Fanon Flashcards
What enables cultural obliteration?
- negation of national reality
- new legal relations introduced by occupying power
- banishment of natives and customs to societal margins
- enslavement and expropriation
What remains of previous traditions
Many retain some semblance, but “the artisanal style develops into a formalism which is more and more stereotyoed”
Why is it important for the colonising culture to stop cultural life and production in systematic fashion?
Gives more power to colonial culture
Easier to subjugate a people who see themselves and all aspects of their life as inferior
“Within colonial domination…
…there is not and never will be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture”
Any attempt made to regenerate cultural dynamic helpful, as…
They “give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms, and its tonalities”
They help to “brush the cobwebs off national consciousness, to question oppression, and to open up the struggle for freedom”
Natural and persistent adherence to little remaining culture is…
“a throwback to the laws of inertia”
“There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty”
“rigid in the extreme”
National oppression=inhibition of culture
“Withering away of the reality of the nation”
Intelligentsia become producers of literature
Methods of struggle for liberation become more precise; promote and give support to national consciousness. Native writer begins to address own people instead of appealing to the oppressor: a call to arms. Only now a national literature
Literature of combat
“Calls on the whole for people to fight for their existence as a nation”
Mounds national consciousness: “ the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space”
Call to arms and to awareness
Renews belief in native cultural production
Culture once again becomes dynamic
New national patterns formed: new art, woodwork, storytelling
Colonialists defend old native style (new = hope and change)
“The artist invites participation in an organised movement”
“Imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people”
Renews the purpose of all elements of national culture
Conflict is an expression of culture
“The conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised people to reestablish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists”
Culture is radically altered by conflict: “after the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man”
And now?
“The most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation”
“It is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history”
