Native Culture and Literature under Colonialism: Fanon’s Theory of Native Resistance and Development

Mhd Noor Al-Abbood

doi:10.5539/ells.v2n3p121

Abstract

This article provides a critique of Fanon’s three-stage narrative of native literary and cultural development. Fanon envisions a “stage-ist” narrative of native culture and literature moving teleologically from a moment of total identification with the colonizers to a moment of total freedom, through an ambivalent stage of nativist resistance. The main question this article addresses is: can we take this narrative, with its explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions, as a paradigm of native cultural and literary anti-colonialism? My argument is that such a narrative does indeed provide indispensable insights in illuminating specific moments or in critically explaining certain themes in the native culture of opposition. Fanon shows acute understanding of the salient issues relating to nationalism and nativism, their constructions of identity and of the past, and their relationship to the West in general. I have nevertheless found that this narrative cannot be upheld as paradigmatic of the colonial experience as such. For it is implicitly premised on the Caribbean colonial experience which is particular enough not to be generalized. The limitations of Fanon’s views, which underestimate the vitality and power of native culture, stem from his conception of colonial power as absolute, at least at the early stage of the colonial relationship. This conception of colonial power as total does not, however, take into account the various ways in which this power has been exercised and resisted at different times and in different places.

Highlights

Tracing the works of the native writers, Frantz Fanon (1967) claims that it is possible to envision a three-phase narrative, or “a panorama on three levels” (p.178)
In the first stage, which he calls as the “period of unqualified assimilation”, the colonized native writer’s literary production shows that he is completely assimilated into the culture of the colonizer
In order to profitably evaluate his literary theory and criticism, there will be a need to look at the history of colonial literatures and cultures to be able to gauge how far his proposed model can be related

Summary

Introduction

Tracing the works of the native writers, Frantz Fanon (1967) claims that it is possible to envision a three-phase narrative, or “a panorama on three levels” (p.178). The tendency to follow metropolitan aesthetic and cultural trends is manifested, according to Fanon, in the emergence in peripheral literatures, of Parnassian, symbolist and surrealist fiction and poetry (p.179) At this stage the native writers’ identification with the colonizing culture is total: “[t]heir writings correspond point by point with those of their respective numbers in the mother country” (pp.178179). Joining the masses in their national liberation movement, the native writer will not be able only “to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of his people,” but he will become “the mouthpiece of a new reality in action” (p.179). This is basically the narrative of native literary and intellectual development that Fanon constructs. In order to profitably evaluate his literary theory and criticism, there will be a need to look at the history of colonial literatures and cultures to be able to gauge how far his proposed model can be related

The Early Stage: in the Beginning There Were Only Mimic Men

The Second Stage

The Third Stage