October 16 - 18, 2007 

Remembering Fanon: Zapatista Women & the Labor of Disalienation

Magalí Rabasa

Cultural Studies Graduate Group

University of California, Davis

Remembering Fanon is a process of intense discovery and disorientation.  Remembering is never quite an act of introspection or retrospection.  It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.

Homi Bhabha.  “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition.”

So writes Homi Bhabha in his 1989 essay on the urgency of recuperating Fanon for the postcolonial context.  Drawing on his formulation of memory as a complex process of rearticulation, a restitching of fragmented elements, in this paper I reveal the significance of Frantz Fanon’s work, particularly his most heavily psychoanalytic text Black Skin, White Masks, for the examination of gendered revolutionary subject formation in the current Zapatista movement, based in Chiapas, Mexico.

Fanon expounds alienation as an effect of the colonial condition, whereby the dynamics of interaction with the colonizer, manifested most intensely through language and education, are internalized by the colonized.  Whereas Freudian psychoanalysis is based on the individual, Fanon insists that it is the collective trauma of colonization that produces alienation.  Disalienation, as theorized by Fanon for the colonial context, is an essential phase of anticolonial struggles like that of the Zapatista movement, and the broader movements of resistance to neoliberal globalization. The project of the Zapatistas is one of decolonization.  This does not imply a mythical return to the precolonial, but rather a process of critically re-membering cultural identity and consciousness.  The collectively-based internal psychic processes articulated in the Zapatista movement, especially by women, as concientización are fundamental to my interest in Fanon and his connection to Chiapas.  Projects such as the Revolutionary Women’s Law put into practice the negotiation of multiple identities (and marginalities) as well as the right to question tradition.  While the assertion of the permanence of indigenous culture reflects an externally directed message, the affirmation of the right to change cultural traditions represents an internal transformation- a re-membering of identities violently fragmented by (neo)colonialism. 

Fanon’s highly theoretical earlier work and the more pragmatic social theory of his later writing situates him as an essential figure for scholarship on the formation of revolutionary postcolonial subjects.  While Fanon’s work is undoubtedly laden with misogyny and homophobia, the renovation of psychoanalysis that he presents, particularly as a venue for revealing the internalization of dominant systems of meaning (patriarchal, colonialist, racist), can be productively mined to support understanding and resistance of such psychic structures of power.  Drawing on Chela Sandoval’s insistence on the usefulness of Black Skin, White Masks as a methodological tool, and Gautam Premnath’s articulation of Fanon’s theory of national consciousness for the transnational context, I consider the relationship of Zapatista women to the broader movement, as well as of the Zapatista communities in resistance to the Mexican nation.  In this paper, I argue that Bhabha’s articulation of re-membering serves a double purpose for the Chiapas context: the critical recuperation of Fanon’s theories and the reimagining of culture and rebellion.  

Magalí Rabasa received her BA from the University of Oregon in Latin American Studies and Spanish in 2004. Her Honors Thesis “New Social Movements- New Testimonio: Latin American Women & the Negotiation of Identity & Representation” focused on testimonio and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. Currently a second year doctoral student in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis, Magalí’s research is focused on questions of alterity and collectivity in the transnational context of Zapatismo, considered through a feminist postcolonialist theoretical framework.

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