02-2-13 July 14 Haidar Eid & Khaled Ghazel

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Global Journal of English Language and Literature

April 2014. Volume 2. Issue 2. ISSN 2320-4397
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/globaljournalofell/
Nativism, Nationalism and Liberation in a Postcolonial Context
Haidar Eid & Khaled Ghazel

Abstract
This paper examines how, such concepts as nativism, Negritude and nationalism, despite their fetishization of
the native essence and identity, are reappraised as part of a revisionist project of theorising the profuse modes
of resistance encompassed in postcoloniality. Even though the paper acknowledges their instrumentality in
disrupting discourses of domination, it is on the liberation theory that it bestows emancipation and decolonizing
of the mind. It maintains t that such notions as Afrocentric essentialism, reverse ethnocentrism, mystification
and even absurdity make up its bone of contention. Moreover, in managing to syncretize various European
literary terms and styles into their work, anti-colonial writers such as Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon managed
to set up imaginative writing as intrinsic to anticolonial resistance.
About the Autho(s): Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor of English at al-Aqsa University in Gaza. Khaled
Ghazel lives and teaches in Birmingham, UK. E-mail: haidareid@gmail.com.

What Fanon and Cesaire required of their own partisans,
even during the heat of struggle, was to abandon fixed ideas
of settled identity and culturally authorized definition.
Become different, they said, in order your fate as colonized
peoples can be different; this is why nationalism, for all its
obvious necessity, is also the enemy. (Said, 2001:315 )
So Edward Said writes eloquently of the need to make viable a conceptual framework for a
rumination of a mode of resistance transcending the narrow confines of a debilitating nativism and its
heir apparent nationalism. In such vein, this article attempts to examine, drawing on the premises of
Benita Parrys article Resistance theory / theorising resistance or two cheers for nativism (1994)
how, despite jettisoning such concepts as nativism, Negritude and nationalism for their fetishization
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of the native essence and identity, ( Said, 2002:175 ) Parry, notwithstanding, makes a case for an
unsententious interrogation (1994:176) of these terms to reappraise them as part of a revisionist
project of theorising the profuse modes of resistance encompassed in postcoloniality.
Echoing a deep seated divide within the realm of postcolonial resistance theory, Parry, though
conceding to the challenges implied in initiating a counternarrative to disrupt what Richard Terdiman
calls the absorptive capacity of any colonial discourse, exhorts the feasibility of working out a
mode of historicizing an unsubordinated colonial subject within a peripheral counter hegemonic
discourse of resistance. In proposing to bring to the fore the muteness colonialism inflicted upon the
peripheral, marginal colonized subject, Parry fervidly pushes this quest towards fashioning out a
critique from outside its [ colonialisms] control (2004:36 ) where the colonized can be written back
into history. Of the ineluctability of incorporating such silenced modes of resistance in an anti
colonialist discourse, Parry is explicitly adherent. Cognizant of the possibility of representation for
those excluded and disempowered colonial suppressed voices, Parry foregrounds the need to be
heedful of, and hence, re-narrate those surreptitious modes of protest. Set amidst an intolerable
yearning for a suspect yearning for an (im)possible purity and a reconcilably subtle mode of
resistance, Wilson Harriss instance of limbo dancing should it embody an inner re-creative
response (1974:14 ) denotes the emergence of a portrait of a postcolonial critic as a missionary in
reverse.
To consolidate this view, it seems appropriate to reflect on Benita Parrys disdainfulness of doing
away with writing into history what Gyanenda Pandey terms as the marginal voices and memories,
forgotten dreams and signs of resistance (1994:214). It is out of her spuriousness of depoliticized
theories of colonialist discourse that Parry oftentimes pillories such colonial discourse theory figures
as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The crux of her quarrel with these critics,
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin write, remains their political ineffectiveness and even reactionary
implications (Ashcroft et al 2005:176).
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The same attitude towards these reactionary ramifications is reflected in Benita Parrys prudent stand
being contingent upon the germaneness to a postcolonial refashioning of exhuming archives of an
acclaimed heritage. Arguably, Parrys reflection inhabits a somewhat tumultuous field. Her contention
lies in how, in order to perform the act of activating memories and simultaneously circumvent the
confinement of a fixed retrograde valency, a versatile discursive subjectivity ought to be produced
without being tethered to any notion of essentialism. By stating in this way the question of
oppositionality between such a binary division as essence versus diversification, it is worth recalling
Edouard Glissantwhose metissage Benita Parry alludes to in her article and his concept of
Relation.Diversity, writes Glissant:
leads to Relation: it is the modern implication of
cultures in each other, through their wanderings
their structural demand for absolute equality.
( Glissant, 1981: 191)
Should one concur with Glissants conception that, on the one hand, the poetics of metissage is the
poetics of Relation (1981:251) and, on the other, Relation is an anti-imperialist project(Britton,
1999: 12), it would be difficult not to conclude that incorporated in metissage is a counterpoetics
which writes back with a vengeance to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie.

In refusing to accept the cloak of a simple hybridity that some contemporary critics assume,
Edouard Glissant goes as far as to distinguish between metissage the French language equivalent
and creolisation stressing the latters standing in contradistinction to essence (Britton, 1999: 16).
Positioned within an entire Caribbean setting, one can safely argue that at creolisations heart lies a
concept of counterpoetics of both literary and cultural countervailance. Creolite, Mustapha
Marrouchi writes,
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takes possession of the language of the colonial
oppressor and distorts it, using it to construct a
black culture inscrutable to outsiders. This spirit
of creative distortion permeates all the literature of
the Antilles ( Marrouchi, 2002: 232 )
As elucidated through the previous instance of Wilson Harriss limbo dancing and now Edouard
Glissants metissage/ creolisation, Benita Parry is intent on calling attention to the intricacy of such
modes of resistance, much against the calumniation levelled at them. In this Parry is dependent on
Stuart Halls carefully modulated case (1990) for another contested and censurable terrain: ethnic
identitarianism.
Hall demonstrates, in short, the complexity entailed in identity construction arguing that it is not as
transparent or unproblematic as we think (Hall, 1990: 222). Notwithstanding, he suggests two
different ways of labelling identity. Cultural identity with culture being shared amongst the
community, hence conducing to its oneness. To this, Hall gives much prominence in its contribution
to anticolonial struggles and perpetuating representation. The second unveiled as exhibiting
polysemy contravenes any notion of fixity. Thus defined, identity
is not grounded merely in the attempts to recover
the past; rather it refers to the way in which we
are positioned and constructed by the workings of
the past. (Sanga, 2001: 21)
It is this fixity or identitarian thought to borrow a phrase from Edward Said that ought to be
discarded on the part of postcolonial intellectuals in order to be able to commit themselves to
recuperating the forgotten and disputing the official narratives. The Saidian type of intellectual should
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reject stable identity as it is rendered by such affirmative agencies as nationality, tradition, language
and religion.(Said, 1995:353 )
Nowhere in Benita Parrys article is this notion of identitarian thought or ethnic
identitarianism more obvious than in the contentious concept of negritude; itself subject to a much
withering critique. Parrys prolegomenon to negritude is set, much in the selfsame fashion as
nativism, around a discursive appraisal of its ideologys limitations and attempting through
demonstrating its oppositional agency to encapsulate it into a wider national discourse of liberation.
It is possible to say at this stage that, while Parry contrary to so many of her contemporaries
doesnt wholeheartedly relegate such concepts as nativism, negritude and nationalism to a sheer
compliance with colonial discourse, hence acknowledging their instrumentality in disrupting such
discourses of domination, it is on the liberation theory that she bestows emancipation and
decolonising the mind to use a phrase from Ngugi.
Here, the Saidian theoretical evolution (nativist through nationalist to liberationist) is coterminous
with Fanons. Entailed in this shift is a metamorphosis of national into social and political
consciousness cutting across the narrow confines of the nation. Of this Said says:
If I have so often cited Fanon, it is because more
dramatically and decisively than any one, I believe,
he expresses the immense cultural shift from the
terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical
domain of liberation. (Said, 1993: 268 )
Let us now jump back to negritude. Renounced for its romantic spiritualism (a critique levelled
especially against Senghor, one of the movements progenitors) negritude, though Senghor himself
admitted that it has come in for so much distrust: it is through its virtue that decolonisation has
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been accomplished without much bloodshed or hatred (cited in Williams/ Chrisman, 1994: 32). In
order for us to come to terms with the branching between extolling and upbraiding such theory
(negritude), one should pause to argue that such notions as Afrocentric essentialism, reverse
ethnocentrism, mystification and even absurdity make up its bone of contention.

Throughout her reconsideration of negritude, Benita Parry embraces an approach based solely on a
dual negotiation of its dialectics and critics. That negritude was developed as part of an already
highly articulate anti colonial movement (Young, 2001:266 ) testifies to its standing at least at
so early a stage of this analysis in defiance of the assimilationist policies of French colonialist
culture.
But the lines of argument over negritude do not allow one to consider only its good privileged side. In
their aversion to negritude, critics though they first welcomed its inception railed against the
likelihood of its reincorporation into a European model in which it functioned only as the antithesis
of the thesis of white supremacy. (Ashcroft et al, 2005: 20) In this context, it is tempting to mention
that some of negritudes philosophical and ideological shortcomings are due to championing two
entirely antagonistic stances: assimilation into French of African culture with a version of humanism
preached solely on the grounds of cultural metissage and valorizing black identity and culture to
celebrate all that had been identified as negative and inferior by the colonizers the instinctual and
the mysterious of darkest Africa ( Boehmer 1995: 105 ) The upshot of this paradoxical standpoint is
that, to quote Wole Soyinka, negritude trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role (1976:
129 ).
At this point it becomes necessary to consider, though succinctly, the disenchantment with negritude
by its principal founders. Inveighing against the selfsame movement of which he is a co architect
Senghor, ironically, launched a scathing attack on negritude correlating it with colonialism and,
strikingly enough, Nazism:
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We thought that we Negroes were the salt of the earth,
that we were the bearers of an heard message and that
no other race could offer it but us. Unconsciously, by
osmosis and reaction at the same time, we spoke like
Hitler and the colonialists, we advocated the virtues of
Blood. (cited in Sharpley Whiting, 2002: 10 )

In like manner, it is the Cesairean concept of negritude that seems to endorse similar conclusions.
Hailed by Cesaire essentially as a movement with a literary socio cultural ideology at its heart, such
version of negritude is constantly pilloried to demonstrate its political ineffectiveness (Cesaires
backing of De Gaulles controversial referendum jumps to mind). A. James Arnold makes plain that a
careful analysis of Cesaires concept of negritude shows that it bears no necessary relationship to
any given political position, that it is without a firm theoretical base. (1981: 15 )
Notwithstanding, it is on Benita Parrys unflagging faith in the usefulness of an ideologically correct
censuring of negritude as being tantamount to a rewriting of the anti colonial archive (Ghandi,
1998: 112) that our line of argument will be centred. Benita Parry, while paring away the nostalgic
side of negritude, concurs conditionally with its efficacy and value as an anticolonial national
discourse. If we are to concede that negritudes founding fathers, as Ella Shohat puts it, were not
particularly preoccupied with gender issues (cited in Parry, 2004: 43) then negritude as a movement
testifies to its being mainly patriarchal. Combined with a poor incoherent political agenda as
previously mentioned is a debilitating heedlessness of the question of gender which makes a
coherent identity particularly unattainable.
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It is perhaps against negritudes masculinist genealogy shored up by literary historians, critics and
Africanist philosophers (Sharpley- Whiting, 2002: 14) that Benita Parry advocates the construction
out of negritude of a more ideologically even and rational discourse as a mode of anticolonial
resistance.
Let us now move on to consider textually the role of negritude in disrupting the colonial hegemonic
discourse. Much against Parrys wariness that an increased concern with textuality is overwhelming
a necessary attention to socio-historical events ( Childs-Williams, 1997: 145) her analysis of negritude
is done rather largely through a textual re-evaluation. Should one consider Aime Cesaire, Senghor and
Frantz Fanon among the forefathers of postcolonial literary tradition, it is worth mentioning that in
managing to syncretize various European literary terms and styles into their work they set up
imaginative writing as intrinsic to anticolonial resistance. And if through parody,Speech, as Bakhtin
put it becomes a battlefield for opposing intentions (cited in Marrouchi, 2002: 11 ) they therefore
adopted it to turn the European literary tradition against itself , therefore the instrument of
subservience became a weapon of liberation. ( Rushdie, 1982: 9 )
We treasure the instance in Parrys article of Cesaires poetic response to Depestres reviling
surrealism in favour of committed verse. Remindful of the hothouse environment of the postcolonial
studies stage, the cultural exchange between negritudes poets and surrealists is telling here. But more
telling still is the heated debate about the relevance in postcolonial studies of such negritude figures as
Cabral, Cesaire and Fanon.
One of the most pressing issues in Benita Parrys article is the question of re-reading and re-
deploying Fanon, through putting his major work to a close critical scrutiny, within the context of the
much contentious postcolonial discourse of anticolonial resistance and liberation. By focusing on
Fanons precariousness, Parry is intent on accentuating his conflicting predictions. And through an
extended attempt to prove his incommensurability, Fanon is brought to the fore as a writer
epitomizing restlessness. In fact, even according to the postcolonial conventions of textual decoding,
this by all means amounts to an unaccountable harshness.
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It makes sense to try to come to terms with Fanons instability should one consider the circumstances
under which he produced his oeuvre. Within this context, one needs to sketch out a theoretical way in
which Fanon is approached. With Saids Travelling Theory one can delineate, by briefly drawing
on its fourth stage, the dissonance in Fanons writings. About this stage Said says: the now full (or
partly) accommodated or (incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new
positions in a new time and place. (Said 1984: 227 ) Perhaps because Fanon , as Stuart Hall says, is
bound to unsettle us from whichever direction we read him (cited in Read, 1996:35) that we should
produce a rather dialectical reading of him to overcome the discord of incompatible testimony
attached to his major writings. Much like Said after him, A. C. Alessandrini suggests that what might
look like theoretical impurities often turn out to be the result of historical pressures. ( Allessandrini,
2005: 445)
Thus, out of the historical pressures emerge new, though at times conflictual ideas jostling for space
within the breadth of a single work. Fanons conception of negritude, national culture, resistance and
humanism follow in the selfsame fashion:
zig zag which perhaps more accurately characterizes
transverse form of anti-colonial resistance ( Boehmer /
Gilbert 2002: 14).
As is obviously noticed, it is only because Fanon has a different dialectical conception of history that
his work embodies a kind of perpetual dissonance. With Sartre, Jean Khalfa writes, he was one of
the last thinkers of his time to experience history as dialectical. (2005:5)
A remarkably compelling image of Fanon in postcolonial studies is that of an intellectual in
opposition. His radicalism as regards the questions of identity, race, national culture, decolonisation,
liberation and even humanism has been all the more arduous for postcolonial studies/ societies. Out of
their situatedness such notions as ethnicity and negritude are at times essential for rehabilitating ones
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identity while at others seen as a major hurdle towards a subjectivity transcending Otherness. (His
protest at Sartres conception of negritude only to adopt his selfsame stand later is a telling instance)
It is through a decolonization coupled with a repudiation of an essentialised ethnicity that a Fanonian
hypothesis of humanism is liable to be enacted. A study of whether this humanism a la Fanon is a
simple abrogation of the Manichean aesthetics begs for investigation. Postcolonial criticism, Arif
Dirlik writes, has moved past Manichean divisions between the colonizer and the colonized to
stress borderlands conditions (Dirlik, 2002: 433)
In the upshot, one is tempted to ask: doesnt the term we use today as postcolonial owe much of its
foundational basis to the negritude poets and Fanon in particular?
References
Allessandrini, Anthony ,G. ( 2005). Humanism in Question: Fanon and Said, in A Companion to
Postcolonial Studies, Eds. Schwartz, Henry and Ray, Sangeeta. Oxford,Blackwell
Arnold, A. James. ( 1981 ) Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aime Cesaire,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Ashcroft, Bill., Griffiths ,Gareth and Tiffin, Helen. ( 2005 ) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, London, Routledge.
Boehmer, Elleke. ( 1995 ) Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Boehmer, Elleke and Gilbert, Bart Moore, ( 2002 ) Introduction to Special Issue: Postcolonial
Studies and Transnational Resistance, Interventions, vol 4 ( 1 ) 7 ( 21
Britton , Celia M . ( 1999 ) Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and
Resistance, Charlotsville and London, New World Studies.
Childs, Peter and Williams, Patrick. ( 1997 ) An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory, London,
Pearson Education.
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Dirlik, Arif , ( 2002 ) , Rethinking Colonialism , Interventions, Vol 4 ( 3 ) 428 - 448
Ghandi ,Leela. ( 1998 ) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press.
Hall , Stuart. (1990 ). Cultural Identity and Diaspora , in Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference, Ed. J, Ruthford. London, Greenwood Press.
------ ( 1996 ). The after Life of Frantz Fanon , in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and
Visual Representation, Ed. Alan Read. Seattle, Bay Press.
Harris, Wilson. (1974) History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, Georgetown,
Guayana, Ministry of Information and Culture.
Khalfa, Jean, (2005), Editorial, Wasafiri, Issue No 44 pp 5( 6)
Marrouchi, Mustapha. ( 2002 ) Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures , Storytellers, New
York, State University of New York Press.
----- ( 2004 ) Edward Said at the Limits. New York, State University of New York Press.
Pandey, Gyanendra, (1994), The Prose of Otherness, Subaltern Studies, 3 114 118
Parry, Benita, (1994). Resistance Theory/ theorising resistance or two cheers for nativism, in
Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory Eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen.
Manchester, Manchester University Press.
-----. ( 2004 ). Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique,
London, Routledge.
Said, Edward . ( 1983) The World, the text and the Critic, London, Faber and Faber.
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-----. ( 2001) Reflections on Exile, London, Granta Books.
Sanga, Jaina C. ( 2001) Salman Rushdies Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation,
Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalisation, London, Greenwood Press.
Senghor, Leopold Sedar, (1994). Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century, in Colonial
Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Eds. Chrisman, Laura and Williams, Patrick. New York,
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