Reviews and Comments

Fanon takes a lot from psychoanalysis in his description of the psychological effects of colonialism. He describes the subjectivity of the oppressed who are led to identify with their oppressor and are alienated from themselves. He replies to a lot of other texts, quotes a lot of black poets. He replies to Sartre, it made me want to read Sartre's "question juive". He also replies to some authors that are irrelevant nowadays, these parts are a little boring because he kinda assumes that the reader has read them. The parts about white women wanting to be raped, or about white racists being repressed homosexuals, sound pretty bad nowadays. All in all, he is at his most astute when describing the condition of the colonized (which, luckily, is most of the book). He gets a little weird and bad when psychoanalyzing the colonizers. Some passages are really well written and highly quotable.

This is a book based on an article, or rather it is an article inflated to the size of a book. I was able to tell after 30 pages, and got confirmed afterwards. This seems like a common practice in the US publishing world: an article-sized essay gets inflated through the addition of an introduction where terms are defined, and the insertion of examples. The argumentative structure stays the same, only now instead of occasionally nodding towards an example to support an argument, every argument gets one to several examples that are stretched to wikipedia length. This practice isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the case of this book, some of the examples given are things I didn't know anything about (the decolonial struggles of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde), so this is a nice opportunity to learn something new. But all in all, this practice makes good essays longer and worse. If it is often hard to tell what point Táíwò is trying to make when he goes into biographical details of some historic figure, that might be because these details aren't conducive to the point at all - they are just upping the word count. After finishing the book just now, I read the article that originated it (in the Boston Review, no paywall). The article makes several points that confused me in the book way clearer. In particular, the article cites Frazier's "Black Bourgeoisie" to generalize the point it makes about, well, elite capture. The book, on the other hand, gives us Frazier's backstory, the story of his parents, his intellectual legacy, etc. All this achieves (besides being interesting in the way a wikipedia article is) is to obscure the argument that Táíwò actually wants to make. So this is my conclusion: read the article. The book contains the same points, made with more words and less clarity. The points themselves are very good! The concept of elite capture is useful for critiquing nonconstructive uses of identity politics. It's a shame that the publishing industry doesn't incentivize conciseness.

I did not expect this tiny book from the 1990s to be as good as it is. The book is about the continuity of fascist ideology in German scientific discourse and general society. It shows extremely well how biologizing societal issues lies at the core of far right ideology. The book's central argument is about ableism (which the author calls "social racism" because it was the 90s). This is ableism understood not only as othering and violence against the disabled, but as a general ethics of ability/usefulness as a virtue: the ableist violence of the Nazi state was directed at the disabled but also the homeless, the unemployed, drug addicts, queers, etc. Ableism, the author argues, is as essential to fascism as racism and antisemitism, but most people including antifascists don't recognize it as such because they would have to confront the ableism baked into their own worldview. I think that is at least as correct now as it was 40 years ago. This book is extremely thought provoking and feels way ahead of its time - in my narrow view at least. I can't wait to reread it in a few months.

This is a journalistic work: it's very thoroughly researched, contains little generalizations and even less analysis, focuses on specific organizations and people. This means that it will be outdated in a few years (the book is from 2020). But for now, this is a well made deep dive into the connections between fascist organizations and combat sports in Germany and internationally. The book is well written, the structure makes sense and no time is wasted. I found the guest-authored chapters on other countries (Italy, Poland, Russia, France and Greece) especially interesting. The only aspect I didn't like is where the author tries to draw some extremely thin connection between neoliberalism and fascist ideology. I think this is an analysis that can make sense in some very specific contexts, but here it's not well made. The observation (made by the author) that both ideologies value individualistic self-improvement doesn't justify the claim that fascism follows from neoliberalism in some fundamental way. For one, fascism predates neoliberalism by half a century! A better conclusion from that observation could be that the specific strain of fascism that the book describes (self disciplined, ascetic and macho) combines the fascist hero ethos with neoliberal ideology in a way that's unique for our neoliberal era. That's not what the author is saying though. But this was just a few paragraphs out of an otherwise excellent book.