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sorry for the delay yall, unexpected things happened that had to be taken care of.

Commenting now to find this post easier, bumping for visibility, and will edit after reading, sorry about missing the previous post, Othello, entered a depressive spiral and just bounced back a few days ago, looking forward to this week’s discussion!

I’m going to post some of the quotes I’ve highlighted here and work on what I feel about this chapter at a later date. This chapter and the following chapter are my favorite chapters.

The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation. No colonial system draws its justification from the fact that the territories it dominates are culturally nonexistent. You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes. At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with stamping these instruments with a hallmark which he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner. Sometimes he has no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people; but the ideas that he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up with have no common yardstick to measure the real situation which the men and the women of his country know. The culture that the intellectual leans toward is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion. That extremely obvious objectivity which seems to characterize a people is in fact only the inert, already forsaken result of frequent, and not always very coherent, adaptations of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed. The man of culture, instead of setting out to find this substance, will let himself be hypnotized by these mummified fragments which because they are static are in fact symbols of negation and outworn contrivances. Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. When a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes. All that has made up the technique of passive resistance in the past may, during this phase, be radically condemned. In an underdeveloped country during the period of struggle traditions are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies. This is why the intellectual often runs the risk of being out of date. The peoples who have carried on the struggle are more and more impervious to demagogy; and those who wish to follow them reveal themselves as nothing more than common opportunists, in other words, latecomers.

The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognize these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old N*gro who is trapped between five glasses of whiskey, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the N*gro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not Utopian to suppose that in fifty years’ time the type of jazz howl hiccuped by a poor misfortunate N*gro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of negritude, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.

I love this chapter. Fundamentally, it’s about what happens to the culture of a people when they are suddenly colonized. Every people are at a certain stage in political, social, and cultural development. What colonization does is completely freeze that development as the colonizers’ culture is forcefully imposed on the colonized. The colonizers’ culture is seen as “modern,” and if the colonizers’ control on the colonized culture is strong enough, the colonizer will sell a distorted and orientalized version of the ossified culture back to the colonized as a contrast to see how much the colonizers are more “civilized.” Not every colonized person will submit, but many who don’t submit will overcorrect by completely embracing every part of their ossified culture, even the most reactionary parts of it, and will be completely resistant to resuming cultural development. The choice given by the colonizers are essentially either becoming a color-on-the-outside-white-on-the-inside comprador bootlicker or some social reactionary larping as an orientalized version of what the ideal native would be 5 centuries ago.

You can see this dynamic play out numerous times with regards to queer rights. In Russia, almost everyone who is actually reasonable about queer rights is some self-hating liberal who wished they were Western European instead of a pathetic Slav and almost every Russian who has some appreciation of Russian heritage is some queerphobe who believes queerness is some globohomo conspiracy made up by Anglos. This regression of Russian culture in comparison to what they had with the Soviet Union is directly traced to the early 90s when the Soviet Union fell apart and their respective republics forced to submit to US hegemony. Or take Uganda passing that anti-gay law, which includes the death penalty for “repeat offenders.” The piece of shit president makes overtures of how being against gay people is somehow “decolonial” and “returning to our African roots,” never mind that the same president was a US sell-out for most of his political career and Africa was never as uptight about sexuality as British Victorian colonizers who imposed their bullshit heteronormality on the world.

So what’s the solution? The solution is to recognize that the source of the problem comes from the colonial occupation, and that until the colonizers are expelled and sovereignty is restored, cultural development will always be stuck between clinging to the distant half-fantasy past or just being a half-assed version of colonizer culture. This means that art ought to recognize the national liberation struggle as a just struggle and ultimately serve revolutionary ends, used as a tool by revolutionaries to wage revolutionary struggle. Art itself cannot be decolonized until the land has been decolonized, but art can serve as a tool towards decolonization. It’s not enough the art is anti-capitalist or pro-native pride, but it must be attached to a revolutionary organization. The Black Panthers had an official band, and they had songs like “Free Bobby Now,” a song that exists within the context of the party gathering support from everyday people in order to apply political pressure to free their cofounder, who was locked up on trump-up charges.

With decolonization comes the expulsion of imperialists and their compradors, and once they’re gone, cultural development can resume. Social reactionaries can no longer hide behind “decolonization” to peddle their reactionary bullshit, and if they insist on being reactionaries, they can be relegated to the dustbins of history.