Reflections on "On National Culture" from Wretched of the Earth (Pages 159-160, 170-172)

In his chapter on National Culture, Fanon explores the divergence of cultural expression from cultural reality in the colonial context. In doing so, he articulates the troubling paradoxes that plague the colonized intellectual’s response to the colonial assault on national culture. In this essay, I will explore the two distinct problems with a retreat into the ontological safety of colonized intellectual’s distant and imagined native culture that Fanon highlights and why his analysis here impacted me.

For Fanon, the colonized intellectual is caught between his alienation from (and subsequent hatred of) white culture and his inability to find amongst the “mindlessness” of his continent a “cultural stimulus comparable to the glorious panorama flaunted by the colonizer”. Therefore, the colonized intellectual develops a heightened sensitivity, which can be interpreted as a propensity to glorify cultural artifact and custom for the sake of finding one’s place in the world. This propensity may allow the colonized intellectual to ascend to great heights of cultural expression in art and literature, but ultimately does nothing to productively inform “the routine of daily life” because the sum of his emphasis on culture, tradition, and costumes is to Fanon, a banal quest for the exotic. Herein lies the first of the aforementioned paradoxes. The colonized intellectual seeks to be “a dirty n***er” as defined by white man. On the one hand, the desire of these intellectuals who have been assimilated into European culture to merge with the “scum” successfully undermines the colonizer’s mission to save the native from himself. But what Fanon so aptly argues is that at the same time the techniques being used for resistance are those that are “borrowed from the occupier”. Fanon here is referring to the colonized intellectual's exoticization of every artifact of the cultural landscape and the glorification of cultural particularisms, whether that be costume, language, or ritual. That is to say that the colonized intellectual reifies not national culture but (often) obsolete and invalidated cultural expressions that are far removed from the daily lives of the inhabitants. Fanon’s analysis here is impactful (for me) because it addresses a common and criminal simplification of national culture that is found in anti-imperial discourses even today. Too often an assault on culture is met with reactionary elements that end up driving culture backward, associating progress and change with ceding to the enemy. No where is this better illustrated than with discourses on Islam in the era of the war on terror. The fear of state endorsed polemics from the West limits the capacity for rational discourse and undermines the progress made with respect to the expansion of women's role in religion or the inclusion of minorities in mainstream faith.

Furthermore, Fanon shows how the colonized intellectual's approach does a disservice to the progress of national culture. Fanon highlights that amidst armed revolutionary struggle, tradition becomes dynamic and changes meaning. The fight for national culture is primarily a fight for national liberation which is the necessary pre-condition for culture ad not the revival of cultural traditions and particularisms. This once again leads us to a paradox that plagues the colonized intellectuals approach, this time being one that undermines the dynamism of national culture amidst armed struggle. Fanon refers to culture being condemned to “clandestinity”, that is to say culture being divorced from national liberation as a consequence of the colonial mission of cultural destruction. Once again, on the one hand, asserting cultural particularisms may successfully undermine this mission just as the mission to save the native from himself was undermined (as previously mentioned). But Fanon argues that such demonstration at the same time “refers us back to the laws of inertia” wherein “no offensive is launched” and “no relations (are) redefined”. Fanon goes so far as to say that such practices radically reduce the cultural landscape, introducing a rigidity and atrophy wherein there is little development and movement. Therefore, in seeking to revive neglected traditions, the colonized intellectual goes against the progress of his own people involved in the armed struggle for liberation. Fanon's analysis is (for me) crucial in understanding how national culture in the post-colonial period should remain in the face of assault a collective thought process whereby a people assert their strength and not an exoticization of particularisms. Seeking to preserve cultural artifacts (such as religious practice in the case of of the war on terror) in the face of an assault on national existence instead of pursuing liberation through any means obstructs progress towards the ultimate goal of freedom.