Laughter and Revolution in the Work of Frantz Fanon

• In Event: Being and Blackness

Abstract

Frantz Fanon cared about laughter—a lot. While this often comes as a surprise to critics, hints of Fanon’s growing attention to laughter appear as early as Black Skin, White Masks and increase through The Wretched of the Earth. Critics have neither explored the importance of laughter to Fanon nor of what import Fanon might prove within theories of laughter. One reason for this gap, perhaps, is an overinvestment in seeing laughter as antithetical to seriousness, which consequently renders it unthinkable within the context of the perpetuated image of Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist and as a theorist of anti-colonialism and revolution. Prompted by Fanon’s declaration that “Now one would be able to laugh” during the pivotal moment of the oft-cited “Look, a Negro” scene in Black Skin, White Masks, I trace the development of Fanon’s relationship to laughter and its relationship to what remains absent in traditional approaches to laughter.
Theorists of laughter, for the most part, peddle an Aristotelian ‘laughing animal’ thesis that says laughter, whether a psychical defense mechanism or self-regulatory social phenomenon, remains undoubtedly—some might say laughably—human. This privileging of a universal human spirit, however, postpones any sustained analysis of the reactions to the laughter of bodies for whom access into the boundaries of the human remains perpetually deferred. In short, what occurs at the impasse in which laughter becomes the simultaneous locus of (in)humanity? Attending to laughter promises to contribute to existing analytical paradigms such as race, psychoanalysis, queer theory, the body, anti-colonialism, gender and sexuality, and Black Studies.

Author

• Diego Millan, Tufts University (MA)