Critical analysis of "On National Culture"
Critical Analysis of “On National Culture”
This chapter began as a lecture, which suggests it
ability to stand on its own. Indeed,
this chapter and the next are, compared with the precious chapters, seemingly
discrete and isolated. The previous
three chapters moved roughly chronologically, from colonialism to postcolonial
nation-building, whereas this chapter and the next are more thematic. Within each theme-intellectuals here,
psychology in the next chapter-Fanon moves across the colonial timeline in
order to pick up trends throughout.
Still, it would be a mistake to think that the “intellectual”
has not been a theme throughout The Wretched of the Earth. In Chapter, he foreshadow this chapter in
this passage: “ the colonialist bourgeoisie
hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where
each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. But the colonized intellectual who is lucky
enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle will soon
discover the falsity of this theory”.
Fanon has already suggested in other words how joining the combat can
liberate the intellectual, who derives culture from it. This chapter, then, is not so much a
stand-alone piece as a culmination of previous lines of thinking. Different references to the intellectual from
earlier in the book are weaved together and brought into deeper analysis here.
Perhaps needless to say, this is also an intensely
personal chapter for Fanon, who was himself an intellectual. HI training as a psychiatrist is of special importance
in the next chapter, on psychological disorders. In this chapter, the intellectual context,
perhaps most important is the experience Fanon had with Aime Cesaire. Both were from Martinique, the French island
in the Carribbean, and Fanon served on Cesaire’s parliamentary campaign there
before Fanon moved to France. Cesaire
was a leader of the Negritude movement which called for a common cultural
movement and identity on behalf of Blacks all over the globe, regardless of
national context. Fanon was clearly
sympathetic to this movement. At the
same time, he seems to critique it in this chapter as a “racialization” of
culture, rather than a nationalization.
Margaret Majumdar remarks that, although “there is a thread linking Fanon
to some of the ideas put forward by his fellow Martiniquan, Aime cesaire, and
the other proponents of Negritude”, Fanon nonetheless “synthesizes his views on
race, culture and the nation into a radically different perspective, which challenges
all attempts to box him into mechanistic categories and all forms of reductionism
of his thought to simplistic notions”.
The point, though, is that Fanon’s critique is born
from a place of experience and respect.
His critique of Negritude is different from the one he has of, for
instance, the “national bourgeoisie” in the previous chapter. Rather, Fanon can see, from personal
experience, a racialization of culture as something he himself was attracted
to. He understands its ole for the Black
intellectual. But he nonetheless argues
for moving in a different direction.
In doing so, Fanon also practice a form of
self-reflection in this Chapter. It is
not an explicit self-reflection; this book has remarkably little autobiography,
perhaps because Fanon was interested in a collective movement more than an
individual experience. But by talking
about the paths an intellectual can take, he is generalizing from his own
experience and also criticizing himself in order to move in a mire political national
direction. It is this form of
self-criticism , in “public” in the sense that he is writing a book for
collective consumption, that Fanon practices here. As always, the final goal is “community”, now
understood as national.
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