Fanon on National Consciousness

The purpose of this entry is to help you navigate through FrantzFanon’s chapter on National Consciousness and help you get ready for classroom discussion.

Fanon wrote this book in the three-year period in which he helped lead the psychiatric hospital in colonial Algiers, and as he wrote articles for revolutionary papers, and collaborated with the Algerian resistance. He did not have the assistance of an editor, the service of a computer or the disposal of a vast library (or the Internet for that matter). He engendered this work while he slept about four hours a day, hardly ate, and was under constant surveillance.

This is a work of painstaking pondering that comes from the meeting of considerable intellectual sweat, and hardcore, real-life political experience. At its heart, this chapter is a poignant demonstration of profound compassion for the unprivileged.

As an intellectual that trusted the people, Fanon main interest was to share with the Africans, who were on the brink of catapulting from colonialism, what he already knew about being a postcolonial, and what he thought will happen in the near future; all through the eyes of history. In fact, the Latin American past hanged predominately in Fanon’s head. Most Spanish America had over a century of postcolonial experience already, and Fanon wanted all Africans to avoid the pitfalls rendered clear through Western Hemisphere’s history.

Fanon objective was clear. He wanted to help deliver the promises of nationalism and avoid the “crude and fragile travesty of what might have been”. He had come to the conclusion that the hope of the postcolonial nation was not foreign investment or better relations with wealthy countries, but the mobilizing of its “revolutionary capital, which is the people”. In other words, the national leaders will achieve true independence only by trusting their own people.

But the main obstacle to the promise of nationalism was in fact the national bourgeoisie. These were the wealthy nationals who wanted to run the country after the exit of the colonial government. The problem was that they could not “rationalize” popular action.

The bourgeoisie has been crippled by colonialism; they had no economic power, no imagination and no political will. They were merely invested in small businesses, agriculture, and the liberal professions. They had neither financiers nor industrial magnates. They were “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor.” Unfortunately, this caste had become the intermediary for the economic forces of the richest countries, and had neglected their role as national enablers. Thus, they could not deliver real independence, which in turn explains why postcolonial nations remained hanging as colonial drapes.

Read this chapter with these questions in mind:

What was Fanon's problem with producing only raw materials, nationalizing industries, promoting tourism, competition with other poor countries (as opposed to cooperation), chauvinism and tribalism?

Pay close attention at Fanon’s relentless assault on the national bourgeoisie. What was his problem with this “little greedy caste”? On the other hand, what is the responsibility of a strong bourgeoisie?

How do religious revivals may fuel racial rivalries?

What is the meaning of this phrase: “a racism of contempt: it minimizes everything it hates”?

How could African unity be achieved? What are the problems with a single party? What are the (harmful) pillars of regimes in underdeveloped countries?

Explain Fanon’s ideal: intellectuals collaborating with the masses against the national bourgeoisie.

What is the role of political party?

How Brasilia might have been a good example?

Note the industrialization and development against nature.

What was Fanon’s mood towards the plight of the African women?

What was his take regarding obscure language? And what does the unyielding black market said to him?

For Fanon, what produces the wealth of the rich? And what is the role of the education of the masses?

What are the pitfalls of youth’s pastimes, sports and national consciousness, and the quest for heroes?

What can the army bring to the construction of the nation, and what are the dangers of having the army involved in politics?

What do you find useful and revelatory in Fanon’s long essay?

Fanon ended the chapter with something that we may find controversial. He thought that a nation that is just coming out of colonialism should cultivate a sense of strong nationalism before developing social consciousness. In other words, people should feel united and develop a feel for national responsibility before demanding social justice. What do you think of this?

Postcolonial Ecofeminism (Robert J. C. Young)

You would not come to this class to read and learn about what you would normally get from standard media. So, the title of Monday’s discussion should not be a complete surprise. Its newness may require that you would read and meditate about these issues more carefully than you would with more familiar topics. These types of topics, nevertheless, would surely help you appreciate the human experience on the other side of nationalism.

You already know that in this context postcoloniality means the people’s ambivalent experience and subordinate position even after independence from a colonial power. In other words, it is that state in which a former colony has nominal sovereignty because the former master (or new foreign ones) has not left entirely or has taken on new forms of domination. The struggle for freedom, thus, continues, not so much by pushing the foreign away, but in redefining the social structures that continues to promote inequality and subordination, which colonialism donated to the new nation (“inherited from colonialism”).

But what do ecology and feminism have to do with postcoloniality?

Robert J. C. Young’s challenge in chapter 5 is simply asking us to appreciate the perspective of the women who struggled against colonial and later postcolonial domination in India and other parts of Asia and Africa. Their experience is not totally transferable to other postcolonial female experiences because each group had faced different set of trials and had had different types of needs. Rather, it is the overarching theme of resisting a modern patriarchal nationalism that puts them together in the same crowd.

The section titled “Gender Politics in India” illustrates how notions about traditional roles for women are hard to reject. Even Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the great reformer who appropriated ‘feminized’ modes of struggle, came at times to reinforce, instead of reject, conventional Hindu and puritanical Victorian concepts of women and femininity. Young vindicated Gandhi, though, by showing that he genuinely realized that women’s politics were more radical than most nationalism. It argued for equitable relations between men and women, sustainable connections to the land, and a life-style and medicine that encourage collective health. These are the contributions of postcolonial women and their politics.

In “Gender and Modernity” Young threw us several ideas about modernity that could easily mystify if you fail to pay close attention. On the one hand he wrote technology and a politics of egalitarianism defines modernity. On the other, he asserted that (mythical) cultural nationalists and their obsession for a fabled past, where women stayed at home and were submissive, is all part of modernity. But his more interesting contribution, by far, was that there are several types of modernities, that there are different types of Third World modern experiences, and that even the West represent a diversity of modernities (think about how different is New Zeeland from the U.S.). The best explanation of modernity, however, is Young’s, and it appears in this section: the interaction of the West with the Rest.

Women’s struggle for equality and sustainability is the epitome of the postcolonial predicament according to the section “Women’s Movement after Independence.” While nationalist movements sought desperately to present a unified face during the conflicts against the direct colonial rule, after impendence, the same nationalists (i.e., Religious nationalisms) who preached equality and freedom tried relegating women to submission. Since the role of women actually degenerated with the “nation,” postcolonial feminism had been at the forefront of a “politics of egalitarianism that supports diversity rather than the cultural uniformity demanded for nationalism.” (99)

The section “Feminism and ecology” shows how “macho” nationalism continued with the same colonial politics of exploitation. It reinforced the same old social hierarchy; it exploited workers, women and the environment. Like the colonial government, the new nations colonized forests and minds in responses to market-oriented and scientific notions of the time. This brought deforestation and desertification to local economies and otherwise clean ecosystems.

All of this colonization was for the short-term commercial values of the marketplace, “trying to control nature just as patriarchy tries to control women.” (102) Women, however, because of their experience as cultivators and family enablers possessed repositories of knowledges about balances in nature and the effects of ecological disruptions. It is no wonder, then, that it were women activists who began the Chipko (tree huggers) movement and developed a philosophy of politics that resisted centralization, corruption and exploitation. Instead, they promoted justice, self-sufficiency, and empowerment of local knowledges.

In the section “What makes postcolonial feminism ‘postcolonial’?,” Young asked if postcolonial feminism amounted to a separate strand within postcolonial thought. His answer was simply no. In this section Young addressed the malleability of postcolonial theory by explaining how feminism is at its core, and thus inseparable. It is also applicable to a wide variety of politics, and even though they might not include obvious gender perspectives, they all work from the same paradigm: the pursuit of collective justice and equality. These struggles may be waged inside the nation or in exile, as the examples of Radia Nasraoui and Gisèle Halimi shows.

In the last section, “The untouchables: caste,” Young readily admitted that postcolonial struggle is not limited to the legacy of the colonies. There are older vices that plagued modern society. In the Indian example, we see the caste system, which is much older than the British colonial government. The plight of the Dalits is its most explicit case injustice. “A quarter of the Indian population is made of such Dalits.” And they do most of the menial jobs, and live segregated from the rest, with little access to anything we normally see as good from modernity.

In class I want you to think seriously about the meaning of feminism and its opposite, namely, patriarchalism. How women’s social position as historically close to the land and responsible for sustaining families shaped their politics differently to that of men.

You should also ponder over the dark side of macho-nationalism, its insistence on cultural uniformity. Most importantly, I expect you to deliberate on the reasons and causes of nationalisms continuing with the same unfair hierarchies imposed by colonial rules, and with the exploitations inaugurated by the colonial masters.

How do you fit Young in Benedict Anderson's frame of thought? What parts correspond, even if slightly, and what elements are diametrically apart?