THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 73
bilities of the past—those deployed, say,
by Indigenous peoples in Canada and
Australia, in their battles for survival
against logging and mining corporations.
Conversely, his theory about the revolu-
tionary potential of African peasants now
seems all too clearly the romantic fan-
tasy of an uprooted, self-distrusting in-
tellectual. In Africa, the urban working
classes turned out to be far more import-
ant to decolonization than the peasantry.
Countries in which peasants proved
crucial to national liberation, such as
China and Vietnam, came no closer to
starting a new history of man. Contrary
to what Fanon ardently hoped, even the
strongest post-colonial nations, such as
India and China, are “obsessed with
catching up” with their historical tor-
mentors, and have engendered, in this
imitative process, their own rhetoric of
obnoxious narcissism.
Still, Fanon’s misgivings about de-
colonization and his insights into the
connections between psychic and so-
cioeconomic change have never seemed
more prophetic and salutary than in to-
day’s racially charged climate. Nonwhite
people’s growing demands for dignity,
together with China’s ascendancy, have
destabilized a Western self-image con-
structed during decades when white
men alone seemed to make the mod-
ern world. This weakening of imperi-
al-era authority has resulted in a pro-
liferation of existential anxieties, marked
by a heightened exploitation of culture-
war talking points in politics and the
media. Thus, attempts to reckon with
the long-neglected legacies of slavery
and imperialism collide with cults of
Churchill and the Confederacy, and crit-
ical race theory becomes an electorally
potent bogeyman for the right. Mean-
while, as Éric Zemmour, a demagogue
of Algerian Jewish ancestry, raises the
banner of white supremacy and Islam-
ophobia in France, and Taliban fanat-
ics inherit a devastated Afghanistan
from retreating Western powers, decol-
onization seems far from being trium-
phantly concluded. Rather, it resembles
the bleakly ambiguous and open-ended
transition depicted by Fanon. Sixty years
after its publication, “The Wretched of
the Earth” reads increasingly like a dying
Black man’s admission of a genuine im-
possibility: of moving beyond the world
made by white men.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Born in Blackness, by Howard W. French (Liveright). Reach-
ing as far back as 1324, when King Mansa Musa, of Mali,
embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, this revisionist chron-
icle sets out to depict Africans and people of African descent
as the “prime movers in every stage” of global history. Chal-
lenging the common view that the West rose because of some
inherent superiority, French emphasizes that it could not
have become what it did without Africa’s resources, noting,
for instance, the centrality of the continent’s gold and its
labor to the development of European societies. Weaving to-
gether previous scholarship on the subject with new archi-
val research and eye-opening descriptions of historic sites,
French makes an engaging, persuasive case for reconsider-
ing Africa’s place in world history.Twelve Caesars, by Mary Beard (Princeton). Ever since Au-
gustus assumed the role of princeps (roughly, “first citizen”),
in 27 B.C., the Western world has been saturated with depic-
tions of Roman emperors. This thoroughgoing survey exam-
ines the relationship between ancient imperial imagery and
the modern visual imagination. The face on a bust thought
to portray the Emperor Vitellius, who reigned briefly in 69
A.D., becomes, in the Renaissance, “one of the most repli-
cated ancient images in art,” appearing, for example, in Ve-
ronese’s “Last Supper,” and often used as a symbol of glut-
tonous immorality. With handsome illustrations of coins,
canvases, frescoes, and teacups, Beard brings the prestige and
power of these emperors’ half-invented faces into tighter focus.The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich (Harper). This is a pandemic
novel, but COVID-19 is just one element in the life of its busy
narrator, an Ojibwe bookseller named Tookie, living in Min-
neapolis. As the virus haunts, she sees streets burning during
Black Lives Matter protests, the ghost of a deceased “wan-
nabe”-Native customer lingering in her store, and remind-
ers of her recent incarceration for an unwitting offense. Tookie
recommends books to her loyal customers throughout the
novel, which ends with lists of Indigenous poetry, “short per-
fect novels,” and “pandemic reading” dear to its gentle fic-
tional narrator. The story is, perhaps above all, about the
peace available to us in books like this.A Time Outside This Time, by Amitava Kumar (Knopf ). Satya,
the protagonist of this novel, is, like its author, an Indian
American writer and literature professor. Early in 2020, during
a “cushy fellowship” at an Italian villa, he finds his imagina-
tion overwhelmed by events in the real world and decides to
make fiction out of them. In a work in progress, “Enemies
of the People,” he blends together lies, fake news, misinfor-
mation, and Trump tweets. His writing triggers emotional
flashbacks to events from his boyhood in a small town in
India, where the state usurped individual liberties, political
conflicts threatened his family, and “even milkmen carried
swords.” As Satya uncovers the “truth of fiction,” Kumar pro-
vides a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.