RACE AND DECOLONISATION

Black Skin, White Masks (race) and Wretched of the Earth (decolonisation), Eve Tuck and K.W Yang

Franz Fanon

French-educated Martinican psychiatrist

Participated in the struggles of the Algerian peoples against French colonialism

WE: time and pre-colonial culture

The colonial empties the space of its history

The post-colonial occurs not in this culture but in its future

Fanon asks that you cannot just build a culture on liberation but calls for a true humanism in response to colonialism— “the rhythm of the people”

Endorses a Romantic Anti-colonial criticism: there is an inevitable retrieval of the pre-colonial in the post-colonial psychiatric structure

Cultural nationalism

cultural nationalism is attached to articulating a singular identity

The contemporary idea that the contemporary natives are separated from past grandeurs e.g modern vs ancient egyptians

Yet Fanon argues that you cannot think about the past when moving into action: “the action of the native intellectual is limited intellectually”

Men of culture take

Their stand in the field of history

To escape from the supremacy of the white man’s culture, the native feels the need to

turn backward toward his unknown roots and to lose himself…to his own barbarous people

WE: the intellectual

too much distance and recession into the past turns you into a distanced exoticist of your own culture

Becomes culturally out of step with the people: “the danger in…cutting his last moorings and breaking adrift from his people”

By being hostile to the idea of culture and song as part of the struggle, the intellectual shares the same vision as the coloniser

He sets a high value on the customs, traditions and appearances of his people,

but his inevitable…experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism

The damage of the pre-colonial utopia

by pretending, you diminish your ability to intervene by limiting and self-orientalising your own historicity

Diminish yourself into a “race of angels”

By locating idenitty by where you are in the larger system, mirroring the colonial value judgement rather than contesting what it actually says about you

WE: action

three phases

1) the native gives proof of assimilation of occupying power

2) the native is disturbed: not a part of his people but only in their memories and legends

3) the fighting phase: the native cannot lose himself in the people and therefore shakes them—> “an awakener of the people”

there is a shift from concept and muscle —> Asking how a culture should or does have agency

Culture does consciousness raising via feeling rather than instruction

Resistance is the strongest form of action

The role of the poet is this fighting rather than simply memorialising

Fanon on violence

supportive of violence because colonialism is inherently violent

In resistance, the revolution will be inevitably be violent otherwise it will not be a fully decolonial process and will otherwise replicate the colonial context

The “irrevocable taking up of arms”

1) violence is inevitable—used to prop up and thus inevitably used to undo it

2) doesn’t revel in this violence—through violence, those who are brutalised regain their humanity—it is a question of agency: if people are not equals then they do not have equal agency to intervene

Black Skin White Masks

Racialised bodies become raced objects as the colonised subject lapses into non-being

The colonised identity is defined by the gaze of the coloniser

Eve Tuck and K.W Yang: Decolonisation is not a Metaphor

“When metaphor invades decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future.

“Not offering it as a metaphor”—> “not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonisation doesn’t have a synonym”

Tuck and Yang: External and Internal colonialism

External colonialism: extraction of goods to develop the first world e.g tea, sugar but also diamonds, fish, humans-turned-workers—> requires military colonialism

Internal colonialism: management of people, land within domestic borders of imperial nation—use of prisons, ghettos, schools, policing—> lead to internal dislocations, segregations, divestment

Tuck and Yang: settler colonialism

“Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and coony” e.g indigenous ppl in the US—“total appropriation of Indigenous life and land”

Settler: “violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted  each day of occupation”

Tuck and Yang: Decolonisation in settler-colonial context

Decolonisation “could involve the seizing of imperial wealth”, which is “tied to settlement and re-invasion” which makes decolonisation “in a settler context is fraught because empire…and internal colony have no spatial separation”

As a metaphor, allows people “to equivocate these contradictory decolonial desires because it turns decolonisation into an empty signifier”—Fanon: “decolonisation never takes palce unnoticed”—> both settler colonialism and decolonisation “implicates and unsettles everyone”