NOTES

undeniable space between them. It is this discomfort that needs to be kept in mind as we read Fanon’s later work. The Wretched of the Earth, read in such a way, becomes an incredibly enabling model of the way an intellectual can put herself or himself at the service of a political struggle which is not “organically” hers or his. The disavowal of the Antilles which Vergès finds in Fanon’s work is undoubtedly there-although it must be stressed that it is a disavowal motivated, at least to some extent, by the political circumstances of Martinique. But also present in Fanon’s relationship to the Algerian Revolution is an attempt at affiliation, in Edward Said’s sense (1983:18-21). It is from this disjunction between the Antilles, France, and Algeria that Fanon’s struggle to establish what I have elsewhere called a “transnational humanism” arises (Alessandrini 1998). And it is as a result of this disjunction that we can identify a Fanon who is more cosmopolitan than we might imagine at first glance. Discovering this Fanon means occasionally reading against the grain, for there is certainly also the Fanon for whom “cosmopolitan identification…serves as the thin, abstract, undesirable antithesis to a red-blooded, politically engaged nationalism” (Robbins 1998:4, 15 n. 16). But this is, we must remember, the position of a theorist and practitioner who could never be entirely certain of his own connection to that “red-blooded” nationalism. It is also precisely the sort of complexity we might expect from a Fanon who, in Stuart Hall’s words, “is bound to unsettle us from whichever direction we read him” (1996:35). It is this Fanon who challenged us, with his dying words, to “find something different.” I can think of no better challenge for cultural politics today.