A Dying Colonialism

"Yes. I saw that you had Black Skin, White Masks . And I know that many readers looking at this interview will likely have read or at least heard of The Wretched of the Earth , which is Fanon’s massive tome of political theory. But I love A Dying Colonialism. It’s French title was L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, or, The Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution. It was published in 1959 and translated into English, I believe, in 1965—so after the end of the Algerian War of Independence. It’s a collection that really does the range of things that I love the most about Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a student of Aimé Césaire. Also born in Martinique, and educated in France. He was studying psychoanalysis . He wrote Black Skin, White Masks as his thesis, which is part of the reason why it’s such an insane book. People have so much trouble with it. I always try to remind my students: this is student writing! It doesn’t know what it’s doing at every moment, but it’s absolutely worthwhile trying to understand it! Anyway, he refined his politics and his philosophy, and went to Algeria to join the revolution and to practice psychiatry. This is an interesting twist to the Césaire colonial detour—unlike his teacher, he didn’t go back to Martinique, he joined a completely different revolution. And not where the West African slave trade originated, but Muslim North Africa. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He became part of this nationalist struggle and joined the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, and really saw something different about the evils of colonialism, having served in the Second World War for the French nation. So fighting for freedom in Europe, under the condition of not having national liberation or full citizenship in the French nation state really spurred this whole international drive towards the end of imperialism—as it did in the United States for the civil rights movement. A Dying Colonialism, for me, is the coolest book because it really attaches all these big abstract theoretical philosophical movements that he was undertaking in the other two books to practices on the ground in the everyday of the Algerian revolution. There’s a chapter on the role that the veil plays in gender politics and the Algerian liberation struggle (its successes and failures on the question of gender are still hotly debated among scholars!). There’s a chapter on the role of radio that I think is really interesting in terms of how media can be deployed as revolutionary tools. Then there’s a beautiful chapter on medicine in the Algerian revolution, and the status of imperial medicine, the motives of the non-compliant patient. For us today, that’s an especially interesting set of questions that’s often left out of Fanon criticism, but is something I look at in my own book in depth. Epidemic Empire is, at bottom, a study of the metaphor of the terrorism epidemic. This is language that was everywhere in the ten years following September 11 . I started doing a little bit of investigation to see whether taking that metaphor literally would lead me anywhere in the historical archive, and indeed it did: it turns out that the modern instantiation of this figural relationship between anti-state insurgency and the idea of contagion was linked to 19th-century discourses about the Indian uprising in 1857. Then—in coincidence—cholera was raging throughout the Empire, and it brought into being this new discipline called epidemiology, around 1850. The way epidemiology approached its objects was through a multi-voiced or synoptic kind of perspective. It’s difficult to tell the story of something that emerges all over the place at once. We can go hunting after origins, go chasing after etiology, but what is more difficult is tracking what it looks like at a sort of ecological level. Epidemiology, essentially, was codified in order to do that work. Initially I had some interesting scenes to thinking about—fictional ones and historical ones. I realized though, that to understand how knowledge and power were working in tandem in this period to produce today’s common sense Islamophobia, I needed to find the archive and narrate the invention of epidemiology as a colonial practice. So the first third of the book works out how colonialism—particularly the British endeavour in India , which then kind of exported it to Ireland and the typhoid crisis that followed the famine there—invented an idea of disease that would shore up the borders of empire. Administering healing, whether it was missionary work and spiritual healing or medical work and physical healing, was the centuries-long excuse for the continuation of empire. We still hear people saying things like, ‘we brought the railroads,’ right? That kind of discourse. You’d be worse off without the modernisation of colonialism, etc. So the book tells the history of how that metaphor originated in the Indian context, criminalising and pathologizing Muslim subjects—through the language of disease containment—and their roles in the national uprisings that led to independence. “It’s bizarre how much resonance there is between 1817 cholera writing and 2008 terrorism writing” The relationship between epidemic and terrorism went underground from some years and then re-emerged in the Algerian revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. So the second part of the book tells the story of how the archive of Algerian independence both draws on the 19th-century history of Indian independence movements, and then crystallizes what will become the 20th century story about Islam and contagion, and how they always seem to go together. There was a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers film, about the early years of the Algerian Revolution, at the Pentagon in 2003 as a kind of training film for military personnel doing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. The question for me was: is it a sort of lazy resonance, or is there real deep historical continuity between these moments? Again, it turned out that the medicalisation of the colonial body in French Algeria had both antecedents in the 19th century and resonances in our lives in the present moment. So, finally, the third part of the book looks at how diasporic South Asian Islam exists in literary archives, and then how it appears in policy archives. The sixth chapter of the book is a deep dive into Salman Rushdie, his writing, and how he presents a notion of Islam and how that changes over the course of his career in relation to health, disease, contagion, and affiliation. In the final chapter of the book, I turn to the big tomes of our national history, or neo-imperial national history: The 9/11 Commission Report , The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture … almost as, like, legacies of those earlier medical writings from the early 19th century. It’s honestly bizarre how much resonance there is between 1817 cholera writing and 2008 terrorism writing. So that’s the arc of the book. The argument I’m really trying to make is that this metaphor, wherever it comes from and whatever its spirit, has profoundly material consequences for our political present—and has literally shaped our global politics. And certainly, it has led to the catastrophically disorganised response to an actual pandemic. The metaphorical epidemic has meant pouring trillions of dollars into an endless war rather than providing, for example, universal healthcare to the citizens and residents of this neo-empire. Absolutely. No, no, it all went on drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan. On counterterrorism at home and abroad."