duality in Fanon

¶ … National Culture:

Fanon and the difficulty of creating a new "National Culture"

Fanon's 1959 essay "On National Culture" discusses the process of intellectual liberation, and was written when scores of Latin America, African, and Asiatic republics were finally breaking free of European domination. The issues Fanon discusses remain relevant to our contemporary reality. One of the justifications for colonialism, historically, Fanon says, is the idea that the Third World was somehow 'underdeveloped' culturally and economically and thus desperately in need of the aid of the first world. This 'aid' was often merely another form of colonization. Europe exploited foreign nations for its own enrichment, forcing other nations to adopt their standards to make them more fertile grounds in which to produce products for Europe.

Recently, efforts to pressure developing nations to engage in privatization of national industries and critiques of the alternatives to capitalism they have attempted have often been framed in terms of 'saving' these nations from themselves. So have attempts to 'liberate' native peoples from their supposedly antiquated ideas about women, race, or gender, assuming that 'we' in the West are more enlightened than 'them' and must teach 'them from our supposedly more informed perspective (disregarding the West's own problematic history on these issues).

However, Fanon is equally vociferous in his statement that newly independent states must find a way to economically provide for their people, and that they must find a new source of 'national identity' that neither reifies the past nor wholly appropriates European culture. National identity cannot be backward-looking, because the past is always a lost, foreign country, even to those who are technically tied to it by blood. Colonial intellectuals must be self-conscious to the degree to which they have internalized the language of their colonizers but not obsessed with creating a new or a pure national culture.

The question of how to break new ground, rather than relying upon a false, idealized past is not an easy one. Even if colonial intellectuals could somehow resurrect the values of the Aztec civilization, for example, this would still not be a real solution to the vexing questions of today. In fact, an attempt to bring back the past only reinforces European stereotypes about 'primitivism' because to look backward at a society and to try to recreate it inevitably results in anachronistic value structures being applied to modern-day life.

Creating new national efforts to structure identity outside of old paradigms have not been easy. Efforts at pan-African solidarity, for example, have proved difficult, given the extent to which historical and contemporary events divide different groups. Attempts to create an alliance between African-Americans and Africans have often failed, said Fanon. Although united by common grievances against their European oppressors, these groups did not share the same political agenda and worldview, and thus grew bifurcated, politically, on the world stage.

This example of the difficulty of 'unity' based upon region or race calls into question what constitutes 'identity' in the modern, national sense. What makes a nation-state? Fanon suggests that culture alone does not constitute nationhood, as manifest by the many residents of colonized states who more openly identify with their oppressors' culture. The opposite of the European-ized native is what Fanon calls the 'colonial intellectual,' a person of dual consciousness, who goes through a three-phase cycle of first identifying with the European cultures and attempting to 'out-Anglicize' them. "The reason being that the colonized intellectual has thrown himself headlong into Western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigation their new family environment once their psyche has formed a minimum core of reassurance, the colonized intellectual will endeavor to make European culture his own. Not content with knowing Rabelais of Diderot, Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, he will stretch his mind until he identifies with them completely" (Fanon 156). When this fails, the intellectual tends to fixate an idealized version of native culture, creating a romanticized, but ultimately false version of the past. "Seeking to cling close to the people, he clings merely to a visible veneer. This veneer, however, is merely a reflection of a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal" (Fanon 160). However, the colonial intellectual does not realize that even when he attempts to perceive the 'pure' past, he is still using the aesthetic standards and language of the oppressor, having internalized them to such a great degree. "The colonized intellectual who returns to his people through works of art behaves, in fact, like a foreigner" (Fanon 160). The third part of the cycle is when the intellectual becomes a 'galvanizer' of the people, who tries to make his fellow natives aware of the unfair changes wrought to their nation by force, and encourages them to revolt against their oppressors. The intellectual uses "combat literature" and revolutionary literature -- and, most importantly a truly national literature emerges (Fanon 158-159).

Fanon clearly believes that this final stage is the truest source of national identity in formerly colonized states. Neo-colonial outrage must inevitably be based in reaction against material forces, not based upon some conception of 'culture' created by intellectuals that many of the intellectuals' co-nationals may not even share. "The colonized intellectual is responsible not to his national culture, but to his nation as a whole" (Fanon 161). Culture is but one aspect of this, states Fanon, rejecting the idea that culture permeates all aspects of human discourse. What we call 'culture' is not always relevant when understanding issues of class oppression, for example, in his view, when members of the colonial ruling classes have established themselves as the haves, while the colonized have become the have-nots.