I. Introduction

In this paper, I present Fanon’s analysis of decolonization in order to present an explicit conception of resistance based upon Fanon’s concept of decolonization, which is aligned with the lived experience of the colonized: their racial, sociopolitical, and economic condition, as well as their existential condition. I contrast Fanon’s analysis with Sartre’s critique of colonialism as it appears in The Critique. Through The Critique, I examine what I call Sartre’s material conception of resistance, which uses the racial facts of colonized existence as a means to describe the political and economic inequality of the colonized, and as a means of justifying resistance against colonialism. Through Fanon’s writings, I examine what I call a phenomelogical conception of resistance that uses the racism experienced by the colonized to describe how the colonized live, feel and think about their own colonial existences and to conceive of the initiative process of decolonization. I attempt to place in relation the self and society within Fanon’s conception of resistance, and I examine the relation between the condition of colonized women and Fanon’s analysis on resistance in Algeria. Moreover, I examine the role of women in Sartre’s analysis on resistance in order to show what Sartre’s analysis could contribute to the issue of the gender dynamics in colonial France. Through the distinction that I make between Sartre’s and Fanon’s conception of resistance, I argue a more nuanced approach to the theories of Sartre (such as it has been shown by Iris Young) and Fanon (such as it has been shown by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting) can show us how their work may at times include the situation of women. Although I am more critical of their theories, the goal of this paper is to extend the theories of Sartre and Fanon so that they can become more inclusive to the situation of women — whether colonized or colonizers. What I add to this Post/Colonial discussion, is the analysis that French colonial resistance is rarely a topic that can be discussed outside questions concerning the issue of gender differences.

II. Sartre’s conception of resistance

To Joseph S. Catalano, Sartre’s main purpose in developing the concept of seriality in The Critique is to describe unorganized class existence.[1, p. 144] We “should not conceive of our membership in society as analogous to the way the numbers one, two, three, and so on, belong to the class of cardinal numbers. Rather, it is analogous to the way the numbers first, second, third, and so on, belong to the class of ordinal numbers.”[1, p. 144] Sartre’s concept then, defines a set of human order. Also, David Detmer explains, the concept of seriality refers to “a collective of people who each have the same individual purpose, but who do not share a common purpose.”[2, p. 201] The concept of seriality refers to a collective of people who may individually desire the same thing but not in the same manner or for the same objective. For example, Sartre draws on the case of people waiting at the bus stop to show how his concept of seriality operates within his analysis on the collective.[2, p. 201]

The people in question are a collection or queue of people waiting for a bus in front of the church at the Place Saint- Germain in Paris.[3, p. 256] To Sartre, people waiting at the bus stop reflect the relationship of seriality among them.[3, p. 256] Above all, Sartre says, “these individuals form a group to the extent that they have a common interest, so that, though separated as organic individuals, they share a structure of their practico-inert being, and it unites them from outside. They are all, or nearly all, workers, and regular users of the bus services; they know the time-table and frequency of the buses; and consequently they all wait for the same bus: say, the 7.49.”[3, pp. 258-259] Detmer explains that Sartre introduces the concept of practico-inert in order to explain the wayhistory, while it is the product of the actions of free beings, conditions and limits future human choices.[2, p. 191] From then on, Sartre, uses the concept of practico-inert in order to refer “to the tendency of human creations, or even of natural objects that human beings have worked on and altered, to restrict our freedom in the future.”[2, p. 191] Through Detmer’s explanation then, we gather that Sartre uses the example of people waiting for a bus in order to show how the common actions of these people shows the relation between human freedom and praxis; praxis that reflects actions made in view of a common aim.[3, p. 547]

Sartre notes that these people’s “acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act. From this point of view, the group is not structured; it is a gathering and the number of individuals in its contingent.” [3, p. 262] Whether taken qualitatively or quantitatively, people at the bus stop can be perceived as random numbers in a sequence -- where the people closer to the bus door have a greater chance to get on the bus, while people farther behind have a lesser chance. In effect, Sartre continues, “everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is himself. In the series, however, everyone becomes himself (as Other than self) in so far as he is other than himself, and so, in so far as the Others are other than him. There can be no concept of a series, for every member is serial by virtue of his place in the order, and therefore by virtue of his alterity in so far as it is posited as irreducible.[3, p. 262] Within the specific case of a group of people waiting for a bus in the Place Saint-Germain, Sartre claims that the alterity of each potential bus passenger, the differences in “age, sex, class and social milieu,” [3, p. 256] non-differentiate them as a mass.

To Sartre, these people, within the ordinariness of everyday life, portray a section of the residents of a big city, Paris, “in so far as they are united though not integrated through work, through struggle or through any other activity in an organized group common to them all.”[3, p. 256] Expressing the seriality of people reflects Sartre’s attempt to show the non-differentiation among potential public transportation passengers in the sense that any of these people waiting for a bus has the possibility to get a seat in the bus despite the scarcity or limits of seats in each bus that stops in front of the church at the Place Saint-Germain.[3, p. 263] Despite the fact that “there are not enough places for everyone,” [3, p. 260] everyone has a chance to get a seat. To Sartre, “the travelers waiting for the bus take tickets indicating the order of their arrival. This means that they accept the impossibility of deciding which individuals are dispensable in terms of the intrinsic qualities of the individual.” [3, p. 261] For the series of people waiting for the bus, the fact that the number of their tickets indicates the order of their arrival, an order which only increases their individual chances of getting a seat in the bus, shows that who these people are individually does not guarantee them a seat in the bus. The series of people waiting for a bus alludes to both the anonymity and interchangeability of each bus passenger. William L. McBride claims that what is most important for Sartre in his example is the individuals’ interchangeability, the context of each passenger’s alterity and the passengers’ roles as ordinal units.[4, p. 138] Within this collective, who each of the passengers is does not matter and the order in which they arrived, while it increases the chances of which passengers will have a seat in the bus, could have been different. Thus despite each passenger’s alterity, the differences in “age, sex, class and social milieu,” [3, p. 256] each passenger could be put into the place of another. And in my own words and according to Sartre, the seriality of people at the bus stop does not cause any instances of discrimination against women, the old versus the young and, the rich versus the poor. They all have a chance to a seat in the bus.

As Arthur explains in Unfinished Projects, “it is unsurprising, given the time of the Critique’s composition in the late 1950’s, that Sartre turned to colonialism to illustrate in concrete terms how these mediations actually work on the level of practice.”Footnote 1 Sartre saw that the concepts of seriality and practico-inert with which he described the collection or queue of people waiting for a bus, for example, were fit to describe the material environment of the collection of people within the system of colonialism. However, to Arthur, the place of colonialism in The Critique “is not the central concern of the work, and that examples taken from class struggle generally and the French Revolution in particular play a more important role.”Footnote 2 Arthur says this in contrast to the analysis of Robert J. C. Young who may have overemphasized the place of colonialism in The Critique.[5, p. 47] To Arthur, colonialism presents to Sartre the most extreme example through which his ideas converge.Footnote 3 Arthur makes sure to note that “much of what is expressed about colonialism in the Critique had, however, clearly been brewing for some time. The outline for Sartre’s understanding of colonialism in Algeria was already on display in his 1956 essay, “Colonialism Is a System.” Sartre added to this analysis and fleshed out its philosophical foundations, but he did not amend it.”Footnote 4 Writing The Critique during the later stage of the Algerian Independence enabled Sartre to “become more and more convinced of the systematic nature of violence and counter-violence that he saw in colonial relations.”Footnote 5 The context of the later stage of the Algerian war then enabled Sartre to conceive of the ways in which the system of colonialism could be subject to resistance. So, in “Colonialism is a System,” Sartre described the context of colonialism and in The Critique, he added to this analysis the ways in which the system could be literally abolished. Ultimately with his analysis of colonialism in The Critique, Sartre aimed to show that no change could occur within the condition of the colonized without the destruction of the colonial apparatus.[3, p. 302] Sartre’s conception of resistance developed through his analysis on colonialism then, is based upon his analysis on the evolution of violence within the system.[3, p. 720]

As Arthur notes, Sartre’s analysis of colonialism revolves around two axes: (1) the practico-inert structures created by colonizer and colonized alike that serve to regulate the exploitative historical relationship between them, often (or even typically) reinforcing it; (2) the praxes that creates bonds of alterity and/or reciprocity, depending on the situation, among the colonizers (the settlers) and among the colonized (the natives), whereby Sartre examines the division of settlers and natives into perceivable groups of humans and subhumans; the settlers’ racism; the participation of the natives in their own oppression; feelings of inferiority among the native population; and also the capacity for genuine group actions (“counter-violence”) on the part of the natives.Footnote 6Reciprocity, which is to Sartre the permanent structure of every object, is lived relations whose content is determined in a given society, as things in advance, by collective praxis, and which are conditioned by materiality and capable of being modified only by action[3, p. 109] and is initially posited as human freedom by praxis itself. [3, p. 110] The analysis of Sartre on colonialism then, is made to show how the reciprocal relationship between the colonized and the colonizers, which is based on the ways the violence of the colonizers exploits the colonized and dissolves the identity of the colonized into their racial alterity, a dissolution that results in the colonized’s attempts to counter the violence of the colonizers with equal violence.[3, p. 733] Through the context of colonialism, Sartre shows that the violence of the queue of people in the colonial system reflects the manner in which “serial violence dissolves, like seriality, into minimal violence as a primary determination of praxis.”[3, p. 732] The system of colonialism portrays the degeneration of violence from within the actions of both the colonizers and the colonized. The degeneration of violence shows a deteriorating condition that reflects the practice of violence and of oppression in the system. Inert violence, “as frequentative and as the dated connection between colonialists and colonized, is recognized as sovereignty inside repressive practice; and the latter, legitimated by the need to defend the Others, gives violence- process its first statute of operation. But, to conclude, if violence becomes a praxis of oppression, this is because it always was one.”Footnote 7 Thus the rule of colonialism is based on violence.

For the purpose of justifying the use of violence by the Algerians in particular, Sartre develops his analysis of resistance through the material condition of the colonized. Sartre begins by explaining the context that led to the use of violence on the part of the Algerians. The Algerian rebellion, Sartre says, “through being desperate violence, was simply an adoption of the despair from which the colonialists maintained the natives; its violence was simply a negation of the impossible, and the impossibility of life was the immediate result of oppression. Algerians had to live, because colonialists needed a sub-proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because wages had to be as close as possible to zero.”Footnote 8 The material circumstances of the Algerians, Sartre claims, is what resulted in the use of violence on the part of the Algerians. The Algerians were made to work for wages that were lower than the wages of the average French worker and were never enough for the Algerians’ own subsistence. As Catalano observes from analyzing Sartre’s claims, “although a handful of Muslims may be educated, the aim of colonialism is generally to keep those colonized from entering into the society of the occupying country. The goal is cheap labor, and this goal requires the daily practice of keeping the Muslim on a subhuman level.”Footnote 9 From this we gather that the Algerian rebellion is based upon the fact that the economic conditions of the mass Algerian population erode any attempts on the part of Europeans to emancipate the Algerians.

The violence of the rebel, Sartre continues to explain, “was the violence of the colonialist; there was never any other. The struggle between the oppressed and oppressors ultimately became the reciprocal interiorisation of a single oppression. [...] And against his own violence as Other, he created a counter-violence which was simply his own oppression become repressive, that is to say, reactualised and trying to transcend the violence of the Other, in other words his own violence in the Other. We have thus shown, in the simple example of colonisation, that the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, as a double reciprocal praxis, which ensured — at least until the insurrectional phase - the rigid development of the process of exploitation.”Footnote 10 To Arthur, “Sartre defined violence broadly — it can refer both to individual acts and to long-term processes.”Footnote 11 Arthur explains that Sartre saw the reciprocal praxis of violence as a dialectic of violence produced as a practical relation between free, situated organisms.Footnote 12 The acts of violence on the part of the colonized then, being a reality created precisely because of the violent actions of the colonizers; exploitation, racism, lack of political rights and debauchery, reflect the ways the reciprocal praxis of violence or this dialectic of violence, willfully made both the colonized and the colonizers the object of violence. To this analysis and following Sartre, Catalano adds that colonialism is violence not only as praxis but as process.[1, p. 241] It is “process because it arose from a network of earlier violence and continued into a network of new violence. It is a praxis because violent people used habitualized violence to establish a new violent network.”Footnote 13 As Sartre claims then, the development of the network of new violence created through the mass participation of the Algerians in the violence of colonialism deserves the name of “praxis-process.”[3, p. 725] The violence relation between the oppressed and the oppressing groups, always the conditioned conditions of serialities of series,[3, p. 729] ensures the functioning of the system of colonialism by participating in the innovation and maintenance of violence within the system.

III. The critique and gender

As Sonia Kruks observes, the objective of The Critique is to elaborate a theory of class, which unlike Marx’s theory of class, would privilege differences while still exploring the possibility of a project of worldwide human emancipation. [6, p. 240] Yet to Kruks, “to emphasize Sartre’s sensitivity to difference is not, however, to deny that the Critique is still deeply flawed by sexism — it is!”[6, p. 240] To Kruks then, Sartre’s project in The Critique does not register to the ways gender creates class differences within the condition of humans. In other words and from my own reading, the human differences created through the intersection of gender, class and even race are included in the analysis of Sartre. For this reason and in relation to Kruks’ observation, Sartre leaves out the human conditions of White women. And to add to Kruks’ observation, I claim that Sartre leaves out the human condition of women of color in particular. This is important to note because had Sartre conceived of the context of gender within his analysis of seriality and of the queue of people waiting at the bus, for example, he may have been able to conceive of how the inclusion of women at the bus stop would have changed the serial order of people waiting at the bus stop. A young man would have given his front seat in the bus to a White woman, for example, (thus changing Sartre’s process of claiming that the order of arrival at the bus stop determined your right to a sit in the bus) while the same young man may have denied the same seat to an aged or old woman of color. What I mean to say is, given the acts of common courtesy and chivalry White men expressed towards White women in particular during the era of Sartre, it can be imagined that a White woman arriving in tenth place could have been given the first seat in the bus. I acknowledge the lack of gender, race and class intersectional analysis in Sartre’s The Critique, and I explain in this section the way Sartre conceives of a material conception of resistance that is solely based on the racial and class alterities the colonizers have imposed on the condition of the colonized. I claim that through his analysis on racial and class alterities, Sartre is mostly able to discuss the situation of male colonized and colonizers. What I say here is most apparent in Sartre’s description of the actions of the sons of both the colonized and the colonizers. Thus I claim that if you leave out the intersection of gender to the topics of race and class, you may omit to discuss the situation of women.

Specifically, Sartre says, “the son of the colonialist and the son of the Muslim are both the children of the objective violence which defines the system itself as a practico-inert hell.” [3, p. 718] By emphasizing the place of the sons of the colonized and colonizers in the colonial system, Sartre shows that while he may want to analyze the relation within the queue of people in the system of colonialism, his analysis of the series of violence within the system may not take into account the use of violence by the daughter of a colonialist and the daughter of the Muslim, for example. By emphasizing the place of the sons of the colonized and colonizers in the colonial system, Sartre shows how his treatment of gender within the colonial system is from a masculine point of view.[6, p. 241] By claiming that the series of violence within the colonial system is solely based upon the subjectivities of the male members of the colonial system, Sartre neglects to show how the gender differences between male and female subjects of the colonial system, can create different series of violence that not only perpetuates but also innovates the violence of the system. From this perspective, I argue Sartre’s analysis of colonialism and the way to abolish colonialism is gender insensitive. In Sartre’s analysis of colonial violence and how such violence can mutate into a tool of resistance against the system, the relation within the queue of people in the colonial system is based on the series of racial and class alterities between the colonized and colonizers; it is an analysis that leaves aside the role of gender alterity within the series of colonial violence. Sartre then describes a colonial context that does not explicitly take into account the ways in which the seriality of gender participates in creating a queue of people within the colonial system.

In the article, “Gender as Seriality,” Iris Young attempts to recuperate Sartre’s project in order to identify how, despite the sexist connotations of Sartre’s analysis, his theory of seriality can apply to social contexts that attend to the gender alterity of different levels of social collectives.[7, p. 728] Applying the concept of seriality to gender, Young explains, “makes theoretical sense out of saying that ’women’ is a reasonable social category expressing a certain kind of social unity. At the same time, conceptualizing gender as a serial collectivity avoids the problems that emerge from saying that women are a single group,” [7, p. 728] whereby we can speak of women in terms of their individual racial, gender, sexual, abled and disabled differences. To Young, what Sartre’s theory of seriality can bring to the conception of the category of “women,” is that it can emphasize the differences among the collectivities of women without essentializing women strictly in terms of their gender alterity. So from Young’s perspective and in relation to my analysis, the gender analysis created through the queue of people that acknowledges the involvement of colonized women and women colonizers within the violent series of colonialism would be different from the kind of gender analysis created through the queue of people that acknowledges the involvement of colonized men and colonized women within the violent series of colonialism. From Young’s attempts to appropriate Sartre’s theory for the purpose of conceptualizing the category of “women” through concept of gender, we gather, “gender, like class, is a vast, multifaceted, layered, complex, and overlapping set of structures and objects. Women are the individuals who are positioned as feminine by the activities surrounding those structures and objects.”Footnote 14 In constructing a material conception of resistance, Sartre failed to take into account the ways gender differences structured the violence of colonialism. Sartre neglected to acknowledge the way the structure of gender positioned women to the series of violence within the system of colonialism. To Sartre, then, race and class and rather not gender structure the process and praxis of resistance within the colonial system. From this perspective, I claim that Sartre’s material conception of resistance uses the racial facts of colonized existence as a means to describe the political and economic inequality, and as a means of justifying resistance against the Western system of oppression. While I have argued that Sartre’s analysis on colonialism leaves out the question of gender differences, his theory of colonialism is nevertheless somewhat all encompassing. It gives an account of colonialism as a system coupled with two groups of people; the colonized and colonizer, who are entangled in a Manichean dialectic.

IV. Fanon’s conception of resistance

While Fanon may have misinterpreted and overestimated the freedom and liberation of Algerian women during and then after the Algerian war of Independence, Fanon, unlike Sartre, made sure to at least include the ways in which the participation of women in the Algerian war influenced the structure of resistance in Algeria. In the context of the Algerian revolution, Nigel Gibson notes, “Fanon does not address action in general terms but instead locates a specific revolutionary subject, willing to ’risk’ life and work for the cause of liberation.” [8, p. 40] In other words, the notion of resistance within Fanon’s writing on Algeria shows that the concept of resistance could not be developed without examining the ways in which the revolution changed the lives and attitude of the Algerian population.

In his article, “Jammin’ the Airwaves and Tuning into the Revolution: The Dialectics of the Radio in L’An V de la revolution algeriénne,” Gibson explains that the purpose of Fanon’s analysis of the ways the revolution changed the lives and attitude of the Algerian population shows how the colonized created a turning point within the Manichaean complex of the colonial situation. Supporting the analysis of Fanon expressed in Black Skin, White Masks, Footnote 15 Gibson claims, “Colonial society presents itself as a Manichaean one. The colonizer is represented as everything good, human, and living; the colonized as bad, brutish, and inert. It is a society of total separation, not one in the service of a higher synthesis. In this situation, the colonized inhabits ’a zone of non- being.’”[10, p. 273] The Manichaean complex of the colonial situation then, divides the colonizers and the colonized into caricatures of good versus evil; caricatures that have a real effect in the colonial, because they grant an ontological status to the colonizers while they negate the existence and lives of the colonized.

“Through the experience of the revolution,” Gibson adds, “the colonized’s Manichean consciousness breaks down and is sublated by what Fanon calls a ’radical mutation’ in consciousness. One example of this process is the changing attitudes to the radio. [...] In terms of the dialectic, we can see how the radio, which was totally rejected by the colonized during the colonial period, is taken over by them and used as a weapon in the struggle for liberation. In short, it undergoes a ’dialectical development’ and becomes the mediation in the development of a national consciousness.” [10, p. 274] Alluding to the analytic division that Fanon makes between the situation of the colonized Algerian before and then after the start of the revolution, Gibson notes how the revolution changed the consciousness of the colonized by referring to what Fanon says about the Algerian’s change of attitude to the radio; a change of attitude that shows the way the mass population of Algeria first came to view the radio as a propaganda tool in the hands of French authorities and then as a tool that could be of use to the ways the resistance or the FLN presented their side of the story to the Algerian population. By figuring out how the radio could be useful to them, the Algerians acquired a sense of agency that altered their attitude about the ways the radio could be used as a non- oppressive tool for the resistance. Prior to the resistance, the radio created a reality in colonial Algeria whereby French values were emphasized over Arabs ones, values that negated the existence and lives of Arabs in the colony. The “’radical mutation’ of the native’s consciousness that had brought about a complete change in attitude toward the radio, was, Fanon argued, ’not a back and forth’ or ’an ambivalence but rather... a dialectical progression.’ This dialectical progression was not a synthesis but a ’radical change in valence.’”[10, p. 281] In using and in conceiving of the radio as a tool of resistance, the Algerians, the mass population and members of FLN included, developed an unexpected connection with the radio whereby the Algerians used the radio not to advance the goals of the colonizers but rather to the disadvantages of the colonial apparatus. In other words, during the resistance, the radio in the hands of the Algerians referenced more to the actions and lives of the Algerians than to those of Europeans. The radio then became a technique that could be said to no longer be only in the hands and at the will of the occupiers.

Making note of the effects of the Manichean complex on the colonial situation in Algeria before the Algerian war, Gibson claims, “before the rebellion, ’being’ and ’nothingness’ operated along color lines. This was not an ontological absolute but a definite social and psychological reality, which characterized two ’species’ of men and women: the colonizer and the colonized. In this situation, the colonizer is the ’unceasing cause’ and ’absolute beginning’ and the colonized is nothing, literally nihilated. Colonialism represented the cessation of history for the colonized and, in short, the veritable death of the dialectic.” [10, pp. 273-274] Through the analysis of Fanon, Gibson explains that prior to the revolution, the colonized felt that they were reduced to the status of non-being; an ontological way of being that fundamentally negated the value in the actions and existence of the colonized. Such an ontological status then made the actions and lives of the colonized unequal to and unrecognizable in relation to the actions and lives of the colonizers. From Gibson’s reading of Fanon then, we gain the understanding that the purpose of the resistance in Algeria was created as an Independence War movement that revived the dialectic between the colonized and colonizers such that the colonial self-determination of Europeans could be reciprocated with the equal anti-colonial self-determination of the Arabs. Within the context of colonialism, Gibson explains, “there is no objective truth. There is no neutral standpoint; everything is touched by the colonial system. In the colonial set-up the whole idea of what is truth is Manichaean. For the native, saying ’no’ to the French ’yes’ can be the only truth.”[10, p. 275] The end of colonialism in Algeria made possible through the War Independence reflected the absolute ’no’ to French authorities’ attempt to affirm their will in Algeria.

Moreover, in examining the ontological status of the colonized prior to the Algerian war, Gibson problematically conflated the colonized’s state of “non-being” to the condition of women (in general). To Gibson, the Manichean complex of the colonial apparatus made men out of colonizers and women out of the colonized.[10, pp. 273-274] Beginning with the problematic assumption that the colonizers were only European men and not also European women, I argue Gibson’s analysis of the context of the Manichean complex is literally based in terms of man-man colonizers and colonized man-women instead of also being based on the ontological status of man-women colonizers and colonized women- women. This is a long way of saying that Gibson’s analysis of the Manichean complex of colonial apparatus does not address how the powers of the colonizers privileged the actions and lives European women and how the annihilated existence of the colonized negated the actions and lives of Arab women.

In Gibson’s analysis of how the radio was made of use by the resistance and thereby contributed to reviving the actions and lives of the colonized, he failed to account for the passages where Fanon mentioned the changes in the gender dynamics surrounding the act of listening to the radio, before and after the resistance. Contemporary commentators such as Jonathan Kahana[11, pp. 19-31] and Ian Baucom[12, pp. 1549] have, like Gibson, also taken an interest in Fanon’s analysis of the radio in colonial Algeria. Yet, these commentators, like Gibson, have failed to explicitly acknowledge what Fanon notes as the changes in the gender dynamics and, racial and sexual intersection, surrounding the act of listening to the radio, before and after the resistance. What I have observed here allows me to claim that while Fanon took up the challenge of including the colonial condition of women in his analysis of political resistance, Fanon’s male contemporary commentators have, for the most part, opted to omit the condition of colonized women from their analysis of resistance and of the dialectical relation between the colonized and the colonizer. From the writings of Gibson, for example, the presence and participation of colonized women and women colonizers within the colonial system are not explicitly acknowledged as a subject of post/colonial discourse. In view of the undifferentiated gender analyses presented by Gibson, Kahana and Baucom, for example, on Fanon’s analysis of the radio, I re-examine Fanon’s analysis of the radio as it relates to the gender dynamics within the context of the Algerian resistance. And on this subject, this is what I contribute to the Post-colonial literature.

V. Fanon and gender

Specifically, as Frantz Fanon notes in the second chapter of A Dying Colonialism, when commercial radio appeared in Algeria in the early 1940s as a source of mass communication, it created rivalries among the population by dividing the population in terms of race, class, and political status, thus dividing the French and the Algerians and even causing divisions among the Algerians themselves.[13, p. 69] Initially, commercial radio broadcasts under Radio-Alger were created in French, by the French, and were sometimes transmitted from France.[13, p. 69] Investigating the role of language incorporated in the programming alludes to the discourse on language presented by Fanon in Black Skin White Masks, whereby the sense of power and desire built within our discourse on language reflects the privileges and prejudices of Western institutions.[9, pp. 17-18] Accordingly, the information coming from Radio-Alger represented the interests and sensibilities of the French empire and, therefore, made it easier for the French in Algeria to follow the broadcasts.[13, p. 71] In other words, listening to information coming from the French radio was less difficult for the French in Algeria than for the Arab and Berber Algerians.[13, p. 69]

Among Algerians, radio was regarded as a status symbol that required fluency in standard French and French culture to listen to and enjoy the programming. Given that among the Algerian population the better-off, educated Algerians were more likely to be schooled in French and in French institutions, radio became an item primarily available to the better-off, educated Algerians.[13, p. 69] Yet, the hundreds of Algerian families whose standard of living was sufficient to enable them to acquire a radio did not acquire one.[13, p. 69] To Fanon, while there was no systematic rejection of the radio by these Algerian families, a reason that members of these families gave to sociologists reflected the reality that the topics broadcasted over the French radio were not aligned with the gender hierarchy and sexual politics of the Algerian family.[13, p. 70] The members of these Algerian families claimed that the topics broadcast over the French radio were in conflict with the traditions of respectability established within Arab families.[13, p. 70]

Specifically, the Algerians rather frequently gave the following answer to sociologists, “traditions of respectability are so important for us and are so hierarchical, that it is practically impossible for us to listen to radio programs in the family. The sex allusions, or even the clownish situations meant to make people laugh, which are broadcast over the radio cause an unendurable strain in a family listening to these programs.”[13, p. 70] In his analysis of the family featured in the chapter, “the Algerian Family,” the section on the father and daughter shows that within the Algerian family, the male and female subjects occupy separate spaces. The daughter, learning about the higher value of the man from the position and the habits of the mother in the family, is aware that she has less privilege than the father, the brother and the husband.[14, pp. 105-106] Within the context of the Algerian family, the female subject as a girl learns from male subjects, and from other female subjects that she cannot always do what the male subject does, be where the male subject is and also hears what the male subject hears.[13, pp. 70, 106] The gender dynamics within the family reflects a patriarchal hierarchical order, an order that could be disrupted by the introduction of the radio in the family. The answers that the Algerians gave to sociologists suggested that they, as Arab, could not, like Europeans, listen to the radio as a family in mixed gender company. As Fanon notes, the possibility of the daughter, mother and even younger son,Footnote 16 “eventuality of laughing in the presence of the head of the family or the elder brother, of listening in common to amorous words or terms of levity, obviously acts as a deterrent to the distribution of radios in Algerian native society.”[13, p. 70] The topics broadcast on the French radio then were not adapted to the “many moral taboos”[13, p. 70] that characterized the Algerian family in the 1940s.

Moreover, Fanon made sure to note that “it is with reference to this first rationalization that we must understand the habit formed by the official Radio Broadcasting Services in Algeria of announcing the programs that can be listened to in common and those in the course of which the traditional forms of sociability might be too severely strained.” [13, p. 70] The rationale that the Algerians, while it alluded to the issues relating to the traditions of respectability and the gender dynamics within the patrilineal hierarchy of the Algerian family, should be used as the first reason why the hundreds of Algerian families whose standard of living was sufficient to enable them to acquire a radio did not acquire one. The radio then was first not adopted by these Algerian families because they saw the technical instrument as a colonial tool that would continue to impose French European norms of conducts on the Algerian male and female members of the family.

Then, Fanon made sure to note the manner in which the context of the Algerian liberation war brings another dimension to radio as a technical instrument. Fanon begins this segment of his analysis by stating the following, “on the basis of this analysis, techniques of approach could be proposed. Among others, the staggering of broadcasts addressed to the family as a whole, to male groups, to female groups, etc. As we describe the radical transformations that have occurred in this realm, in connection with the national war, we shall see how artificial such a sociological approach is, what a mass of errors it contains.”[13, pp. 70-71] From this perspective, Fanon alludes to the reality that Algerians’ stand as a family against the inclusion of the radio within their patrilineal hierarchical family organization did not reflect a fundamental order within the Algerian family but rather reflected an objective family order, organized by the head of the family, against the even further colonialization of the Arab family.

Prior to the Algerian war in 1954 and the foundation of the FLN by Arab men such as Mohamed Boudiaf and Saadi Yacef, the economically better off Algerian families as well as the mass population of Algerians did not see value in owning a radio, precisely because they saw the radio as a “piece of French presence,”[13, p. 72] in colonial Algeria. The radio, Fanon continues, “as a symbol of French presence, as a material representation of the colonial configuration, is characterized by an extremely important negative valence.”[13, p. 73] The radio or French radio in particular, created a bond within the colonial system that the Algerians did not want to be willfully connected to. But in 1955, the mass population became conscious of the reality that the acquisition of a radio set in Algeria, “represented the sole means of obtaining news of the Revolution from non-French sources.”[13, p. 82] Fanon then explains the social and political occurrences that made the Algerian population change their minds about the radio and which in turn built an unexpected connection between the Algerians and the technical instrument whereby, “having a radio meant paying one’s taxes to the nation, buying the right of entry into the struggle of an assembled people.”[13, p. 84]

As Fanon primarily attempts to show, the changes in the actions and attitude of the colonized does not reflect a sudden alteration in the consciousness of the colonized but rather reflect a progressive and/or digressive alteration in the consciousness of the colonized that can be traced as a process from within the timeline of modern slavery and colonialism. In view of this, Fanon traces the positive effects that the Algerian population acquired from listening to the radio to the year 1945, when the Algerian population received support and sympathy from “the men and women in America, Europe, and Africa,”[13, p. 74] for being the victims of the Sétif and of Guelma uprising[13, p. 74] which begin on the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied countries of World War II, on May 8, when French authorities begin to shoot local demonstrators. Moreover, the reality that Algerians could listen to radio shows broadcasted from national broadcasting stations in liberated Arab countries, in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, also influenced the change in the Algerians’ connection to the radio.[13, p. 74] Fanon notes that “after 1947-1948, the number of radios grew, but at a moderate rate. Even then, the Algerian when he turned on his radio was interested exclusively in foreign and Arab broadcasts.” [13, p. 74] The Algerian then chose to listen to foreign and Arab broadcasts precisely because French radio broadcasting did not provide the Algerians with a perspective on the French colonial situation and international news that reflected their situation and worldviews.[13, p. 76] When the Algerian independence war started in 1954, the Algerian, Fanon claims, “found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news.” [13, pp. 75-76] The resistance, during the first months of the war, attempted to organize their own news distribution system.[13, p. 76] However, the press organizations in support of the resistance became subject to censorship.[13, p. 77] From then on, the acquisition of a radio set in Algeria, “represented the sole means of obtaining news of the Revolution from non-French sources.”[13, p. 82] Resistance made known to the Algerian population that they had their own broadcasting radio show, the Voice of Algeria.[13, p. 82] In the market or shop, trade in used receiver sets began.[13, p. 83]

By 1956, when the majority of Algerians began to purchase a radio set, Fanon records, “traditional resistances broke down and one could see in a douar groups of families in which fathers, mothers, daughters, elbow to elbow, would scrutinize the radio dial waiting for the Voice of Algeria. Suddenly [...], the Algerian family discovered itself to be immune to the off-color jokes and the libidinous references that the announcer occasionally let drop.”[13, p. Fanon] The present context in which Algerian families listened to the radio as a whole then suggests that the radio during the revolution became a source of protection to the integrity of Algerian families. Algerian families’ attempt to acquire protection from the radio reveals a connection with the radio that may have not been possible when the Algerians were introduced to the radio before the revolution as a byproduct of French values. Prior to the revolution, the radio was a technical instrument that Algerian families’ members felt that they had to be protected from. As Anne McClintock notes of Fanon’s analysis of the colonized family, “refusing, however, to collude with the notion of the familial metaphor as natural and normative, Fanon instead understands it as a cultural projection (’the characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment’) that has very different consequences for families placed discrepantly within the colonial hierarchy.”[14, p. 283] From Fanon’s analysis then, we acquire the sense that the colonial situation influences the order and the integrity of colonized families not as a natural but rather as a cultural construction structured in confirmation of social and political oppression.

Furthermore, paying attention to the relation and positions of members of families’ different sexes as they listened to the radio, Fanon explains that after the revolution, Algerian families began to listen to the radio in mixed company.[13, p. 83] From Fanon’s explanation in the chapter, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” we can only assume that Algerian daughters and mothers were allowed to listen to the radio with men because the head of the family, the father or the eldest brother, permitted them to. But from Fanon’s analysis in the chapter, “The Algerian Family,” we can come to see that the participation of Algerian wives, mothers and daughters in the resistance enabled these women to ask men to listen to the radio with them.[13, pp. 108-109] After the FLN decided to allow women to participate in the resistance, “the female cells of the F.L.N. received mass memberships.”[13, p. 108] The participation of women in the resistance enabled these women to become active members within the struggle. Aware that his daughter could be a member of the FLN, “the father himself no longer had any choice. His old fear of dishonor had become altogether absurd in the light of the immense tragedy being experienced by the people. [...] There was no time to lose. So the girl would go up into the maquis, alone with men. For months and months, the parents would be without news of a girl of eighteen who would sleep in the forests or in the grottoes, who would roam the djebel dressed as a man, with a gun in her hands. The father’s attitude toward the girls remaining at home or toward any other women met in the street inevitably underwent a radical change. And the girl who had not gone into the maquis, who was not actively engaged, became aware of the important role played by women in the revolutionary struggle.” [13, p. 109]

From this we gather that because of the participation of some female members of Algerian families, the female members who stayed home and were not at the war resistance front, experienced better treatments from the male members of their families, from their fathers in particular.

Yet, to Fanon, the differences in treatments that the female members of Algerian families received from their male counterparts during the resistance, did not just reflect men’s changes in attitude towards women, but rather reflected the status of freedom and liberation of women in the Algerian society. Observing the changes in the father’s attitude towards the girls, that is to say, observing that to the father girls may no longer be “always one notch behind the boy,” [13, p. 105] Fanon claims that after the resistance, “the men’s words were no longer law. The women were no longer silent. Algerian society in the fight for liberation, in the sacrifices that it was willing to make in order to liberate itself from colonialism, renewed itself and developed new values governing sexual relations. The women ceased to be a complement for man.”[13, p. 109] The participation of some Algerian women in the war resistance front enabled Algerian women as a group to exert a greater sense of agency, which in turn enabled these women to become guerilla fighters, speaking in front of men and listening to the radio together with their father. The resistance then, gave new values to the gender dynamics and sexual relations among the male and female members of the Algerian family.

Although criticized by Rabaka as being another feminist who presents a “destructive criticism” against Fanon for writing about women,[15, pp. 250-251] McClintock’s “Fanon and Gender Agency,” presents a compelling analysis of the limits of Fanon’s analysis of the agency of colonized women during colonial Algeria. In support of McClintock’s position, which, at least to my reading, both justifiably praises and criticizes the analysis of Fanon on women, I claim the following: While what I call Fanon’s phenomelogical conception of political resistance is exemplary as it attempts to address the question of gender difference between colonized men and colonized women within the colonial context of Algeria in particular,[13, p. 283] the place of women seems to be fundamental within Fanon’s analysis of the “naturalness of nationalism as a domestic genealogy,”[14, p. 284] yet his work as whole fails to show how “the situation of women that was accordingly taken as the theme of action,”[14, p. 289] can inform the dialectic or more precisely the process through which “man” can acquire a new skin;Footnote 17 a new skin that as Bernasconi emphasizes, requires the disappearance of colonialism, of the subject condition of people as colonizer and colonized, the disappearance of racism, if not as a shedding of skin, at least as a shedding of what skin color has come to mean in a world defined by colonialism.[18, p. 113] Contrary to Rabaka’s reading of Fanon, I do not see with enough evidence how, in the writings of Fanon, the process of decolonialization creates from within the situation of colonized women, a “new [wo]men,” “women who are simultaneously struggling to topple sexism, racism, colonialism and capitalism.”[15, pp. 260-261]

According to McClintock specifically, in his analysis of the structure of the Algerian society, Fanon’s insight, “here is that the dynamics of colonial power are fundamentally, though not solely, the dynamics of gender: It is the situation of women that was accordingly taken as the theme of action. Yet, in his work as whole, Fanon fails to bring these insights into theoretical focus.”[14, p. 289] It is not clear how the context of gender dynamics in Fanon’s analysis of colonialism informs his theoretical concern with the dialectic process of resistance. What McClintock says here relates to her argument on the limits of Fanon’s analysis on the agency of colonized women in the following way: “women’s agency for Fanon is thus agency by designation. It makes its appearance not as a direct political relation to the revolution but as a mediated domestic relation to a man. [...] Women’s first relation to the revolution is constituted as a domestic one.” [14, p. 291] In view of my analysis on the radio, to Fanon more precisely, what some colonized Algerian women did as members of the war resistance front, was less important than the ways that these women’s actions in the resistance affected their lives and other women’s lives in their homes, with their fathers, brothers and husbands. I argue recognizing these Algerian women less as guerilla fighters but more as mothers, wives and daughters, Fanon actually asserts that the participation of women in the resistance created better domestic lives for male and female members of Algerian families but it did not, however, end colonialism. We gather then that when colonized women acted in the context of Algerian war, whether as guerilla fighters, as daughters who talked back to their father or as women who could hear what men hear, their actions portrayed not their own will against colonial, racial and gender oppression but rather the will of colonized men who were the ones to truly want the end of colonialism. Given that Fanon’s analysis on the liberation and freedom of Algerian women reflects more of a women’s liberation from impeding relations with men and rather not a liberation from the system of colonialism, the liberation and freedom of women is in the hands of Algerian men. The “criss-crossings of gender”[14, p. 285] within the racial condition of the colonized does not affect the Manichean complex of the colonial situation whereby colonized men are pitted against men colonizers. From this perspective then, the colonized man becomes the agent who can ultimately end colonialism and perhaps replace the “old man” with a “new idea” from which a “new man” can stand.

The Manichean context of the dialectic within Fanon’s conception of resistance poses a problem for the subjectivity and agency of not only colonized women but of also women colonizers. In other words, I claim that the question of the subject that Fanon asks in Black Skin White Masks, “What does a man want? What does the black man want?” [9, p. 8] cannot be addressed from the subject position of people who are attributed the feminine gender, precisely because within the process of resistance to the Manichean dialectical practices between the colonized and the colonizers, since they are not perceived as true agents who can act according to their own will and freedom, women do not figure. Precisely because Fanon’s phenomelogical conception of political resistance does not, as pointed out, by bell hooks, disrupt patriarchy,[19, p. 81] women then cannot be the true source of a colonized identity (colonized agents), nor can they be true colonizing agents or revolutionary agents. The subjective context with which Fanon represents the situation of Algerian women does not give sufficient grounds to show how within the Algerian independence war, women’s actions, even as guerilla fighters, actually liberated women from the wills of men, such wills that prevented these women from being the revolutionary agents of their own colonial situation, all at once economic, gender, sexually and racially based. From Fanon’s analysis then, we acquire the sense that for example, the bombing of the French quarter by unveiled Arab women[13, p. 58] indicated actions that Arab men wanted. In the resistance then, the relation between colonized men and women is not that of collaboration but rather a relation where colonized women were at the service of colonized men.

In view of questions about and the context of political resistance, women of different races, feminine traits, sexual orientations, abilities and disabilities are left with the following subjective questions: Who are we? What can we do? In the attempt to address these subjective questions as they relate to the situation of colonized women in particular, I turn to the writings of Marie-Aimée Helie-Lucas. Explaining the rights of women in relation to liberation wars and the feminine alterities of women, Helie-Lucas says the following: “during wars of liberation women are not to protest about women’s rights. Nor are they allowed to before and after. It is never the right moment. Defending women’s right “now” — this now being any historical moment — is always a betrayal of the people, the nation, the revolution, religion, national identity, cultural roots.” [20, p. 280] From Helie- Lucas’ both analysis and testimony, what is remarkable about colonized women’s agency within the context of colonial independence war, is that these women’s actions reflect the actions of an agent who sees the value in sacrificing her own self-interests against economics, sexism and racism, in the name of men’s national independence. Yet, it is precisely the self-sacrificing actions that women do for the causes of men, out of concern of being identified as traitors that contribute to the devaluation of women’s actions, freedom and sense of agency. Ultimately, the state of both imposed and self- imposed compromises, within the social and political situations of women, degenerates into problems about the rights and freedom of women.

VI. Conclusion

In summary, a closer examination of colonial discourses on the dialectic and on resistance as examined within the work of Fanon and Sartre included would show how Sartre’s concern with the problem of reciprocity in The Critique about the relation between the colonized and the colonizer, [3, pp. 109-111, 720, 733] and Fanon’s concern with the problem of recognition as he explains in the section on Hegel from Black Skin White Masks and at the end of The Wretched of the Earth[9, pp. 216-222], [17, p. 236] are solely based on the subjective condition of men (whether white or non-white) but not of women (whether white or non-white) as well.

To Sartre the reciprocal relation between the colonized and the colonizer creates a contradiction within the state of the colonizer whereby in the dehumanization of the colonized, the colonizer must first recognize him as a man.[3, p. 111] Thus the reciprocal context of the relation between the colonized and colonizer, shows that the colonizer sees the colonized as both a man and a subhuman. On Fanon’s account, the denial of recognition that he sees practiced by the colonizer upon the colonized does not make a “full man” out of the colonized. [17, p. 236] From both Sartre and Fanon’s analysis, there is a context in which the colonized man is both free and not free. While the colonized man’s unfreedom is what kept him subordinate to the male colonizer and colonial system, it is the colonized’s man sense of revolt and use of violence against the male colonizer and his system that ultimately brings freedom to the colonized man.

What is rightfully acknowledged in both Sartre and Fanon’s analysis is that there is the possibility of freedom within the situation of colonized men. Yet, assuming that the male colonizer is a free subject, my project shows that the general context from which the freedom of colonized men can be examined, in both Fanon and Sartre’s analysis, cannot necessarily be extended to the situation of colonized women and female colonizers, in part because the identities of white men and of non-white men, constructed as colonizers and colonized, does not “generally” take into account, the situations of the female members of the colonial system as a theoretical subject of post/colonialism. Thus within the post/colonial analyses that I have presented in this paper, women are there but not in theory. In order for the theories of Sartre and Fanon to be more inclusive, scholars from the Post- colonial Tradition have to inclusively write about, and advocate for, the situation of both White women and non- White women building on theories of Sartre and Fanon.