Chapter 2
Colonial and post-colonial theories: Frantz Fanon and
Gayatri Spivak
2.1. Introduction
In this chapter, at first the theoretical framework of colonial and post-colonial studies will be
discussed. Then, the methodological considerations will be elaborated. Moreover, the origin and
the history of colonial and post-colonial studies will be discussed.
Then, the definition of colonial and post-colonial studies and their backgrounds from the
viewpoints of critics such as, Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(February 24, 1942) are used in relation to both theories. Additionally, other known critics, such
as Edward Said, R. Siva Kumar and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point of view regarding both colonial
and post-colonial studies have been applies in this thesis.
Finally, this chapter will be narrowed down to the definitions of various elements of
colonialization, which are Western thought—deductive reasoning, rule of law and monotheism.
Western thought—deductive reasoning will take into consideration and interprets according to
Fanon’s view. Rule of law concerning religious signs will be discussed regarding Spivak attitude
toward rule of law. Also other critic’s views, which are related to this thesis, will be applied.
2.2. Fanon and colonialization
Frantz Fanon is a crucial figure in modern literary and colonial theory. His works have been
influential in a wide variety of theoretical trends and practices, including colonialism, political
racialism, and post-colonialism studies. Fanon is one of a handful of writers who can be said to
have established the foundations for modern literary and colonial theory. To understand theory
today one must come to know about and engage with his work.
As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critical analysis of the
culturally inaccurate representations that are the bases of Orientalism — the Western study of
the Eastern world that presents how Westerners perceive and represent Orientals. That because
Orientalist scholarship was and remains inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that
produced it, much of the work is inherently political and servile to power, and so
is intellectually suspect. The thesis of Orientalism is the politics of discourse applied to the
Middle East; the Orientalist discourse arises from a particular, political culture — defined by the
presuppositions of the political culture — which, in turn, shape the political culture and the
political culture of the subject area.
Fanon is best known for the classic analysis of colonialism and decolonization, The Wretched of
the Earth. The Wretched of the Earth was first published in 1961 by Éditions Maspero, with a
preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. In it Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and
violence in the struggle for national liberation. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much
of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century.
Postcolonialism is the critical destabilization of the theories (intellectual and linguistic, social
and economic) that support the ways of Western thought—deductive reasoning, rule of
law and monotheism—by means of which colonialists "perceive", "understand", and "know" the
world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for the subaltern peoples to speak
for themselves, in their own voices, and so produce cultural discourses, of philosophy and
language, of society and economy, which balance the imbalanced us-and-them binary powerrelationship between the colonist and the colonial subject.
For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer
military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the
only "language" the colonizer speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the
colonists upon the colonized. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse
pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns
to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature.
The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are recognized to
contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work, including his doctoral
thesis, has received little attention. As a result, Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of
violence (it would be more accurate to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence)
and his ideas have been extremely oversimplified. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work
ignores the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. For example, the fifth chapter
of Black Skin, White Masks translates, literally, as "The Lived Experience of the Black"
("L'expérience vécue du Noir"), but Markmann's translation is "The Fact of Blackness", which
leaves out the massive influence of phenomenology on Fanon's early work.
In his introduction to the 1961 edition of The Wretched of the Earth, the philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre supported Frantz Fanon’s advocacy of justified violence by the colonized people against
the foreign colonizer, as necessary for their mental health and political liberation; Sartre later
applied that introduction in Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964), a politico–philosophic
critique of France’s Algerian colonialism. The political focus derives from the first chapter of the
book, “Concerning Violence”, wherein Fanon indicts colonialism and its post-colonial legacies,
for which violence is a means of catharsis and liberation from being a colonial subject.
Nonetheless, in the foreword to the 2004 edition of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Homi K.
Bhabha criticized Sartre’s introduction, stating that it limits the reader’s approach to the book to
focus on its promotion of violent resistance to oppression.
The Wretched of the Earth presents thorough critiques of nationalism and of imperialism, a
discussion of personal and societal mental health, a discussion of how the use of language
(vocabulary)
is
applied
to
the
establishment
of
imperialist
identities,
such
ascolonizer and colonized in order to teach and psychologically mold the native and the colonist
into their respective roles as slave and master, and a discussion of the role of the intellectual in
a revolution. Fanon proposes that revolutionaries should seek the help of the lumpenproletariat to
provide the force required to effect the expulsion of the colonists. Moreover, in
traditional Marxist theory, the lumpenproletariat are considered the lowest, most degraded
stratum of the proletariat social-class — especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed —
people who lacked the class consciousness to actively participate in the anti-colonial revolution.
Yet, Fanon applies the term lumpenproletariat to identify the colonial subjects who are not
involved in industrial production, especially the peasantry, because, unlike the urban proletariat
(the working class), the lumpenproletariat have sufficient intellectual independence from
the dominant ideology of the colonial ruling class to readily grasp that they can successfully
revolt against the colonial status quo, and so decolonize their nation.
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the
land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth)
A decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity from the cultural interactions among the
types of identity (cultural, national, ethnic) and the social relations of sex, class, and caste;
determined by the gender and the race of the colonized person; and the racism inherent to the
structures of a colonial society. In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyses
the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial
subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the colonizer; how such cultural resistance
complicated the establishment of a colonial society; how the colonizers developed their
postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the Us-and-Them binary social
relation to view the non-Western world as inhabited by The Other.
“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism
versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon,
is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how
devastating the consequences may be.” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)
2.3 Fanon and Western thought
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people,
commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced,
decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it--relationships
between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the
police, on the directing boards of national or private banks--decolonization is quite simply the
replacing of a certain "species" of men by another "species" of men. Without any period of
transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution. It is true that we could equally
well stress the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state, its diplomatic relations, and its
economic and political trends. But we have precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula
rasa which characterizes at the outset all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it
constitutes, from the very first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the
proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The
extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for
this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the
lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally
experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men
and women: the colonizers.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor
of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say
that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.
Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in
fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by
the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence
together--that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler--was carried on by dint of a
great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the
settler is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well. For it is the settler who has brought the
native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very
existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system.
Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them
fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors,
with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into
existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity.
Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its
legitimacy to any supernatural power; the "thing" which has been colonized becomes man during
the same process by which it frees itself.
“The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a
justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is
responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that
colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all
form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts,
disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance
today.” (Frantz Fanon, ibid.)
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks
and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official,
instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist
societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed
down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty
years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and
good behavior--all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create
around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the
task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors
and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the
contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct
action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to
budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The
intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up
and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the
bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.
The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The
two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure
Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is
possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers' town is a strongly built town, all
made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the
garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, and unknown and hardly thought about. The
settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to
see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and
even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly
is always full of good things. The settlers' town is a town of white people, of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the
medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born
there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world
without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of
the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light.
The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a
town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of
lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession--all manner of possession: to sit at the
settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an
envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains
bitterly, always on the defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for there is no native
who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler's place.
“Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for
that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in
conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to
show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why
Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.” (Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks)
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different
species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the
immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine
at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with
the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the
economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich
because you are white, yon are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should
always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.
Everything up to and including the very nature of precapitalist society, so well explained by
Marx, must here be thought out again. The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a
reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory difference. In the colonies, the
foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In
defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a
foreigner. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which
distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come
from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, "the others."
The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly
drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the
systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence
will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in
his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is
henceforward a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and which
may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people. To break
up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of
communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no
more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its
expulsion from the country.
Fanon also paralleled the writing of his contemporary, Albert Memmi, who wrote of the
“colonizer” and “colonized”, in appropriate Structuralist language. Fanon dealt with language
and pointed out that when the black man speaks the language of the white man, the black man
assumes the culture and the civilization of his oppressor. The conqueror has no interest in the
culture of the conquered who are considered in need of civilizing. As a result of the civilizing
mission the mask of imperialism, colonized people have been stripped of their own languages
and, without their own culture, they lived with inferiority complex. The colonized individual is
faced with the “superior” culture that dominates her and is “elevated” above “jungle status” only
to the extent that he adopts the mother country’s standards, from language to learning.
“I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a
certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a
culture, to support the weight of a civilization,” he wrote. The black man who approaches the white world
and attempts to fit in-to learn French, to be educated in France, to live in France-becomes “white” only to
his black friends but remains irredeemably “black” among white people. Like W.E.B. DuBois called
“two-ness”, or the sense of being caught between cultures, a state that Fanon called “two dimensions” or
“self-division” or what DuBois called “doubt consciousness”. This self-division is the result of
colonialism and subjugation by the colonizer. The result is a psychotic break that is a recognizable metal
illness.
Descended from slaves captured in African to work the plantations of the Caribbean, Fanon writes of the
mental state of “the modern Negro” as a “clinical study.” “The black man becomes whiter as he
renounces his blackness, his jungle.” “The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his
blackness.” The black man wants only to break through this “seal” which is the white belief in white
superiority to show the richness of black culture and African intellect. In other words, the black
man/slave wants recognition form the white man/master. The black man has only one way out of his
inferiority and that escape route is through the white world. The result of this contact or impact of
whitening is that the black man is radically changed into what Fanon refereed as an “absolute mutation”
with the result of “ego-withdrawal” or “restriction” or a renunciation of authenticity to avoid the pain.
The accommodation of the black man to the white man brings no rewards, only alienation, and this
alienation or de-humanization, is the object of Fanon’s study. Writing in the early fifties and early sixties,
Fanon could see no way out for either of the parties. “The Negro is enslaved by his inferiority, the white
man is enslaved by his superiority”. The neurotic withdrawal of the black man is a defense mechanism
and the Negro become abnormal due to the trauma of his encounter with white culture. Desiring the
approval of the white man, the black man becomes impaired in his development and becomes one
sided. In his deeply felt book, Fanon explains, more eloquently than any Hegelian variation on the One
and the Other, what it is like to be judged negatively on the color of one’s skin. Fanon combined
psychoanalysis and Marxism, understanding that colonized people were traumatized and could never
create their own cultures unless they were truly liberated. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon described
the process of “decolonization,”
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it
cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure
that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is
the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact, opposed to
each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification
which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. The first encounter was
marked by violence and their existence together–that is to say the xpoloiatiaonof the native by he
settler–was carried on by dine of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the
nataive are old acquaitances.
Fanon was a warrior and a healer. He actually fought against fascism in the Second World War and was
disgusted with the racism of the Allies. The American military was shamefully segregated and racist
elements at home in Washington D. C. plotted to prevent soldiers of color from voting in federalized
elections. The British military, as well as the Free French, kept their colonials carefully separate. After the
war, even the French Communist Party supported the continuation of colonialism, perhaps because to be a
colonial power would still mean something to the nation’s prestige. It was his disgust that led Fanon to
participate as a revolutionary in the Algerian uprising against their French masters. Fanon also
participated, as a teacher, in what we would term terrorist activities. Indeed, modern terrorism has as one
of its beginning moments, the war in Algeria. Fanon realized, however, that the revolutionaries were like
any other revolutionary power: essentially bourgeois and wanting only to take over power from the
French and to maintain the class and religious oppressions that the French had set up. As he stated, “For
the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”
2.4. Gayatri Spivak and Colonial Master Sign
In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term Subaltern, the philosopher and
theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautioned against assigning an over-broad connotation;
that:
. . . subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for The Other, for somebody who's not getting a
piece of the pie. . . . In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural
imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The
working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the
least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the
university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern' . . . They should see what the mechanics of the
discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being
allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.
— Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa (1992)
Spivak also introduced the terms essentialism and strategic essentialism to describe the social
functions of postcolonialism. The termessentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to
reviving subaltern voices in ways that might (over) simplify the cultural identity of
heterogeneous social groups, and, thereby, create stereotyped representations of the different
identities of the people who compose a given social group. The term strategic
essentialism denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the praxis of discourse among
peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can occasionally be applied—by the so-described people—to
facilitate the subaltern's communication in being heeded, heard, and understood, because a
strategic essentialism (a fixed and established subaltern identity) is more readily grasped, and
accepted, by the popular majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important
distinction, between the terms, is that strategic essentialism does not ignore the diversity of
identities (cultural and ethnic) in a social group, but that, in its practical function, strategic
essentialism temporarily minimizes inter-group diversity to pragmatically support the essential
group-identity.
Spivak developed and applied Foucault's term epistemic violence to describe the destruction of
non–Western ways of perceiving the world, and the resultant dominance of the Western ways of
perceiving the world. Conceptually, epistemic violence specifically relates to women, whereby
the "Subaltern [woman] must always be caught in translation, never [allowed to be] truly
expressing herself", because the colonial power's destruction of her culture pushed to the social
margins her non–Western ways of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world.
In June of the year 1600, the Afro–Iberian woman Francisca de Figueroa requested from
the King of Spain his permission for her to emigrate from Europe to New Spain, and reunite with
her daughter, Juana de Figueroa. As a subaltern woman, Francisca repressed her native African
language, and spoke her request in Peninsular Spanish, the official language of Colonial Latin
America. As a subaltern woman, she applied to her voice the Spanish cultural filters of sexism,
Christian monotheism, and servile language, in addressing her colonial master:
I, Francisca de Figueroa, mulatta in colour, declare that I have, in the city of Cartagena, a daughter named
Juana de Figueroa; and she has written, to call for me, in order to help me. I will take with me, in my
company, a daughter of mine, her sister, named María, of the said colour; and for this, I must write to Our
Lord the King to petition that he favour me with a licence, so that I, and my said daughter, can go and
reside in the said city of Cartagena. For this, I will give an account of what is put down in this report; and
of how I, Francisca de Figueroa, am a woman of sound body, and mulatta in colour . . . And my daughter
María is twenty-years-old, and of the said colour, and of medium size. Once given, I attest to this. I beg
your Lordship to approve, and order it done. I ask for justice in this.
[On the twenty-first day of the month of June 1600, Your Majesty's Lords Presidents and Official Judges
of this House of Contract Employment order that the account she offers be received, and that testimony
for the purpose she requests given.]
— Afro–Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero–Atlantic World: 1550–1812 (2009)
Moreover, Spivak further cautioned against ignoring subaltern peoples as "cultural Others", and
said that the West could progress—beyond the colonial perspective—by means of introspective
self-criticism of the basic ideals and investigative methods that establish a culturally superior
West studying the culturally inferior non–Western peoples. Hence, the integration of the
subaltern voice to the intellectual spaces of social studies is problematic, because of the
unrealistic opposition to the idea of studying "Others"; Spivak rejected such an anti-intellectual
stance by social scientists, and about them said that "to refuse to represent a cultural Other is
salving your conscience . . . allowing you not to do any homework." Moreover, postcolonial
studies also reject the colonial cultural depiction of subaltern peoples as hollow mimics of the
European colonists and their Western ways; and rejects the depiction of subaltern peoples as the
passive recipient-vessels of the imperial and colonial power of the Mother Country. Consequent
to Foucault’s philosophic model of the binary relationship of power and knowledge, scholars
from the Subaltern Studies Collective, proposed that anti-colonial resistance always counters
every exercise of colonial power.
“Gayatri Spivak’s long-awaited book…sets out to challenge the very fields Spivak has herself
been most associated with—postcolonial studies and third world feminism… [A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason] is remarkable for the warnings it provides—powerful critiques of diverse
positions structure the author’s stance—as guardian in the margin. Spivak forcefully interrogates
the practices, politics and subterfuges of intellectual formations ranging from nativism, elite
poststructuralist theory, metropolitan feminism, cultural Marxism, global hybridism, and ‘white
boys talking postcoloniality.’
In critical theory and postcolonialism, subaltern refers to the populations that are socially,
politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colonyand of the
colonial homeland. In describing "history told from below", the term subaltern is derived
from Antonio Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony, which identified the groups that are
excluded from a society's established structures for political representation and therefore denied
the means by which people have a voice in their society.
The terms subaltern and Subaltern Studies entered postcolonial studies through the works of
the Subaltern Studies Group, a collection of south Asian historians who explored the politicalactor role of the men and women who comprise the mass population—rather than the political
roles of the social and economic elites—in the history of south Asia. Marxist historians had
already been investigating colonial history as told from the perspective of the proletariat, using
the concept of social classes as being determined by economic relations. In the
1970s, subaltern began to denote the colonized peoples of the Indian subcontinent and described
a new perspective of the history of an imperialcolony as told from the point of view of the
colonized rather than that of the colonizers. In the 1980s, the scope of enquiry of Subaltern
Studies was applied as an "intervention in South Asian historiography".
Gayatri Spivak's line of reasoning was developed in Geographies of Postcolonialism (2008),
wherein Joanne Sharp proposed that Western intellectuals relegate other, non-Western (African,
Asian, Middle Eastern) forms of knowing—of acquiring knowledge of the world—to the margins
of intellectual discourse, by re-formulating said forms of knowing as myth and as folklore.
Therefore, in order to be heard and known, the oppressed subaltern must adopt Western ways
of knowing, of thought, reasoning, and language; because of such Westernization, a subaltern
people can never express their ways of knowing (thought, reasoning, language) and instead must
conform expression of their non–Western knowledge of colonial life to Western ways of
knowing the world.[10] The subaltern's abandonment of his and her culturally customary ways of
thinking—and subsequent adoption of Western ways of thinking—is necessary in many postcolonial situations. The subordinated man and woman can only be heard by his oppressors if he
or she speaks the language of the oppressor; thus, intellectual and cultural filters of conformity
muddle the true voice of the subaltern. For example, in Colonial Latin America, the oppressed
subaltern must conform to the colonial culture and utilize the filters of religion and servitude, in
his or her language, when addressing the Spanish Imperial oppressor. In order to appeal to the
good graces of their Spanish oppressors, slaves and natives would mask their own voices with
the culture of the Spanish Crown.
If an abrupt leaping from Jane Eyre to the Asiatic Mode of Production challenges the staider
compositional notions of white male scholars, it also has more than a smack of good old
American eclecticism about it. In this gaudy, all-licensed supermarket of the mind, any idea can
apparently be permutated with any other. What some might call dialectical thinking is for others
a pathological inability to stick to the point. The line between post-colonial hybridity and PostModern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin. As feminist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist
and post-colonialist together, Spivak seems reluctant to be left out of any theoretical game in
town. Multiplying one’s options is an admirable theoretical posture, as well as a familiar bit of
US market philosophy. For Spivak to impose a coherent narrative on her materials, even if her
title spuriously suggests one, would be the sin of teleology, which banishes certain topics just as
imperialism sidelines certain peoples. But if cultural theorists these days can bound briskly from
allegory to the Internet, in a kind of intellectual version of Attention Deficit Disorder, it is partly
because they are free from the inevitably constricting claims of a major political project. Lateral
thinking is thus not altogether easy to distinguish from loss of political purpose. Even the books
which Spivak has not written cluster like unquiet ghosts within her footnotes, reluctant to be
excluded. Indeed, an essay remains to be written on the unpublished writings of Gayatri Spivak,
which would take as its subject all those footnotes in which she has announced a work which
never actually appeared, or – as here – describes a work that she will not or cannot write.
Spivak’s hankering to say everything at once is not perhaps entirely innocent of a desire to
impress; but it is a great deal more than that, just as the obscurity of a theorist’s style can
sometimes signal insecurity quite as much as arrogance. The fact is that Spivak has a quite
formidable span of reference, which leaves most other cultural theorists looking dismally
parochial. Few of them could remotely match the range and versatility of this book, which
stretches from Hegelian philosophy and the historical archives of colonial India to Post-Modern
culture and international trade. Much post-colonial writing behaves as though the relations
between the North and South of the globe were primarily a ‘cultural’ affair, thus allowing literary
types to muscle in on rather more weighty matters than insect imagery in the later James. Spivak,
by contrast, has a proper scorn for such ‘culturalism’, even if she shares a good many of its
assumptions. She does not make the mistake of imagining that an essay on the figure of the
woman inA Passage to India is inherently more threatening to the transnational corporations than
an inquiry into Thackeray’s use of the semi-colon. The relations between North and South are
not primarily about discourse, language or identity but about armaments, commodities,
exploitation, migrant labour, debt and drugs; and this study boldly addresses the economic
realities which too many post-colonial critics culturalise away. (For some of them these days,
any reference to the economic is ipso facto ‘economistic’, just as any allusion to the lungs or
kidneys is ‘biologistic’.) If Spivak knows about graphemics, she also knows about the garment
industry. It helps, too, that she is among the most coruscatingly intelligent of all contemporary
theorists, whose insights can be idiosyncratic but rarely less than original. She has probably done
more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global
academia, than almost any of her theoretical colleagues. And like all such grandes maîtresses,
she has now to deal with that ultimate source of embarrassment, her devoted acolytes.
2.5. Fanon and Culture
Frantz Fanon's speech (in French) before the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in
Paris in September 1956 and published in the Special Issue of Presence Africaine, JuneNovember, 1956, remains a classic study of Racism and Culture.
(From the foreword to Frantz Fanon: Toward the African Revolution, published by Writers and Readers
Publishing Cooperative, London, 1980): - "Frantz Fanon was born in the West Indies on the Island of
Martinique in 1925. From there, he went to France to study medicine, specializing in psychiatry. His
studies completed, he accepted a post on the staff of a hospital outside Algiers. Here he was able to
observe what he had already personally experienced as a black brought up in a French colony: the
psychological effects of colonization. He joined the rebels and committed himself to the Algerian struggle
for liberation. His dedication, his extraordinary insight into the psychology of oppression, marked him as
one of the most articulate champions of the Algerian Revolution and of those oppressed by colonialism
and neocolonialism the world over. Fanon did not live to see an independent Algeria. In 1961, it was
discovered that he was suffering from leukemia and he died in December of that year at the age of 36. His
works continue to ignite the imagination of readers. The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism,
Black Skin, White Masks and Toward an African Revolution speak to us in the voice of the Third
World."
Tamils living in many lands, but without a land of their own, will find in Fanon's observations
insights which reach far beyond the historic moment that he addressed. For them, as well as for
Frantz Fanon cultural growth and political freedom go hand in hand.
"...nations that undertake a colonial war have no concern for the confrontation of cultures. War is a
gigantic business and every approach must be governed by this datum. The enslavement, in the strictest
sense, of the native population is the prime necessity..... Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective
murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social
panorama is destructured; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied...
What makes us recall Frantz Fanon now, particularly his memorable works on the “African
revolution” and the “wretched of the earth”? Has Fanon been long gone already? It is barely a
decade since racism disappeared from South Africa and since national popular conferences made
their voice heard across the continent. It is barely a few years since the Durban anti-racism
conference was held. Since Fanon wrote “Black Skin, White Masks” in 1952 and the Wretched
of the Earth” in 1961, hardly a decade went by without someone rediscovering the value of
“human consciousness” and the need for a “second wave of national liberation, for a continual
African revolution in the broadest sense of the word: a catharsis.
Fanon was not just preoccupied with probing the political or economic origins of colonialism; he
dealt with colonialism as a situation of dehumanization caused by Euro-centricity and its
negation of the other. He methodically applied psychological research – among other things - to
the colonial phenomenon, focusing more on the general social situation than on individual case
studies. This helped him identify the global aspect of colonialism. With the first wave of political
independence, 1950s Fanon was able to grasp the meaning of neo-colonialism as it transpired in
regimes that grappled, less than successfully, with the issue of liberation. The term “neocolonialism” had to wait for the All African Peoples’ Conference in Cairo in 1961 to gain
currency.
With this wide-reaching understanding of colonialism and imperialism, Fanon invented the terms
“containment” and “negation” to analyze the situation in Third World countries ruled by colonial
powers. He gave much thought to this state of affairs – which extended from the Caribbean to the
Arab world and encompassed large parts of Africa – focusing particularly on settler colonialism
and apartheid. Although some of his critics deny it, Fanon’s insight went beyond these specific
points, particularly as he discussed the Congo and other colonized regions. He examined the
significance of “colonial hegemony” in the colonized communities, their cultures, and the human
situation in general. He defined “colonial violence” in a broad sense, incorporating the way in
which blacks would assume “white masks” as a result of the tension between colonizer and
colonized.
2.6. Conclusion
In the final lines of this essay, I will turn to the question I posed at the beginning. Why do we
need to revisit Fanon’s ideas today? In my view, -contrary to those who recall fanon as romanticFanon offers excellent analysis of the spontaneous role of the marginalized masses and their
movement toward potential consciousness and away from tangible subconscious. Lacking in
political organization and deprived from a democratic civil society and intellectuals speaking on
their behalf, the masses of the Third World (particularly in Africa and the Arab world) are now
prone to spontaneous uprisings, particularly in cities filled with the unemployed and the excluded
surrounded by shanty towns. Their situation matches the one Fanon so aptly described.
As for the peasants, the circumstances surrounding the agricultural question worldwide, the
actions of the WTO, the ongoing exchanges between Europe and the US, food shortages, the
alienation of African and South peasants in matters concerning food supplies, all of the above is
related to the mechanisms of world capitalism. All of this should remind us of the “peasant
question” that Fanon spoke about, as well as his references to the “indigenous bourgeoisie” in
“dependent” countries.
The question of women and gender also recalls Fanon’s ideas on the sociological position of
women and the need for a comprehensive approach to address women’s problems in developing
countries. Women need more than just a few rights. They deserve more than nominal
participation in power structures they didn’t help create, they need to be part and parcel the
structural change.
The bulk of Fanon’s work and life focuses on “imperial repression”, a phenomenon now visible
across the Third World. As the globalization proceeds with overwhelming military force to
negate people and societies and suppress freedom and choices, one is tempted to foresee a
“second wave of national liberation”, a conversion between the self-awareness of the intellectual
and the collective awareness of the oppressed masses. In less than half a century, we are back to
the questions Fanon raised in the Wretched of the Earth as well as we are in need of new
Bandung.
The crisis of the agricultural situation brings us back to the roots of the peasant question. As the
situation of the unemployed and marginalized in cities deteriorates because of current policies,
and as unorganized popular uprisings become regular events in the Arab- African region and
elsewhere, Fanon’s work becomes as relevant as ever.