Children of Resistance

It might be customary to talk about an artwork or an artist, by beginning with a critique of what she or he didn’t do. It might be useful to point out that Marlon Riggs’s video Black Is, Black Ain’t often takes aim at fairly easy, predictable targets, like Minister Louis Farrakhan, or several representatives of easily identified, simplified, or extreme nationalist positions (the interviews with people in the “African village” that was formed in the rural U.S., for example), etc. It might be uncontroversial to point out that, sometimes, some of the critiques from the “bourgeois intellectuals” in the video sounded a bit too defensive, but rightly so, perhaps. This defensiveness shouldn’t automatically lead one to assume undue guilt, it might be argued.

With these in mind, one could follow up by arguing that Riggs could have foregrounded his position more, critiqued the “intellectuals” more, or cut out what seemed to be shallow or contradictory positions, positions that Riggs seemed to agree with. But I admit I’m not very interested in this customary route. Sometimes I find myself just as interested in what an artist does. And in this case, what Riggs did, what made Black Is, Black Ain’t so interesting, was a certain refusal, though possibly not as explicit as intended: a refusal to settle the terms.

I remember once reading a critique of Tongues Untied by Bell Hooks, who found what she considered masculinist posturing in the video to be a bit too much. Though a critique of masculinity exists in most of Riggs’s work, Black Is, Black Ain’t seems to be the most extensive critique. It stands out in the video as one of the clearest positions argued. Riggs’s personal struggle with his own body, dying of AIDS, addresses the question of masculinity at the level of the personal and the body; and this also stood out for me.

Black Is, Black Ain’t also works as a culmination of Marlon Riggs’s larger body of work. In fact certain shots are also in the early video work. As in his earlier videos, Black Is, Black Ain’t is very theatrical, while maintaining documentary roots. There is an interesting integration of the use of folk culture, dance, music, and poetry. And, as with Tongues Untied, there is the integration of personal narrative and politics into this mix, but this is always surrounded by multiple-voices telling their own personal and communal sides of the story. All of these factors form innovative documentary techniques. These latter innovations open up the sometimes one-leveled, good/bad image critique of Riggs’s earlier videos, Ethnic Notions and Color Adjustment. This, again, strikes me as part of Riggs’s strategy of refusal taken as a positive action.

Fanon and Mannoni

In Chapter 4 in Black Skin, White Mask, “The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples” Frantz Fanon analyzes Dominique O. Mannoni’s study, Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of Colonization. Though he agrees with Mannoni that the colonial situation includes interrelations between historical conditions and the subject’s understanding of these conditions (84), Fanon concludes that Mannoni does not fully understand the situation. (84) He argues that Mannoni’s analysis assumes that the dependency and inferiority complex of colonized people antedates colonization. (85) Fanon also argues against Mannoni’s position that economics has a limited role in racism in colonial situations, arguing instead that economics is part and parcel of the socio-cultural-political structure. This allows him to conclude, “Europe has a racist structure.” (92) Fanon makes his position plain: “A given society is racist or it is not.” (85) Though, on finer points he is more subtle… sometimes.

Fanon argues his points well. He is able to clearly show where Mannoni ignores the specific psycho-social-economic elements of the colonial situation. Fanon also foregrounds his own position in this context (his position as an analyst and as a subject of colonialism). He borrows heavily from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and the Jew. And he also seems to share with Sartre certain Existentialist concepts of “Man” and “Otherness” ( He takes up Lacan’s writings on the construction of the subject-as-split in another section of the book.). Fanon is a psychoanalyst and believes his attention should be on a patient’s psyche as well as on the patient’s environment and that improvement should be sought in both areas. (100)

In opposition to Mannoni, Fanon argues that the dependency complex is the culmination of the interaction between the colonizer and the native population, or the colonized. This situation has changed who both sides are. The structure of the system privileges certain positions over others. (96) It is the instability of these positions that seem to be Fanon’s analytic target. My reading of his argument is that these positions are so filled with internal contradiction, that a psychoanalytic analysis in conjunction with a careful examination of the political situation can be a useful way to address some of the consequences of colonization. How applicable a position it is, is something I don’t feel capable of quantifying, particularly without much knowledge of Fanon’s psychoanalytic case studies. I’m more familiar with the “political” work, which I suspect offers limited access to his work in psychology.

Concluding Contradictions

If I wanted to find some common ground between Riggs’s video and Fanon’s work, it might be the fact that both highlight the particular contradictions that exist as the result of colonization (in certain cases in concert with slave systems) and co-habitation. W.E.B. Dubois’s “Twoness” could be expanded to threeness, fourness, etc. Both works seem to argue that a non-split subjectivity is utopic, but isn’t this is an assumed and unchallenged point these days? I want to believe that there is another understanding at work here. The “ain’t” in Black Is, Black Ain’t is the negated part of the split or fragmented subject and should be kept in play to keep the “is” from being so easily agreed upon.

Work Cited

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.