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Nancy Huynh | GEOG 5208 - York University | 2/3/2014

Jean Paul Sartre wrote in a preface to Wretched of the Earth Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. How important is if for geographers to enter the book?
Sartre wrote the preface to address the colonist in all Europeans, even the ones that did not physically colonize people of colour and their space. He wrote to Europeans, "your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors", and "we have

all profited

from colonial

exploitation" (Fanon 2004 [1963], lviii). I argue that geographers of certain traditions of geography, particularly the "Land-Man Tradition", produced racialized knowledge about people in certain places, and profited in cultural capital from such productions. The "Land-Man Tradition", which has a history of environmental determinism combined with social Darwinism, produced scores of studies that interpreted why nations rise and fall (Pattison 2007 [1964]). Such geographical work exploited people with the aim of knowledge production that very likely contributed to colonial efforts.

Present-day geographers, however, ought to "enter" the

Wretched of the Earth

not as some atonement

to the problematic history of geographic traditions, but as a chance to be reflexive of current and planned research and the possibilities of geographers to produce new knowledge of the world that might transform existing (capitalist) exploitative systems of social reproduction. The most literal reading of Fanon's

Wretched of the Earth

is that of a handbook, with geographic insights, for leaders of

emerging nations. To emerge as a liberated nation, leaders must listen to and work with people in the "interior" to fight for independence; the people thus become the leaders, and the leaders part of the people. The colonized bourgeoisie cannot be relied upon to liberate the peasants and the lumpenproletariats because they rely on the colonial spatial arrangement to line their pockets (Fanon 2004 [1963]). It is through liberation struggle that the true colours of the colonized bourgeoisie are revealed, "that some blacks can be whiter than the whites" (Fanon 2004 [1963], 93). My interpretation of Fanon's work as the next generation, so to speak, of geographers is that we also must look to the "interior" at various scales if we care for our work to be transformative. But first, we ought to reflect on our research aims as we "enter" into Fanon's text: what are our true colours?

Optimistically, geographic traditions have changed from the early "Land-Man" days. Knowledge production of and

with

people at the "interior" has become the focus. The "interior" might be rural or

inner suburb, but the point is that much of our research is with the marginalized and oppressed. While we might be

with

such groups, the questions loom: how much of the knowledge we produce is

for

them? Are we willing to change the socio-spatial configurations that have afforded us the positions we are in (i.e. a simple example: universities kept running by, but spatially separated from, people in the surrounding neighbourhoods ) to, in Fanon's (2004 [1963]) words, "create a new man" (39)?
1

It is critically important for geographers to "enter" Fanon's book to reflect on how the socio-spatial arrangements of our lives might affect the knowledge we produce in our work. Will we be like the

colonize bourgeoisie, adapted to a capitalism that lines our own pockets (decently), and put our research in the hands of those interested in perpetuating the current system and spatial configuration? Or are we going to "wake up, put on [our] thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty" (Fanon 2004 [1963], 62)? Geographers, with our acute understanding of how social transformation requires a concomitant spatial interpretation and change, have a lot of potential to be part of the struggle to create a new comradely (non-exploitative) peoples, and thus space. Thus, "entering" into the book is critical, but what is it that we do when we come out if it is just as important.

Note

1: Considering who cleans our offices, cooks the food in our cafeteria, etc., and where they travel from to do this work.

References

Fanon, Frantz 1963 [2004]. Grove Press.

The Wretched of the Earth. (Translated

by Richard Philcox). New York:

Pattison, W. 2007 [1964]. "The four traditions of geography", in Moseley, W., Lanegran, W. and Pandit, K. eds.

The introductory reader in human geography: contemporary debates and classic writings.

Malden: Blackwell.

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