However, Fanon also foresaw the flipside of cultural nationalism - that it may lead to xenophobia and intolerance.
3) However in the third stage, the native is truly anticolonial, accompanied by a critical analysis of his own culture. 2) the native acknowledges the wide disparity and discovers that he can never be truly white or white enough for the coloniser to treat him as equal, and returns to study his own culture, with a romantic and celebratory mode. He formulated the three stages in which a national culture is formed: 1) The native, under the influence of the coloniser’s culture, seeks to emulate and assimilate it by discarding his own culture (what Homi K Bhabha later calls mimicry). Fanon believed that such a national culture must take recourse to the African myths and cultural practices. He attempted to plead for a greater, pan-African cause, as the blacks had to create their own histories and rewrite their stories. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon propounded idea of a national literature and a national culture, recognising the significance of cultural nationalism, leading to national consciousness. Further the sense of inadequacy and insecurity in the colonised’s psyche results in violence, which is a form of self-assertion. Fanon calls this phenomenon donning white masks over black skins resulting in a duality, and experiencing a schizophrenic atmosphere. In an attempt to deal with the psychological inadequacy, the native tries to be as white as possible, by adopting the Western values, religion, language and practices of the White, and by rejecting his own culture. Fanon thus develops a psychoanalytical theory of postcolonialism where he suggests that the European “Self” develops in its relation and encounter with the “Other.” Fanon argued that the native develops a sense of ‘self’ as defined by the ‘colonial master’ through representation and discourse, while the coloniser develops a sense of superiority. Frantz Fanon ‘s Contribution to Postcolonial CriticismĪ pioneering postcolonial theorist and activist, who wrote in the 1960s in the context of the French occupation of Algeria, Frantz Fanon through his seminal works, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1967), analysed the psychological effects of colonialism on both the coloniser and the colonised.
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