Culture and the Emerging Nation Theme Analysis

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that one of the ways in which colonial forces oppress colonized individuals is through the erasure of black culture. Racist colonial powers claim that colonized countries, especially those on the continent of Africa, are devoid of culture and meaningful artistic expression. The absence of culture is considered the height of barbarism, and colonialism assumes that in the precolonial period, Africa “was akin to a darkness of the human soul.” An important step in decolonization, Fanon therefore maintains, is proving the existence of one’s culture and exerting it on a world stage. “The recognition of a national culture and its right to exist” is crucial in building a new nation, and with the widespread decolonization of the continent of Africa came the establishment of “Negro” culture, a unifying black culture that recognized all cultures of the African diaspora. Fanon, however, contends that establishing a universal black culture is not possible, nor is it helpful to decolonization, because black culture is not universal. Instead, Fanon argues that the individual struggle for nationhood is the unifying black culture, and that this can’t be expressed or appreciated on a continental level.     

Fanon explains negritude, an affirmation of African culture and heritage, which attempts to bring a unifying black culture to the world stage. For example, colonized literature in Africa has not historically “been a national literature but a ‘Negro’ literature.” Thus, colonized literature examines the continent of African as a whole rather than the individual countries and cultures that make it up. Negritude reached even America, where “the ‘black world’ came into being,” and it includes all black cultures affected by colonization, including those in Ghana, Senegal, Mali, and even those in the United States. Negritude considers these cultures collectively as black culture, not individually as independent nations. However, Fanon argues, a blanket African culture rather than an individual national culture “leads African intellectuals into a dead end.” One unifying African culture can’t possibly reflect the cultural importance of the entire African diaspora, and, Fanon contends, it shouldn’t even try. To do so is to further marginalize and oppress true black culture, and this is counterproductive to decolonization

Fanon contends that a unifying black culture cannot be established because it ignores crucial aspects of individual black culture and actively works against the process of decolonization. Fanon mentions black American writers, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, who were ultimately unable to build a collective black culture in the United States. Black Americans like Wright and Hughes, Fanon says, quickly “realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans.” As each black experience is wildly different, it cannot possibly be represented by one single culture. The culture of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, Fanon says, is “fundamentally different” from those faced by Jomo Kenyatta, an anticolonial activist and the prime minster of Kenya, and Léopold Senghor, a Senegalese poet, politician, and the founder of negritude. These conflicting histories again suggests that one unifying black culture is impossible. In fact, Fanon claims, “the only common denominator between the blacks from Chicago and the Nigerians or Tanganyikans was that they all defined themselves in relation to the whites.” In every other way, black culture as a whole is completely unique and unrelated.

Fanon argues that black or “Negro” culture eventually “broke up because the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national.” A unifying “Negro” culture attempts to express black culture on a continental scale, which, Fanon says, is wholly impossible and detrimental to the cause. According to Fanon, “culture is the expression of national consciousness,” which also means that “national consciousness is the highest form of culture,” and it is automatically established during the building of a nation.