Frantz Fanon, Intracommunal Gun Violence, and the Politics of Afro-Nihilism

• In Event: In the Shadow of Democracy: Theorizing the Dark Ghetto

Abstract

In the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, as well as the recent acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, renewed attention has been afforded to the abiding specters of violence represented by police brutality and white vigilantism. Left woefully undertheorized, however, remains the adjacent but irreducible problem of intracommunal violence, particularly gun violence. The reasons for this are twofold. On the one hand, intracommunal violence usually evokes the misguided notion of “Black-on-Black” crime, which has historically served as justification for aggressive, reactionary conceptions of policing. The topic is thus avoided at the risk of legitimating reactionary ideas. On the other hand, with the proliferation of mass shootings, both scholarly and public attention has fixated on the sheer number of high-capacity firearms in the United States and individual mass shooters. Notwithstanding the importance of these considerations, they generate what the criminologist Elliott Currie has called our “peculiar indifference” toward the effects of intracommunal gun violence, especially within marginalized communities.

This paper turns to an unlikely suspect, the Caribbean revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, to render the problem of intracommunal gun violence in political-theoretic terms. Connecting Fanon with the contemporary literature in political science and sociology regarding neighborhood effects, intergenerational poverty, and the effects of exposure to violence on Black political behavior, this paper advances three claims. First, when considered alongside recent scholarship in political science and urban sociology regarding the effects of the “inherited ghetto,” Fanon offers a perspective from which to complicate and deepen a problem recently raised by the political philosopher Tommie Shelby, how to convert acts of spontaneous defiance–let alone what Fanon called “collective self-destruction”--to conscious resistance. Second, despite recent criticisms against the use of “internal colony” to describe Black America, intracommunal gun violence gives us reason to revisit the term’s Fanonian roots. When applied in its Fanonian gloss, the “internal colony” specifies the intersecting problems of poverty, police violence, and psychological trauma that combine to (re)produce intracommunal gun violence as a nihilistic, death-driven mode of ego preservation. Finally, the paper proposes Fanonian Afro-nihilism as a way of characterizing intracommunal gun violence. Against the Afro-pessimist reading of Fanon currently in vogue, Afro-nihilism is political, not metaphysical, and departs from quietistic questions of ethical misrecognition and spectral trauma to posit intracommunal gun violence as a democratic problem of marginalized people’s (de)mobilization.

Author

• Chris Anthony Chambers, University of Pennsylvania