User:Jordan.d.o/sandbox

DRAFT: Addition to The Wretched of the Earth

NOTE: The final version of this assignment will also include a 'Responses' section, with notable critiques and applications of ideas from 'On National Culture'. In particular, I want to consider Spivak's 'strategic essentialism' and its relationship to Fanon's work. I also want to consider what's been called the revolutionary humanism of Fanon, and how it's articulated in this work.

Summary: 'On National Culture'

In the essay, "On National Culture" published in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon sets out to define how a national culture can emerge among the formerly and, at the time of its release in 1961, still-colonized nations of Africa. Rather than depending on an orientalized, fetishized understanding of precolonial history, Fanon argues a national culture should be built on the material resistance of a people against colonial domination. Fanon narrates the essay with reference to what he calls the 'colonized intellectual'.

The return to precolonial history

For Fanon, colonizers attempts to write the precolonial history of a colonized people as one of “barbarism, degradation, and bestiality” in order to justify the supremacy of Western civilization. To upset the supremacy of the colonial society, writes Fanon, the colonized intellectual feels the need to return to their so-called 'barbaric' culture, to prove its existence and its value in relation to the West.

Fanon suggests colonized intellectuals often fall into the trap of trying to prove the existence of a common African or 'Negro' culture. This is a dead end, according to Fanon, because it was originally the colonists who essentialized all peoples in Africa as 'Negro', without considering distinct national cultures and histories.This points to what Fanon sees as one of the limitations of the Négritude movement. In articulating a continental identity, based on the colonial category of the 'Negro', Fanon argues "the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national".

An attempt among colonized intellectuals to 'return' to the nation's precolonial culture is then ultimately an unfruitful pursuit, according to Fanon. Rather than a culture, the intellectual emphasizes traditions, costumes, and clichés, which romanticize history in a similar way as the colonist would. The desire to reconsider the nation's pre-colonial history, even if it results in orientalized clichés, still marks an important turn according to Fanon, since by rejecting the normalized eurocentrism of colonial thought, these intellectuals provide a "radical condemnation" of the larger colonial enterprise. This radical condemnation attains its full meaning when we consider that the "final aim of colonization," according to Fanon, "was to convince the indigenous population that it would save them from darkness". A persistent refusal among Indigenous peoples to admonish national traditions in the face of colonial rule, according to Fanon, is a demonstration of nationhood, but one that holds on to a fixed idea of the nation as something of the past, a corpse.

Struggle as the site of national culture

Ultimately, Fanon argues the colonized intellectual will have to realize that a national culture is not an historical reality waiting to be uncovered in a return to pre-colonial history and tradition, but is already existing in the present national reality. National struggle and national culture then become inextricably linked in Fanon's analysis. To struggle for national liberation is to struggle for the terrain whereby a culture can grow, since Fanon concludes a national culture cannot exist under conditions of colonial domination.

A decisive turn in the development of the colonized intellectual is when they stop addressing the oppressor in their work and begin addressing their own people. This often produces what Fanon calls "combat literature", a writing that calls upon the people to undertake the struggle against the colonial oppressor. This change is reflected in all modes of artistic expression among the colonized nation, from literature, to pottery, to ceramics, and oral story-telling. Fanon specifically uses the example of Algerian storytellers changing the content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present moment of struggle against French colonial rule. He also considers the bebop jazz movement in America as a similar turn, whereby black jazz musicians began to delink themselves from the image imposed on them by a white-Southern imaginary. Whereas the common trope of African-American jazz musicians was, according to Fanon, "an old 'Negro,' five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his misfortune," bebop was full of an energy and dynamism that resisted and undermined the common racist trope.

For Fanon, national culture is then intimately tied to the struggle for the nation itself, the act of living and engaging with the present reality that gives birth to the range of cultural productions. This might be best summarized in Fanon's idea of replacing the 'concept' with the 'muscle'. Fanon is suggesting that the actual practice and exercise of decolonization, rather than decolonization as an academic pursuit, is what forms the basis of a national culture.

Towards an international consciousness

Concluding the essay, Fanon is careful to point out that building a national culture is not an end to itself, but a 'stage' towards a larger international solidarity. The struggle for national culture induces a break from the inferior status that was imposed on the nation by the process of colonization, which in turn produces a 'national consciousness'. This national consciousness, born of struggle undertaken by the people, represents the highest form of national culture, according to Fanon. Through this process, the liberated nation emerges as an equal player on the international stage, where an international consciousness can discover and advance a set of universalizing values.

Reception: 'On National Culture'

Fanon's writing on culture has inspired much of the contemporary postcolonial discussions on the role of the national culture in liberation struggles and decolonization. In particular, Robert J. C. Young partially credits Fanon for inspiring an interest about the way the individual human experience and cultural identity are produced in postcolonial writing. Fanon's theorizing of national culture as first and foremost a struggle to overthrow colonial rule was a radical departure from other considerations of culture that took a more historical and ethnographic view.

Criticism

Some theorists working in postcolonial studies have criticized Fanon's commitment to the nation as reflective of an essentialist and authoritarian tendency in his writing. In response to 'On National Culture', Christopher L. Miller, professor of African American studies and French at Yale University, faults Fanon for viewing the nation as the unquestioned site of anti-colonial resistance, since national borders were imposed on African peoples during the Scramble for Africa. According to Miller, the lack of attention to the imposition and artificiality of national borders in Africa overlooks the cultural and linguistic differences of each country that make theorizing a unified national culture, as Fanon does, problematic. Miller also criticizes Fanon for following much of "post-Enlightenment Western thought" by treating particular or local histories as subordinate to the universal or global struggle of the nation.

Neil Lazarus, professor at Warwick University, has suggested that Fanon's 'On National Culture' overemphasizes a sense of unified political consciousness onto the peasantry in their struggle to overthrow colonial systems of power. In particular, Lazarus argues the idea of a 'national consciousness' does not align with the history of the Algerian Revolution, of which Fanon was highly involved, since when the country gained independence in 1962 after an 8 year liberation war, the population was largely demobilized. In Lazarus' view, the peasant militancy in Fanon's analysis becomes the exact justification for his theory, yet does not necessarily exist in the material sense.

In the foreword to the 2004 edition of Wretched of the Earth , Homi K. Bhabha also pointed to some of the dangers of Fanon's analysis in 'On National Culture'. He wrote that Fanon's dedication to a national consciousness can be read as a "deeply troubling" demand for cultural homogeneity and the collapse of difference. Bhabha, however, suggests Fanon's vision is one of strategy and any focus on the homogeneity of the nation should not be interpreted as "narrow-minded nationalism", but an attempt to break the imposed Cold War era binaries of capitalism vs. socialism or East vs. West.

Strategic Essentialism

Some scholars have noted the similarities between Fanon's conception of national culture and strategic essentialism. Strategic essentialism is a popular concept in postcolonial studies, which was coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the 1980s. The concept acknowledges the impossibility of defining a set of essential attributes to a group or identity, while also acknowledging the importance of some kind of essentialism in order to mobilize politically. This resonates with Fanon's argument in 'On National Culture', since any essentialism of national cultural identity was basically a strategic step towards overcoming the assimilation of colonialism, and building an international consciousness where binaries of colonized and colonizer were dissolved.

Relationship to the Négritude movement

'On National Culture' is also a notable reflection of Fanon's complex history with the Négritude movement. Aimé Césaire, Fanon's teacher and an important source of intellectual inspiration throughout his career, was the co-founder of the movement. While Fanon's thinking often intersected with figures associated with Négritude, including a commitment to rid humanism of its racist elements and a general dedication to Pan-Africanism in various forms, 'On National Culture' was rather critical of the Négritude movement especially considering its historical context. The last section of the essay was initially drafted as a speech for the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome: 'The Unity and Responsibilities of African Negro Culture' (1959). The problems and solutions presented by the congress, inspired as they were by the movement, often revolved around the presumption that a unified African Negro Culture existed. Alioune Diop, speaking as one of the key figures of the movement at the conference, said Négritude intended to enliven black culture with qualities indigenous to African history, but made no mention of a material struggle or a nationalist dimension. Meanwhile, throughout the essay, Fanon stressed the cultural differences between African nations and the particular struggles black populations were facing, which required material resistance on a national level. In a portion of the essay written after the delivered the speech at the conference, Fanon was especially critical of prominent Négritude writers and politicians Jacques Rabemananjara and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who called for black cultural unity yet opposed Algeria's bid for independence at the United Nations.

'On National Culture' Addition to The Wretched of the Earth

For my final assignment, I've chosen to add a section to The Wretched of the Earth summarizing the chapter 'On National Culture'. I think this is a fairly canonical piece of postcolonial theory, and I think Wikipedia might benefit from a summary of the main points and ideas Fanon is grappling with. More than a summary, I want to also consider some responses from other theorists and how the concept of National Culture has changed and been written about since Fanon.

Potential Bibliography:

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

"Disavowing Decolonization" by Neil Lazarus in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives.

A critique of revolutionary humanism: Frantz Fanon by Richard C. Onwuanibe.

selections from Rethinking Fanon: the continuing dialogue. esp. "Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers of Nativism" by Benita Parry.

Choose Possible Topics

Subaltern Studies:

On the talk page, some editors have suggested additions to the criticism section of the article. I think there is certainly more to be said, in particular, about Spivak's critique of the school of subaltern studies, and other anti-essentialist/postmodern critiques. There's also some questions as to how the school is characterized that I could spend time revising; specifically, the introduction says "their anti-essentialist approach is one of history from below," which I think is a mischaracterization, or at the very least needs clarifying. While academics in subaltern studies claim to "write from below", this has been criticized as essentializing the so-called subaltern as a fixed subject.

"On National Culture":

My idea here is that I would add either a new page on Fanon's essay, 'On National Culture' or create a new section in The Wretched of the Earth. I would read the essay, and then dive into the prominent literature that has directly responded to his thinking. Considering how seminal the essay has become for those in the academy, as well as among activists and organizers, I think wikipedia could benefit from having a more detailed submission on the essay.

Comprehensive Land Claims Policy

This may be a bit outside the scope the course, but I would interested in exploring the modern comprehensive land claims policy, the federal government that guides modern treaty writing since 1973. The claims policy has been criticized for its 'extinguishment' clause (the language has since been reworded but the material meaning remains the same), which requires First Nations to give up their defined rights in exchange for a self-governing agreement. Considering the federal government just split the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada into two departments, one of which now has a full mandate to settle land claims under this policy, it might be an important time for wikipedia to have an article on the topic.

Adding to an Article: The Wretched of the Earth

After the last sentence of the summary section of The Wretched of the Earth, I would add: Fanon has been criticized for his theorizing of a "national consciousness", which uses a humanist vocabulary and seems to suggest a universal consciousness could exist among all citizens of a nation.

Article Evaluation: The Wretched of the Earth

Before I begin the evaluation of the article, I should make clear that my engagement with Fanon is limited to our class discussions and the text we read in class. So, it's from rather tenuous grounds that I make any critiques, at least when it comes to the article's content.

Everything in the article was relevant, but I was struck at how little content there is on the page. The entire article is, basically, a short introduction, a summary lacking any real depth, and a brief section on its reception that is limited to the controversy around Satre's preface, which was removed from editions printed after 1967.

The article seems fairly unbiased, but gleans over much of the concepts in the book. For example, the last line of the summary says, "One of the essays included in The Wretched of the Earth is 'On National Culture,' in which Fanon highlights the necessity for each generation to discover its mission and fight for its mission." This kind of summarization overly simplifies, to the point of obfuscation, Fanon's argument. For one, Fanon is not talking about just any "generation" in the essay, or the book in general. He is talking about particular peoples who, in a display of revolutionary struggle, are attempting to overcome entire histories of colonization, especially the Algerian independence struggle. Moreover, Fanon's point is far more nuanced than a peoples "discover[ing] its mission". It completely disregards Fanon's problematization, or elucidation of, the paradox of national identity and how a "generation" even arrives at its "mission" through an expression of that national identity. Fanon fully recognizes that any concept of national identity risks becoming nativist, essentialist, and fetishized. However, he also sees it as a necessary tool in the emergence of a decolonial revolutionary struggle insofar as it gains validation as an expression of a national "self" that is formed beyond or outside the discourse of the colonizer.

I thought the article overrepresented the controversy over Satre's preface and, in doing so, overrepresented Fanon's highly qualified approval of decolonial violence. The article says Fanon advocates for a "justified violence" by colonized people as "necessary for their mental health". While Fanon argues that decolonial violence is a form of catharsis for the colonized subject and a way of establishing self-respect in light of entire histories of subjugation, from what I know and have read, he doesn't say it's the only way of reestablishing personhood. On several occasions, Fanon documents the dangerous and negative effects of violence as a way of qualifying its appropriation for any emancipatory struggle. While the controversy over Satre's preface is certainly a valid piece of extra-textual history for consideration, I think it's troubling it takes up nearly a third of the article--space that could otherwise be used to detail Fanon's specific approach to the question of violence.

All the citations were relevant and linked to the source, if it was an online source. However, none of the summary was cited, which I think is particularly problematic considering, as I've already pointed out, it contains some contestable claims and representations of Fanon's thought.

Before choosing this article, I scanned the page for Caché (film). The talk page on that article is rife with discussions on editorial decisions and the movie's plot. So, I was particularly struck when I looked at the talk page for The Wretched of the Earth and found, essentially, a single discussion over a line in the article that says one translation of the book is "better-accepted" than others. Considering how influential book has been, I was hoping the page itself and the conversations between editors would be more critical.

In general, the article does not adequately capture the breadth or the influence of the book.

bold