Filed with 60.14 Colonialism · Related: 60.23 History · Politics MOC
There are several interesting things about this. Not least that Fanon, like many other postcolonial writers who became famous in the West, is not really interested in restoring the cultures of the non-Western countries he claims to care about. He is not interested in returning African nations to an era of tribal customs or any other precolonial Indigenous tradition. What he is interested in is analyzing these cultures through a Marxist lens and then “saving” them by applying a Marxist ideology to them. Naturally there is something perverse about this. For Marx was a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge—let alone experience—of non-Western cultures or societies. Just one of the ironies of the postcolonialist thinkers is that so many take the same path as Fanon. Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism.
Other arguments in Fanon have also become familiar through the West in the decades following. There is, for instance, the argument that the West is especially rapacious—and that in this regard, it is wholly unlike all other cultures. There is the argument that the West is wholly without virtue, even while it is strangely, indeed dangerously, alluring. And then there is the insistence that revenge is called for and that the West needs to pay for what it has done. Finally, there is the curious fact that the rage against the imperial powers of the nineteenth century does not stop at the nineteenth-century imperial powers, but extends to a country that never had an empire: America. An interesting truth can be discerned here. There may be many reasons to criticize the European powers for their empires. But if this is seen as a founding sin, and Western countries that did not have empires are lumped in with those that did, then it would seem that it is not in fact empire that is the problem in the eyes of such critics, but the West itself.
The strength and style of Fanon’s writing has kept it being read. Though its appeal seems mostly to lie in its lust for violence, specifically vengeance against the West. But there is another thinker, after Fanon, whose central idea reached even wider, and whose interest in the Middle East ended up with him writing a crucially hostile reframing of the West. That writer is Edward Said, a Christian Palestinian, born in 1935, who had an unprecedented impact on the way in which significant portions of the West thought about themselves.
Like other postcolonial writers, Said’s central claim is singularly anti-Western. He is uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers. And that disinterest helps lead him to believe that every aspect of the West—even or especially its intellectual and cultural curiosity—is to be not just condemned but derided. His central work explaining this trend—Orientalism, published in 1978—has become one of the most widely cited books across disciplines in academia. Said’s central critique is an attempt to prove that when Westerners encountered other societies, they did so through the lens of the societies they came from. Despite the intelligence and style that Said could bring to his writing and his public debates, this central point is wholly unremarkable. After all, through what other lens might Western travelers and scholars have been expected to look at the Orient? Could they have been expected to look at the Middle East through Chinese eyes? Or Middle Eastern eyes? And why should Western explorers, linguists, and others be held to such a strange standard? It would be curious indeed to expect Arabs to have looked at Europe through European eyes. Or for the Chinese to look at the Middle East through Aboriginal eyes. Everybody approaches a different culture through references they have picked up in the culture they are from. There is nothing sinister about this. It is inevitable.
Murray, Douglas. The War on the West (pp. 99-100). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.