Decolonizing, National Culture, and the Negro Intellectual Group 8

Decolonization, National Culture, and the Negro Intellectual - Frantz Fanon (1961)

Paragraph 1-8 Noor Riaz

Frantz Fanon (1961) talks about decolonization and how it arises from the process of colonization between the colonist and the colonized. Decolonization occurs at the local micro level as well as the regional macro level. It can be a destructive process as it requires a new social order and a total restructuring of society and its people, creating something entirely new.

This exploitative relationship arose out of historical consequences and still exists today (directly and indirectly) in everyday life in lesser forms as it is used to organize society into law and order. This relationship can be illustrated in reference to capitalist society between the owner and the worker, the teacher and the students, the state’s law enforcement (police) and its citizens, and the government and its people in which their relationships exist as a social order, with one species exercising authority and self-interests over another.

Decolonization aims to undo this exploitative relationship by undoing the social disorder of society and imposing on it a new order; with “the creation of new men” it aims to lift up the colonized and free them of their previous oppression (p. 283).

Paragraph 1-8 Danielle Tognetti

Decolonization is a process that cannot be accomplished by magical forces. It is a historical process that can only be understood through the history making movement, which gives it content. Decolonization is the confrontation between two forces. Their first confrontation was filled with violence and cohabitation from the colonist and the colonized who seemed to be old acquaintances. The colonists fabricates the colonized subject and derives him from his validities. In order for the last to be first, there has to be a conflict and then a confrontation between two main individuals. The confrontation can only triumph by using every possible means involving violence. The social phenomena of colonization ties into the historical and continuing oppression of black individuals being held under slavery and surveillance of a supposed higher authority. However, decolonization has a meaningful impact on the societies due to the rise of independence, strength and resistance as seen from the recent social media #BlackLivesMatter.

Paragraphs 9-17 Lukas Domingo

Frantz Fanon and the Negro Intellectual

Frantz Fanon (1961) compares the difference between the way the whites view the black Americans and the Arabs in the 1950’s. It is said that in general, they believe that the “niggers” have no culture and the Arabs are barbaric. In 1956, the First Congress of the African Society for Culture declared the “Negroes” as an acceptable civil status, as supposed to their status as slaves before this. The black Americans faced many of the same problems as the Africans and therefore they created the American Society for African Culture. As this was happening, in other states the Arabs realized that the geography of where they are from and their economic interdependence overrides their past revival. Consequently, today most of the Arab states are connected to the Mediterranean lifestyle. In order for the non-white man to escape the white supremacy, the colonized thinks he should return to his unknown roots and lose himself among his barbaric people. He gets taken away from his regular culture and adapts to the white culture. It is a difficult process but is necessary otherwise everyone will be faced with serious mutants. The intellectual, who has managed to change bodies with European civilization, is capable of being plausible to the comparison in the civilization. As he is faced with his country’s status, that he would like to claim as his own, is horrified by the emptiness and feels the need to escape the white culture. The intellectual often falls into heavy arguments and develops a sensitive psychology. This ongoing process is sufficient to explain the style the colonized intellectual of liberating consciousness. It is a style full of energy and colour. This style which Westerners sometimes find painful is not a racial feature but it is a combat. It is necessary for the intellectual to inflict injury, therefore bleeding red blood and freeing himself from the part contaminated by germs. This approach may take him to odd adventures, but he will return with clichés. The colonized intellectual is a process in which it gives a list of the bad characteristics of people and the world, and brings in only the truth. Any colonized intellectual who reverts back to his old ways represents a disappointment and the uselessness of his hard work.

A social contemporary issue that relates to the negro intellectual is the indigenous people of Canada who were stripped away of their culture and forced to assimilate into the white Canadian culture. They were taken away from their homes and forced to live in and attend residential schools. Like the black Americans, they were seen as having no culture, therefore they were forced into a white culture completely unlike their own.