A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature

Shirley Chew, David Richards, Shirley Chew, David Richards

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118836002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Taking an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to literature from 1947 to the present day, this concise companion is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of postcolonial literature and culture.

• An indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism, bringing together 10 original essays from leading international scholars including C. L. Innes and Susan Bassnett
• Explains the ideas and practises that emerged from the dismantling of European empires
• Explores the ways in which these ideas and practices influenced the period's keynote concerns, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance
• Chapters cover the fields of identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies.
• Features a useful Chronology of the period, thorough general bibliography, and guides to further reading

Chapter 1

Framing Identities

David Richards

Frantz Fanon remembered an incident when, as a young student of psychiatry in France, his presence on a crowded train was noticed by a child:

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. […] Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places […] On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.

(Fanon 1986 [1952]: 112–13)

The incident is recollected in Fanon’s first major book, Black Skin, White Masks, which appeared in 1952. However, the work was not originally intended for publication, but for submission as an academic dissertation in order that Fanon might qualify as a psychiatrist at the University of Lyon. His supervisor at the faculty of medicine rejected the thesis and compelled Fanon to write a second piece which was more acceptable to the medical authorities. As David Macey, Fanon’s biographer, comments, the rejection of the thesis that became one of the most influential and foundational texts of postcolonialism was predictable, since it ‘defied all academic and scientific conventions’ in combining an ‘experimental exploration of the author’s subjectivity’ with lengthy quotations from literary works (Macey 2001: 138–9). The work was unconventional in other respects too. In analysing the effects of racism, Fanon had strayed from the strict path of psychiatry, which was dedicated to medical intervention and cure, into the rather more nebulous field of psychoanalysis. Further, the book was written in a style that was more poetic than scientific, influenced by the existential writings of Camus and Sartre, and by the Negritude poetics of his Martinican teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire.

The child’s terrified response to the presence of the black man, and the ubiquitous, daily, casual racism of French society in the midtwentieth century which it symbolizes, triggers a ‘crumbling’ of the ‘corporeal schema’ in Fanon. The ‘corporeal schema’, a term derived from Gestalt psychology that Fanon had taken from the work of Jean Lhermitte, refers to the essential sense we have of ourselves as physical presences; a sense which enables us to interact and engage with the world around us (Macey 2001: 165). Racism fractures this ability to engage with others at a fundamental level by substituting a ‘corporeal schema’ with a ‘racial epidermal schema’. Instead of a body among other bodies with which he shares space, Fanon becomes in this encounter a ‘black body’ marked out by his difference, his ‘otherness’. The effects of this dislocation of presence are metaphorically dramatic – he is no longer ‘a man among other men’ but an ‘object’ of fear and loathing, ‘excised’ from productive contact with others and ‘imprisoned’, as the title of the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks where this appears has it, in ‘the fact of blackness’.

‘The fact of blackness’ is Fanon’s main preoccupation in Black Skin, White Masks. His intention is to diagnose this ‘febrile’ condition, but his analysis goes much further and has a wider relevance than this deeply personal recollection of a moment of ‘nausea’. The incident on the train is symptomatic of a much wider, global ‘dislocation’, as Fanon describes it, which has its roots in the pernicious effects of colonialism. The growth of European empires and dominance by foreign powers have had an impact on the economic, political, and cultural lives of subject peoples who experience radical distortions of their language, law, and civil society; indeed, imperialist intervention is a fundamental denial of the enabling features of humanity. But for Fanon, colonialism does more than simply deprive the colonized of their independence. Colonialism and its handmaiden, racism, strike much more deeply into the social and individual psychology of the colonized. The colonial regime re-enacts on a grand scale the drama of the incident on the train by substituting a society’s ‘corporeal schema’, as it were, with an image of alienation and domination where the colonial looks at the world and sees only a reflection of imperial power which has replaced an enabling sense of otherness. The colonial condition prevents, therefore, the formation of workable forms of social and cultural life by creating psychological dependence on these substituted images of domination and inferiority.

In other words, colonialism attacks the very essence of identity in its subject peoples by inducing a form of mental illness:

The Negro’s behaviour makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis. In the man of colour there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence. […] The attitude of the Black man toward the white, or toward his own race, often duplicates almost completely a constellation of delirium, frequently bordering on the region of the pathological.

(Fanon 1986: 60)

And

every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society.

(Fanon 1986: 109)

Fanon is here, I think, using the term ‘civilized’ in a somewhat ironic sense. He was not alone, nor was he the first, to attempt to diagnose the psychological dynamics of colonial and racist discourses. Fanon located his own position from a triangulation of different influences from existentialism, colonial anthropology, and Negritude. He was profoundly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s deconstruction of anti-Semitism, and he replicates in his discussion of ‘the fact of blackness’ Sartre’s counter-intuitive argument concerning Jewish identity that ‘[t]he Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew; that is the simple truth from which we must start … It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew’ (Sartre 1965 [1946]: 69). This remarkable reversal, that identity is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘essential’, but constructed from discourses of difference and inequality, finds an immediate echo in Fanon when he writes that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1986: 110). But it was in his engagement with anthropology that Fanon further refined this position. A central argument of Black Skin, White Masks concerns Octave Mannoni’s then recent book on Madagascar, Prospero and Caliban (1950). On the face of it, Fanon would seem to share some very basic points of agreement with Mannoni: that colonialism extends into the realms of the psyche, and a full understanding of colonization is only possible if its psychological impact is properly acknowledged. But Fanon and Mannoni soon parted company as Mannoni argued that colonization does not create in its subjects the ‘constellation of delirium’ of the pathological and neurotic types Fanon observed in himself and others, but rather colonization is a type of traumatic experience that makes overt these latent forms of psychosis. In exasperation Fanon asks, ‘why does he try to make the inferiority complex something that antedates colonization?’ (Fanon 1986: 85) And echoing Sartre again, he declares, ‘Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior.’ (93).

Fanon also quarrelled with the very basic assumptions of the psychoanalytic method he had adopted to diagnose the colonial condition. The concept of the Oedipus complex is the root and origin of Freudian (and later Lacanian) psychoanalysis as it is the central theory of Freud’s first major work Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913). As the subtitle of Freud’s text may suggest, he was helped in the writing of this seminal work in the emerging field of psychoanalysis by a number of works in colonial anthropology, particularly Sir James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910) which he drew on particularly heavily. Frazer’s four-volume work collected data from missionaries and travellers from all over the European empires to construct a compendium of every known form of totemic belief, which Freud then used to speculate on the nature of an original prehistoric human society. Having constructed an image of the archaic and original ‘primal horde’ from Frazer’s work on contemporary colonized peoples, Freud argued that avoiding sexual intercourse with members of the same clan or family must arise from ‘the oldest and most powerful of human desires’ (Freud 2001 [1913]: 32). To safeguard themselves, the primal horde fashioned strict taboos on incest, but these taboos only demonstrate ambivalent psychic impulses ‘corresponding to both a wish and a counter-wish’, and thus there exists a ‘psychological agreement between taboo and obsessional neurosis’ (35–6). Freud named it the Oedipus complex from the Greek legend of Oedipus who unknowingly killed his father and married his own mother. The Oedipus complex is the metanarrative of universal incestuous fears; but it also expresses paradoxically our fundamental desires and, so deeply is it ingrained in our psychic existence from prehistory to the present, that it can be thought of as ‘the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art’ (156). Everything flows from this archaic mixture of desire and fear. Fanon, however, was not convinced of the universal applicability of the concept: ‘Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’ (Fanon 1986: 151–2). It could be, he argued, that the anthropologists whose data Freud used, had projected their own cultural obsessions, unique to their societies, onto the peoples they had studied and consequently ‘discovered’ Oedipal complexes where none existed (152). This is a radical revision. A revisionism which not only undermines many of the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis (principles that Fanon himself relied upon to build his argument), but which also reiterates the necessity to see particular psychological states as arising from particular cultural and historical moments.

The impact of Fanon’s initial analysis of the psychology of colonialism was to be felt in a number of related but distinct areas. His insistence on linkages between colonial oppression and psychological repression led him to the formulation of a fully ‘politicized’ version of psychoanalytical discourse, and to his role of political philosopher of anticolonial liberation movements. As anti-colonial conflicts escalated, particularly in Algeria where he participated in the war against the French, Fanon argued in his subsequent book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that the mere achievement of independence from empire was insufficient to remove the colonialists’ distorting mirror and to return the subjected peoples to their rightful sense of identity. The colonial rupture had made ‘a constellation of delirium’ which perpetuates a tragic cycle and renders the colonial subject silent, invisible, and unformed since language, law, civil society, culture now consist of the replicated divisions of colonial identity. There is no possibility of a return to a state prior to colonial intervention, nor is there a ‘cure’ for colonialism; recuperation is only possible through violence. Only insurrection and civil war, matching the violence of imperial domination with the violence of resistance, will enable the colonial subject to achieve catharsis and be healed. Violence, for Fanon, was not only a political strategy to secure independence, it was a psychological necessity to liberate the minds of the colonized from the repressive effects of the empire. Here, Fanon is attempting to confront a major issue in the identity politics of decolonization: how, when colonialism psychologically debilitates so radically, can the colonial or postcolonial subject achieve any kind of agency? His answer is that the colonial subject achieves agency through the cleansing power of violence. There is not the space here to explore further how Fanon’s potent combination of political and psychic liberation through violent action found a ready audience among the ‘wretched of the earth’ of the European empires, and beyond, in black consciousness movements in the United States, and radical movements in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. However, as James Le Sueur argues in his Uncivil war: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (2005), Fanon foregrounded the problems of identity and agency for those ‘confronting the problem of decolonization’, propelled ‘alterity or the issue of Otherness’ into the position of being the single most important theoretical concern of decolonization, and made ‘identity’ the universal lingua franca of contemporary global postcolonial discourse.

If Fanon’s writings on identity made a significant impact on anticolonial political rhetoric, his work both drew on, and helped to reshape, emerging forms of literary expression and cultural criticism. Black Skin, White Masks is embedded in and rests upon literary works; indeed, it makes as much of an intervention in literary concerns as it does in either psychology or liberation politics, so dependent is it upon literary texts for its ‘evidence’ of the impress of empire. Fanon deals with two kinds of literary texts. The first is the now rarely read fictions and semi-autobiographical writings of empire: works by Mayotte Capécia, Abdoulaye Sadji, and René Maran. To varying degrees, Fanon is disparaging or dismissive of each of these. Fanon’s purpose is not only to use these writings as evidence of his thesis but to deploy them as foils to another set of literary texts with which they are compared: the Negritude poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Negritude was a francophone literary and political movement that was begun in France in the 1930s by a group of colonial intellectuals, Senghor from Senegal, Césaire from Martinique, and Leon Damas from Guiana. Its influences ranged from the Black American Harlem Renaissance to European Surrealism, and it was strongly supported by the Existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote an influential essay in their praise entitled ‘Orphée Noir’ (1948). Although all the Negritudinists were committed to countering the racist dogma of colonialism by promoting the cultural identity and value of Black arts and cultures, there are important differences among them of which Fanon is all too aware. Senghor’s version of Negritude emphasized the physical, sensuous, and mythical qualities of Black African identity; his poetry is filled with images of a dark, female Africa, the body, and the drum.

Naked woman, dark woman
Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of black wine,
Mouth that gives music to my mouth
Savanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent caress
Of the East Wind, sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskin
Moaning under the hands of the conqueror
Your deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved.

(‘Black woman’ [1948] see Senghor 1964)

This short extract is typical of Senghor’s belief that ‘l’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est héllène’ (‘emotion is Negro, reason is Greek’). For Senghor, black identity is the inverse mirror image of white identity: emotion rather than reason, body over intellect, rhythm against logic. Although Fanon could see the strategic value of any consciousness movement that tried to undo the depredations of colonialism, this anti-racism merely inverted colonial racism without challenging its basic presuppositions. Rather than liberating the agency of colonial subjects, Senghor’s Negritude simply confirmed racism by turning ‘negative’ stereotypical racial identities into ‘positive’ racial values. ‘My black skin is not the repository of specific values,’ Fanon commented, in a way that would be echoed later by many anglophone writers, Wole Soyinka most famously in the statement at a conference in Kampala in 1962, ‘A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.’

Aimé Césaire’s brand of Negritude was more to Fanon’s taste, although not without qualification. Césaire was a fellow Martinican, and briefly taught both Fanon and the poet Edouard Glissant in Martinique. ‘No book by Senghor has ever been banned by a French government,’ comments David Macey (2001: 184); the same could not be said of the Antillean form of Negritude. Césaire, in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land] (1939) defines his Negritude as belonging to:

Those who invented neither powder nor compass
Those who harnessed neither steam nor electricity
Those who explored neither the seas or the skies but those
without whom the earth would not be the earth
[…]
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
My negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s dead eye
My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
It takes root in the red flesh of the soil
It takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
It breaks through the opaque prostration with its upright patience.

(Césaire 1983: 67, 69)

The language here is deeply indebted to French modernism (particularly the Surrealists who promoted his work), as was Senghor’s, but Césaire’s Negritude, although rooted in anti-racism and anti-colonialism, is not tied in the same way as Senghor’s to an essentialized black racial identity. In important ways, Césaire’s Negritude breaks out of the discourse of race to embrace all those subject to imperial hegemony; in that sense, ‘blackness’ is not only or merely a matter of skin colour but encodes a set of relationships of subjugation to dominant military, technological, and colonial powers. Fanon’s response to these lines, which he quoted in Black Skin, White Masks, was exuberant: ‘Yes, all those are my brothers – a “bitter brotherhood” imprisons all of us alike’ (124).

In the anglophone Caribbean, seemingly without the benefit of the influence of French modernism, surrealism, existentialism, and the developing theories of self and other, similar expressions of the psychological damage inflicted on subjugated identities were, nonetheless, being explored. In 1953, the Barbadian writer, George Lamming, published In the Castle of my Skin, the first of a series of semi-autobiographical fictions that would explore, in a Fanonian way but independent of Fanon, the colonial and postcolonial condition (see also The Emigrants, 1954, The Pleasures of Exile, 1960, and Natives of my Person, 1972). In an introduction he wrote to a new edition of In the Castle of My Skin celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of publication, Lamming makes explicit the novel’s purpose which is to explore the question of colonial identity:

It was not a physical cruelty. Indeed, the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence. No torture, no concentration camp, no mysterious disappearance of hostile natives, no army encamped with orders to kill. The Caribbean endured a different kind of subjugation. It was a terror of the mind: a daily exercise in selfmutilation. Black versus Black in a battle for self-improvement. […] The result was a fractured consciousness, a deep split in its sensibility which now raised difficult problems of language and values; the whole issue of cultural allegiance between imposed norms of White Power, represented by a small numerical minority, and the fragmented memory of the African masses: between white instruction and Black imagination.

(Lamming 1994: xxxix, xxxvii)

There are conflicting assessments of Fanon’s contribution to anticolonial political action: in Algeria he is regarded as a national hero, but in his native Martinique he is only grudgingly acknowledged. Since his early death from leukemia in 1961, his political legacy has divided commentators into those who see him as the prophet of liberation from empire, and those who regard him as the harbinger of an era of violence and terrorism. In the postcolonial academy, however, the reception of Fanon’s ideas on the colonial condition has been much less equivocal. His writings have had a profound effect on an increasingly influential body of visual artists, writers, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural theorists engaged in an interdisciplinary undertaking to refashion the epistemological basis for the discussion and analysis of visual representations, literatures, and cultures, in an era ‘after empire’. To gauge the distance travelled since 1961, we must leap forward in time to a conference on Fanon’s legacy held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1995 as a prelude to a major exhibition, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. The conference took its theme from Fanon’s key chapter in Black Skin, White Masks – ‘The Fact of Blackness’, and was an indication of the growth both in significance and application of the central ideas of postcolonialism. Among those contributing were Martine Attille (filmmaker), Homi Bhabha (literary critic and theorist), Stuart Hall (sociologist), bell hooks (writer, artist, and cultural activist), Isaac Julien (filmmaker), Steve McQueen (artist), Mark Nash (editor and filmmaker), and Françoise Vergès (political scientist). In many respects,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Framing Identities
• Chapter 2: Orality and Literacy
• Chapter 3: The Politics of Rewriting
• Chapter 4: Postcolonial Translations
• Chapter 5: Nation and Nationalisms
• Chapter 6: Feminism and Womanism
• Chapter 7: Cartographies and Visualization
• Chapter 8: Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race
• Chapter 9: Anthropology and Postcolonialism
• Chapter 10: Publishing Histories
• Index