Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Dolce, libro consigliato Beginning Postcolonialism, McLeod

STOP AND THINK

1. Negritude inverts the terms of colonial discourses. It was a familiar trope (metafora) of colonial

discourses that black peoples were mysteriously 'closer to nature' than white Europeans. The Negritude

writers countered this view by accepting but celebrating their 'elemental' nature.

2. Negritude upholds (sostiene) separatist binary oppositions. Negritude used the binary distinctions

between white and black, African and European, common to many colonial discourses.

3. Negritude is nostalgic for a mythic African past. Negritude often posited a 'golden age' of pre-colonial

Africa from which black peoples had been separated by colonialism, and to which they must return.

4. Negritude has very little to say about gender differences and inequalities. Negritude makes a myth

of Africa's past, it is a male myth. It united black peoples around a masculinist representation of

blackness and cared little for the internal unequal relations of gender.

5) Frantz Fanon, national culture and national consciousness

Frantz Fanon in 1953 was appointed as head of the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria at a time when the

Algerian's struggle against France for national independence was mounting. Deeply affected by his

experiences of racism in North Africa during the war, and politicised by his work with Algerian patients

who suffered mental torment as a consequence of their subjugation to a colonial power, Fanon eventually

resigned his post to fight alongside the Algerians for independence and became a leading figure in their

struggle. Hated in France, he survived numerous attempts on his life during the 1950s before falling ill with

leukaemia. Fanon's writings cover a range of areas and have been influential in a number of fields.

In postcolonial studies, his work has been significant as providing a way of conceptualising the construction

of identity under colonialism and as a way of configuring the relationship between nation, nationalism, national

consciousness and national culture an anti-colonial context.

At the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome in 1959, Fanon stressed the urgent

responsibility of writers and intellectuals to forge new forms of national culture as part of the contribution to

the development of the people's national consciousness. Fanon's work advocated a more dynamic and

vacillating relationship between the past and the present. Fanon understood the objectives of Negritude and

recognised its urge uncritically to champion indigenous cultures in defiance of colonialist discourses. Fanon's

ideas were influenced more by Marxist notions of revolution, his theorising of the resistance to

colonialism ultimately refused an uncritical notion of an African past. Instead, national culture and national

consciousness were historical, dynamic things, fashioned by the people under particular conditions and

circumstances.

The term 'native intellectual' refers to the writers and thinkers of the colonised nation who have often been

educated under the auspices of the colonising power. The Western- educated native intellectual is in danger of

identifying more with the middle-class bourgeoise of the colonising nation than with the indigenous masses.

This complicates the role which the native intellectual plays in contributing to the people's anti-colonial

nationalist struggle. Fanon notes how native intellectuals have, in the past, attempted to cherish a

generalised pan- African culture in their resistance to colonial ways of seeing. This is because the historical

circumstances of African peoples in different parts of the globe cannot be so readily unified. An abstract

notion of a pan- African culture is to ignore the different conditions of African peoples in a variety of

locations, such as in America or the Caribbean. 'Every culture is first and foremost national'. National

consciousness is dependent in part on important cultural activities. National consciousness and

national culture are inseparable from each other. Intellectuals have a vital role to play in contributing to the

struggle, as Fanon indicates in three distinct phases:

1. In the first phase, the native intellectual attempts what Fanon calls 'unqualified assimilation'. This

means that he or she is inspired by and attempts to copy the dominant trends in the literature of the

colonising power. In so doing the cultural traditions of the colonised nation are ignored as the native

intellectual aspires to mimic and reproduce the cultural fashions of the colonising power.

2. In the second phase, the native intellectual grows dissatisfied with copying the coloniser and

begins the literature of 'just-before-the-battle' when the native intellectual begins to reflect on the past of

the people. The native intellectual becomes too concerned with cherishing (apprezzare) and speaking for

the past and ignores the people's struggles in the present. Glorifying the cultural achievements of the

past is not enough. A new way of mobilising inherited culture is required. This involves the native

intellectual connecting better with the people and being drawn into closer proximity to their condition

and endeavours.

3. The third phase, or 'fighting phase', in which the native intellectual becomes directly involved in the

people's struggle against colonialism. In this phase, he or she becomes conscious of his or her previous

estrangement from the people and realises that it is not enough to try to get back to the people in

that past out of which they have already emerged. A more dynamic relationship is forged between

the cultural resources of the past and the struggle against colonialism in the present. Traditional

culture is mobilised as part of the people's fight against oppression and it is transformed in the process.

The native intellectual must participate in the active reinterpretation of traditional cultural resources in the

present. The native intellectual has to learn from the people to modify, reinterpret and reform traditional

culture at the service of forging a new national consciousness in which the people's struggle is the

bedrock (fondamento).

Fanon emphasises national culture as a vital, unstable matter that is always being made and re-made. He

concludes by underlining the central role culture has to play in creating the conditions for a national

consciousness that can overcome colonialism and lay the foundations for a newly, and truly, independent

nation. Crucial to Fanon's articulation of national culture is his sense of culture as dynamic and responsive to

historical circumstances. Native intellectuals are schooled by the people and must take the struggle as their

guide in forging national consciousness and culture.

Fanon warns of the dangers ahead for colonised nations if those who come to occupy positions of power in

the nation betray the people in the interests of the privileged few. The achievement of self-

determination through the people's struggle is a first step. A nationalist victory against colonialism means

little if it does not secure the future of national consciousness and transform the nation once independence has

been realised. Little is achieved if the old seats of colonial government are simply occupied by a new

indigenous élite. Fanon is engaging with the issue of neo-colonialism: the perpetuation of a nation's

subservience to the interests of Europe, supported by an indigenous élite, after colonialism has formally

ended. He outlines how the newly independent nation may be administered by an indigenous middle

class that uses its privileged education and position cheerfully to replicate the colonial administration of the

nation for its own financial profit. This class is 'neo-colonial' in that it continues to exploit the people in a way

no dissimilar to the colonialists. It keeps the new nation economically linked to the interests of the old

colonial Western powers by allowing foreign companies to secure lucrative contracts in the new nation, by

continuing to send profits, goods and materials abroad rather than focus on improving the material existence of

the people. The national middle-class profit from these manoeuvres but this wealth never reaches the

people, who remain powerless and in poverty. A nation that remains economically dependent on the West,

and that treats its people in this way cannot call itself truly free.

Fanon warns that the achievement of independence is a beginning. As with the construction of national

consciousness, intellectuals and writers have an important role to play in maintaining this vigilance after

power has been seized.

6) Nationalist discourses, national culture

• They assert the rights of colonised peoples to make their own self-definitions;

• They offer the means by which divergent peoples within a colonised nation can co-ordinate

solidarity across cultural, educational and class differences;

• They value the cultural inheritance and current endeavours of colonised people in defiance of colonial

discourses, and can use them for revolutionary purposes;

• They offer the means to identify and build alternative histories, cultural traditions and knowledges

which conflict with colonialist representations;

• With particular reference to Fanon, the advocacy of national consciousness via the forging of national

culture looks forward to a future for the newly independent nation which is meaningfully free of neo-colonial

Western influence, materially and culturally.

In his work on role of the native intellectual, Fanon provides us with a way of thinking about how cultural

activities, such as literary creativity, are bound up with the wider political struggles of decolonisation.

Writers clearly conceived of their role in wider national terms and thought about the ways in which their work

might contribute to decolonising the mind. Innes notes several characteristics in much nationalist

writing which used European languages and literary forms:

I. First, argues Innes, nationalist writers asserted 'the existence of a culture which was the antithesis of

the colonial one';

II. Second, they emphasised the relationship between the people and the land in order to underline

the illegitimate intrusion of the colonisers, asserting a 'unity between place and people';

III. Third, there was a tendency in some nationalist writing to gender representations of colonial

domination and nationalist resistance.

7)Constructing national consciousness: Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel 'A Grain of Wheat' concerns the achievement of Kenyan independence on 12

December 1963. It explores several issues:

• Now a writer contributes to the forging of national consciousness by engaging with the people's

struggle;

• The process of forging national symbols as well as its pitfalls (trappole);

• The challenge of independence;

• The danger of neo-colonialism.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in Kamarithu, Kenya, in 1938. He studied at Makarere University College in

Uganda and at the University of Leeds,