This paper analyses the Tunisian years of Martiniquan psychiatrist and Front de Libération Nationale member Frantz Fanon in order to identify how a distinctly Afro-Arab articulation of Black transnational identity and politics took shape during the Algerian War for Independence. While Fanon’s immersion in the movement for Algerian liberation is widely studied across numerous fields of inquiry, I argue Fanon’s embrace of Algerianness itself served a central function in his theorization of African liberation, and continues to play a pivotal role in contemporary mobilizations of Fanonist thought throughout the African Diaspora, inclusive of North Africa. This paper thus demonstrates that the very nature of Fanon’s participation in the Algerian War for Independence – as a psychiatrist, an editorialist, a philosopher, and an ambassador for the FLN – alongside his “becoming” Algerian constitutes a political and cultural practice of transnational and translational blackness.

Everywhere in The Wretched of the Earth Fanon promises a newness: “It is a question of the third world recommencing a history of man,” he writes: “We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind.” Death is, finally, and if yet again, to be left in the past: “All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless.” As one does so, the subject Fanon promises is to become living and historical: “This is the proof that the people are getting ready to begin to go forward again, to put an end to the static period begun by colonization, and to make history.” Yet how new is this, one might ask? Is this, one might also wonder, “a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old,” and which no longer repeats a European, colonial sense of relation and time? To consider Fanon’s temporal staging of anti-colonial struggle, I turn to a single instance of archival counter-appropriation in relation to Palestine: Emily Jacir’s book and installation Ex Libris, which “commemorates the approximately 30,000 books that were looted by Israel in 1948 from Palestinian homes and institutions.” If, in Fanon, an absolute newness is promised, in Jacir, a return to a practice of settler-colonial theft and institution building (6,000 of the stolen books were domesticated into the Jewish National Library) gives place to a critique of epistemic forms and practices. And if, in Jacir, an artistic form, which occurs as a practice of gathering and sifting, of collection without sanction, renders a critique of the formation of archives and of the categories they privilege, Jacir equally invites us to return to Fanon, and to read his work differently. Rather than a historical, autonomous being, and rather than a Bildungs-centric subject—the sort of being promised in Fanon—we are given, in Jacir, a subject that is formed, and dis-formed, only through a practice of relation, where the past is not to be left behind but becomes, through an interrogation of form, a condition for the being of those subjects who live in its wake. This condition does not mute anti-colonial struggle, or its stakes, but it reorients and advances that struggle as something that will never have been, finally, one that would write “the history of man.”

This paper argues that working through Franz Fanon’s theorization of colonialism as a structural and violent process of dehumanizing natives reveals the mechanisms employed by the settler state to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The Nakba in/of Palestine, understood as the historic and on-going process of the attempted destruction of Palestine and elimination of Palestinians, is the manifestation of this structural violence. Exposing this process, however, is not enough to understand the dialectical questions embedded in indigeneity in Palestine. While Fanon's work has been used towards understanding the violence of Zionist settler colonialism, the Nakba, I ask in this paper if Fanon’s theorization (read in its entirety) can also be use towards understanding an indigenous humanity formed through a liberation praxis in Palestine. Settler colonialism has worked to dehumanize natives – thus, understanding settler colonial violence in that sense helps us understand that de-humanizing logic and, as Fanon described, the resulting native un-human subjects. An apt description of setter colonial violence is only part of the narrative though, and I argue in this paper that we can use Fanon towards framing Palestine and the history of the Nakba in/of Palestine within a politics of indigenous humanity.