Frantz Fanon on “National Culture”

In On National Culture, an essay collected in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon foregrounds the by-line paradox content indistinguishability, while vital to the emergence of a Third World revolution, paradoxically limits much(prenominal) efforts at liberation because it re-inscribes an essentialist, totalizing, fetishized, much middle-class specific understanding of nation rather than encouraging a nuanced articulation of an oppressed lots cultural heterogeneity across class lines.In other words, although the c at a timept of nation below the belt characterizes colonized yields as historically unified in their primitiveness or exoticness, the terms promise of solidarity and unity often proves helpful nonethe little in their attempts at political amelioration. Fanon encourages a materialist conceptualization of the nation that is based not so much on joint cultural traditions or ancestor-worship as political agency and the joint attempt to dismantle the economic foundat ions of colonial rule.Colonialism, as Fanon argues, not only physically disarms the colonized subject but robs her of a pre-colonial cultural heritage. And yet, if colonialism in this sense galvanizes the native intellectual to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial spring of life of their people, Fanon is careful to point out that these attempts at recovering national continuity throughout history are often contrived and ultimately self-defeating.I am pass water to concede, he admits, that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not transfigure anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today. In the passage below, Fanon explains that national identity only carries meaning insofar as it reflects the combined revolutionary efforts of an oppressed people aiming at collective liberation A national culture is not a folklore, not an abstract populism that believes it can endanger the peoples true nature.It i s not do up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.