Towards a critique of colonial violence: Fanon, Gandhi and the restoration of agency

Abstract

How is the re‐humanization of the colonized self effected during decolonization? This essay examines different conceptualizations of the (de)colonized/postcolonial subject in relationship to violence, by focusing on two works that recast Gandhi’s and Fanon’s anti‐colonial principles in textual and cinematic form. It establishes a comparison between two modes of anti‐colonial theory and practice, violence and non‐violence, as competing “ethics of resistance” (Leela Gandhi) that have become dominant in postcolonial studies. Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura (1938) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Burn! (1969) narrate the birth of a national consciousness with a focus on the transformation of the self. Kanthapura effects a “textual decolonization” through the Indianization of English and the translation of Gandhi’s notions of satyagraha and ahimsa into novelistic form. Burn! is the story of a slave revolt on an island of the Caribbean, and tackles the complex topics of colonial violence and neo‐colonialism within a framework inspired by Fanon. In the essay, I examine the intellectual links between Fanon’s espousal of anti‐colonial violence, and Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”. Violence vs non‐violence as responses to colonialism are seen to be profoundly linked to the contrasting realities of decolonization in India and Algeria, as well as to the intervening event of the Second World War.

Keywords:

• Burn!
• Kanthapura
• colonial violence
• M.K. Gandhi
• Frantz Fanon
• anti‐colonialism
• Walter Benjamin

Notes

1. This is a revised version of an essay that was published in Mark Shackleton (ed.) Diasporic Literature and Theory: Where Now? Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.