Gender and colonial transitioning: Frantz Fanon's Algerian freedom fighters in Moroccan and Caribbean novels?

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which Frantz Fanon's revolutionary narrative in L'An V de la révolution algérienne is reworked in selected novels of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Shani Mootoo. Focusing on Fanon's transitional politics, it draws out how these novelists employ gender transitioning to challenge colonial, nationalistic and familial violence. The article suggests that the intersections of anticolonial rhetoric and familial discourse present in Fanon's work are reconfigured in these novels through a questioning of assumed gendered, sexual and national taxonomies of belonging. It proposes a notion of community that seeks to avoid the reiteration of colonial and familial violence through a transitional politics and an ethics of becoming.La société algérienne dans le combat libérateur, dans les sacrifices qu'elle consent pour se libérer du colonialisme se renouvelle et fait exister des valeurs inédites de nouveaux rapports intersexuels. La femme cesse d'être un complément pour l'homme. Littéralement elle arrache sa place à la force du poignet.[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 woman ceased to be a complement for man. She literally forged a new place for herself by her sheer strength.] (Frantz Fanon) 1 Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. (Judith Butler) 2 Fanon's transitioning politics and ethics of becomingIn 1959 Frantz Fanon completed his collection of essays published under the title L'An V de la révolution algérienne. 3 This text was subsequently translated into English in 1967 as A Study in Dying Colonialism and republished in 1970 as A Dying Colonialism. 4 The specificity of the French title Á 'the fifth year of the Algerian revolution' Á along with the allusion to the adoption of the new calendar following the French Revolution are largely lost in the English version. 5 Indeed, the English title could be said to suggest that Fanon is discussing the global demise of colonial *