EDITED BY FRASER JOYCE
Derek Hook provides a pertinent example from his area of research: HOOK – Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial racism, Black Skin White Masks2, amounts to an unwieldy amalgamation of literary texts, psychiatric and psychoanalytic conceptualization, existential philosophy, and (typically painful) first hand observations, often delivered in a disturbing style of poetic language. This is a ‘multidisciplinarity’ not only of content, but of scholarly (and aesthetic) form, which is Fanon’s response to the difficulty of theorising new ways of perceiving and analysing the social world. Not all of Fanon’s invented concepts (‘epidermalisation’, ‘lactification’, and so on) have stayed the distance or strayed into accepted social scientific conceptualization, but others, most notably the problem of the ‘racial gaze’, of racial objectification within the visual field, most certainly have. Fanon’s work testifies that we cannot presume that the tools of critical knowledgeproduction that might be most needed to explore a topic at a given socio-historical context already exist. For Fanon, the models of analysis already in use – sociological, literary, psychological, Marxist – could not adequately capture the painful vicissitudes of colonial racism; he needed to look instead precisely between these discursive frameworks, to engender new overlapping frameworks of apprehension and analysis. Much may be risked in such forays between the boundaries of disciplines [more below – Ed.], but nonetheless, the imperative remains: we constantly need to invent new ways of seeing and knowing, because the existing models will not always suffice. If interdisciplinary work takes place across or between the disciplines, the researcher will have to negotiate many different kinds of boundaries over the course of his or her research: HEARN – There are many kinds of ‘divisions’ within the humanities and social sciences (not to mention that division itself!), so perhaps couching the issue specifically in terms of disciplines is too narrow to get an adequate feel for what enhances or impedes working 2. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London; Paladin, 1970) 13