Fanon on National Culture and Postcolonial Identity

Introduction: Colonialism and the Problem of National Identity

Frantz Fanon's 1959 essay On National Culture discusses the process of intellectual liberation and was written at a moment when scores of Latin American, African, and Asiatic republics were finally breaking free of European domination. The issues Fanon discusses remain deeply relevant to our contemporary reality. One of the historical justifications for colonialism, Fanon argues, was 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 European standards in order to make them more fertile grounds for producing goods that benefited Europe alone.

Recently, efforts to pressure developing nations to privatize 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, too, 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 instruct them from our supposedly more informed perspective, disregarding the West's own deeply problematic history on these very issues.

However, Fanon is equally vociferous in his argument that newly independent states must find ways to provide economically for their people, and that they must find a new source of national identity — one 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 about the degree to which they have internalized the language of their colonizers, but must not become obsessed with creating a new or a "pure" national culture.

The Pitfalls of Looking Backward

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 constitute 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 try to recreate it inevitably results in anachronistic value structures being applied to modern life.

Creating new national efforts to structure identity outside of old paradigms has not been easy. Fanon's analysis insists that the colonial intellectual must resist the temptation to treat the pre-colonial past as a stable or recoverable foundation for contemporary nationhood, since that past has been irrevocably transformed by the colonial encounter itself.

Pan-African Solidarity and the Limits of Cultural Unity

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, Fanon observed. 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 is evident in the many residents of colonized states who more openly identified with their oppressors' culture. The concept of pan-Africanism illustrates both the aspiration and the fragility of solidarity grounded primarily in shared cultural or racial heritage rather than concrete political interests.

The Colonial Intellectual and the Three-Phase Cycle

The opposite of the Europeanized native is what Fanon calls the "colonial intellectual" — a person of dual consciousness who passes through a three-phase cycle. In the first phase, the intellectual identifies with European culture and attempts to "out-Anglicize" it:

"The reason being that the colonized intellectual has thrown himself headlong into Western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating 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 or Diderot, Shakespeare or Edgar Allan Poe, he will stretch his mind until he identifies with them completely" (Fanon 156).

When this fails, the intellectual tends to fixate on 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). 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 phase of the cycle is when the intellectual becomes a "galvanizer" of the people — one who tries to make his fellow natives aware of the unjust transformations wrought upon their nation by force and encourages them to revolt against their oppressors. The intellectual employs "combat literature" and revolutionary literature, and most importantly, a truly national literature begins to emerge (Fanon 158–159).