62 chApter one
the window together—beyond the war and toward a futurity marked by
new forms of collective embodiment (fig. 1.2).
Fanon thus misrepresents this final scene in Home of the Brave in order
to conclude “The Fact of Blackness.” His peculiar glossing of the film avoids
the profound political, economic, and social alliances boldly forged at the
end of the film, where promise is based on the recognition that the notion
of “lack” itself is socially produced. What Fanon reveals through his gloss—
through the assertion that the crippled war veteran wants a shared victim
status with the black man and wants him to “resign” himself to his color
the way that the cripple has become accustomed to his stump—illustrates a
resistance in Fanonian thought to claim the power of prospective alliances
between differently “othered” subjects. Fanon’s rendering of the cripple be-
trays in this sense his own conception of “man” as one that is conceived
not merely through a specifically masterful masculine body but through a
body that is “whole” by those very standards that maintain the hierarchies
Fanon’s own politics aim to renounce.
1.2 Private Moss and Sergeant Mingo look together out the window and toward a
collective future. James Edwards as Moss and Frank Lovejoy as Mingo in Home of
the Brave (1949), directed by Mark Robson.