..……………….……...1

Part I

Chapter 1

Rebirth of a Nation: Masculine Violence as National (Be)Longing ………….…...….26

Part II

Chapter 2

'Afraid Only of What I'll Become': Rethinking Fanonian Subjectivity

through the Portrayal of Black Sexual Politics in Gayl Jones's Corregidora …….…75


Chapter 3

'My Story is Not After All About Death':

Dangarembga's Corrective to Fanon's Revolutionary Project ………………....….…123


Chapter 4

Cartographies of Healing: Diaspora, Sexual Violence, and Healing

in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory ………………………………......…....….162

Afterword
To Fanon, With Love: Paradigm Shifts…………….………………………...................206

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………....................……217

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Caribbean Women's Studies American Studies
Keyword	literature Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions The Wretched of the Earth Masculinity African diaspora feminist theory Frantz Fanon Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory Black Skin, White Masks Women's studies Black women writers Gayl Jones's Corregidora American studies transnationalism Toni Morrison's Love sexual violence Gender studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Jackson, Regine, Emory University
Committee Members	Awkward, Michael, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Scully, Pamela F, Emory University

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