The Fact of Anti-Blackness Decolonization in Chiapas and the Niger River Delta

There are so many deaths. One no longer knows which one to die. --S. Labou Tansi (1) I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world. --Frantz Fanon (2) This article considers Frantz Fanon's interrogation of the fact of anti-blackness in light of the ongoing decolonization struggles in our current historical moment. (3) Debt regimes, structural adjustment, neoliberal military-prison industrial complexes, and corporate impunity are some of the idioms of power through which colonialist legacies and imperialist desires live today. The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have developed eloquent critiques of the vagaries of neo-liberalism, including the machinations of corporate media and the omnipresence of market relations. By obscuring the black's singular relation to suffering, however, these important challenges serve to reconstitute the anti-black world. To make it plain: when critiques of globalization, such as those proffered by the Zapatistas out of southern Mexico, speak of solidarity with all peoples injured and threatened with extinction by neo-liberalism, they do nothing to undo the Manichean world Fanon shows us. In this "Manichean delirium," the Black is overdetermined from the outside; to use Nigel Gibson's formulation of Fanon, the "Black is body and the body's death is death" (2003: 20). In other words, black people experience bodily punishment; they are imprisoned, harassed, beaten, or murdered; criminalized, stigmatized, tortured or killed; impoverished, diseased, exiled, or homeless not because of a particular political economy, nor because of national oppression or underdevelopment. They are not hunted down because they have organized themselves militarily to resist state violence and the designs of capital for the exploitation of their lands, as in the case of the Zapatista Rebellion, the most prominent social movement currently active in Chiapas. Rather, they are subjected to premature death because they are black, and as such, they are the violence that must be countered and expunged. My argument is that Fanon provides us with the conceptual tools to evaluate the role of blackness in differently situated liberation movements. I suggest that employing Fanon's insights on blackness and the colonial condition to consider the linkages between the rebellion in Chiapas and the resistance in the Niger River Delta reveals how these disparate movements are sutured into a global structure of humanity. The implication of Fanon's treatment of the colonial condition is that while indigenous Americans in Chiapas and Africans in the Delta are similarly situated within the political economy of globalization, they occupy distinct positions in the structure of humanity. This simultaneously shared and divergent social positioning is due to the fact of anti-blackness, and can be seen in both the forms of the respective social movements in Chiapas and the Delta, as well as in the different reactions by global civil society to the situations in each location. This divergence harbors disabling consequences for global human emancipation and underscores the ongoing saliency of Fanon's framework to our present-day struggles. The following section briefly describes the current situation in Chiapas and the Niger River Delta, summarizing the similar effects of globalization across the planet. In terms of the political economy, the vast differences in history, culture, neo-colonial relations, and geo-political positioning between Mexico and Nigeria matter little when it comes to the subjugation of life to capital in Chiapas and the Delta. What does matter, however, is how each location articulates with the global structure of humanity, with Fanon's Manichean world. In the second section, I chart the relevant dimensions of this historical formation for evaluating the relationship between Chiapas and the Delta. The main question is how these differences matter. …