Anticolonialism and Violence
Born in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) studied psychiatry in France before moving on to work in Algeria in the early 1950s. Fanon became a member of the Algerian revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) and an ardent advocate of decolonization. Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952 with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, was a study of the psychological effects of colonialism and racism on black culture and individuals. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was a revolutionary manifesto, one of the most influential of the period. Fanon attacked nationalist leaders for their ambition and corruption. He believed that revolutionary change could come only from poor peasants, those who "have found no bone to gnaw in the colonial system." Diagnosed with leukemia, Fanon sought treatment in the Soviet Union and then in Washington, DC, where he died.
N decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: "The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. . . .
The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.
You do not turn any society, however primitive it may be, upside down with such a program if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actual formation of that program, to overcome all the obstacles that you will come across in so doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all time.
From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.
Source: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: 1963), pp. 35-37.
Questions for Analysis
1. Why did Fanon believe that violence lay at the heart of both the colonial relationship and anticolonial movements?
2. What arguments would he offer to counter Gandhi?
Cesaire (1913-2008), the surrealist poet from Martinique, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal (1906-2001). Cesaire and Senghor were brilliant students, educated in the most elite French universities, and elected to the French National Assembly. Cesaire became an important political figure in Martinique, a French Caribbean colony that became a department of France in 1946. In 1960, Senghor was elected the first president of Senegal. Both men, in important respects models of Frenchness, became the most influential exponents of Negritude, which could be translated as “black consciousness” or “black pride.” Senghor wrote:
Assimilation was a failure. We could assimilate
Mathematics of the French language, but we could
Never strip off our black skins or root out black souls. And so we set out on a fervent quest for. . . our collective soul. Negritude is the whole complex of civilized values—cultural, economic, social and political—which characterize the black people.
Cesaire’s early work took its lead from surrealism and the exploration of consciousness. Later, his work became more political. Discourse on Colonialism (1950) was a powerful indictment of the material and spiritual squalor of colonialism, which, he argued, not only dehumanized colonial subjects but degraded the colonizers themselves.
Cesaire’s student Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), also from Martinique, went further. He argued that withdrawing into an insular black culture (as he interpreted Negritude) was not an effective response to racism. People of color, he believed, needed a theory of radical social change. Fanon trained in psychiatry and worked in Algeria, where he became a member of the National Liberation Front. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he examined the effects of colonialism and racism from the point of view of a radical psychiatrist. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) became one of the most influential revolutionary manifestos of the period. More than Cesaire, and bluntly rejecting Gandhi’s theories and practice, Fanon argued that violence was rooted in colonialism and, therefore, in anticolonial movements. But he also believed that many anticolonial leaders would be corrupted by their ambition and by collaboration with former colonial powers. Revolutionary change, he believed, could come only from poor peasants, or those who “have found no bone to gnaw in the colonial system.”
How did these writers fit into postwar culture? Western intellectuals sought to revive humanism and democratic values after the atrocities of the Second World War. Fanon and others pointed out that the struggles over colonialism made that project more difficult; the violent repression of anticolonial movements in places such as Algeria seemed to be a relapse into brutality. They pointed to the ironies of Europe’s “civilizing mission” and demanded a reevaluation of blackness as a central concept in Western culture. The
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986). A philosopher, novelist, memoirist, and path-breaking theorist of sex and gender, Beauvoir's work challenged widespread beliefs about femininity and womanhood.
West’s postwar recovery would entail eventually facing this challenge to the universal claims of its culture.
The French existentialist writers, most prominently Jean-Paul Sartre (SAHR-truh, 1905-1980) and Albert Camus (KAM-oo, 1913-1960), put the themes of individuality, commitment, and choice at center stage. The existentialists took themes from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, reworking them in the new context of war-torn Europe. Their starting point was that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, meaning in life is not given but created. Thus, individuals were “condemned to be free” and to give their lives meaning by making choices and accepting responsibility. To deny one’s freedom or responsibility was to act in “bad faith.” War, collaboration and resistance, genocide, and the development of weapons of mass destruction all provided specific points of reference and gave these abstractions new meaning. The existentialists’ writing was also clear and accessible, which contributed to their enormous popularity. Although Sartre wrote philosophical treatises, he also published plays and short stories. Camus’s own experience in the resistance gave him tremendous moral authority—he became the symbol of a new generation. His novels—including The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956)—often revolved around metaphors for the war, showing that people were responsible for their own dilemmas and, through a series of antiheroes, exploring the limited ability of men and women to help each other.
Existentialist insights opened other doors. The existentialist approach to race, for instance, emphasized that no meaning inhered in skin color; instead, race derived meaning from a lived experience or situation. As Frantz Fanon wrote, white and black exist “only insofar as they create one another.” The same approach could be applied to gender. In her famous introduction to The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir (duh bohv-WAHR, 1908-1986) argued, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Women, like men, were condemned to be free. Beauvoir went on to ask why women seemed to accept their secondary status or why, in her words, they “dreamed the dreams of men.” The scope and ambition of The Second Sex helped make it enormously influential; it was virtually encyclopedic, analyzing history, myth, biology, and psychology, bringing the insights of Marx and Freud to bear on the “woman question.” Beauvoir’s life also contributed to the book’s high profile. A brilliant student from a strict middle-class background, she had a lifelong affair with Sartre but did not marry him,
THE COLD WAR IN EVERYDAY LIFE. A Soviet matchbook label, 1960, depicts a Soviet fist destroying a U. S. plane. Soviet nationalism had been a potent force since the Second World War. ¦ Could the Soviet leadership sustain this nationalist sentiment without an external threat?
Leading many to romanticize her as a liberated and accomplished woman intellectual. She had little to do with feminism, however, until the late 1960s. When The Second Sex was published, it was associated with existentialism; only later would it become a key text of the women’s movement (see Chapter 28).
Memory and Amnesia: The Aftermath of War
The theme of individual helplessness in the face of state power ran through countless works of the period, beginning, most famously, with George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) and 1984 (1949). The American Joseph Heller’s wildly popular Catch-22 (1961) represented a form of popular existentialism, concerned with the absurdity of war and offering a biting commentary on regimentation and its toll on individual freedom. The Czech author Milan Kundera, who fled the repressive Czech government to live in Paris, eloquently captured the bittersweet efforts to resist senseless bureaucracy. Some writers expressed their despair by escaping into the absurd and fantastic. In Samuel Beckett’s deeply pessimistic Waiting for Godot (1953, by an Irishman in French) and in the Briton Harold Pinter’s Caretaker
(1960) and Homecoming (1965), nothing happens. Characters speak in banalities, paralyzed by the absurdity of modern times.
Other authors ventured into the realms of hallucination, science fiction, and fantasy. The novels of the Americans William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut carry readers from interior fantasies to outer space. One of the most popular books of the period was The Lord of the Rings (19541955), written before and during the Second World War by the Briton J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in the fantasy world of Middle Earth, Professor Tolkien’s tribute to the ancient Celtic and Scandinavian languages he studied and the power of human myths was seized on by a generation of young romantics who rebelled against postwar Western culture for their own reasons.
Questions of terror and dictatorship haunted social and political thought of the postwar era, and especially the work of emigres from Europe. Representatives of the “Frankfurt school” of German Marxism, by wartime refugees in the United States, sought to understand how fascism and Nazism had taken root in Western culture and politics. Theodor Adorno joined Max Horkheimer in a series of essays, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), the best known of which indicted the “culture industry” for depo-liticizing the masses and crippling democracy. Adorno also coauthored The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which used social surveys in an effort to discover how people become receptive to racism, prejudice, and dictatorship. Whatever the specific roots of German Nazism, the Frankfurt school suggested, there were also more general tendencies in modern societies that should give cause for concern.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a Jewish refugee from Germany, was the first to propose that both Nazism and Stalinism should be understood as forms of a novel, twentieth-century form of government: totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). Unlike earlier forms of tyranny or despotism, totalitarianism worked by mobilizing mass support. It used terror to crush resistance, break down political and social institutions, and atomize the public. Totalitarianism, Arendt argued, also forged new ideologies. Totalitarian regimes did not concern themselves with whether killing was justified by law; they justified camps and extermination by pointing to the objective laws of history or racial struggle. By unleashing destruction and eliminating entire populations, totalitarian politics made collective resistance virtually impossible. Arendt returned to the same theme in a provocative and disturbing essay on the trial of a Nazi leader, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). To many readers’ distress, she pointedly refused to demonize Nazism. Instead, she explored what she termed “the banality of evil”: how the rise of new forms of state power and
World History
