Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness and the Horizons of Decolonization

Abstract

This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 179) states that “[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?

• Colonialism
• decolonization
• Frantz Fanon
• national consciousness
• nationalism
• national liberation

This special issue emerges from debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness generated by two panels organized for two consecutive annual conventions of the International Studies Association: in Atlanta in 2016, and in Baltimore in 2017. What started out as enthusiastic acceptance of the idea of “escaping the nation” turned into a much more cautious exploration of the politics of national liberation, while also attending to aspirations that looked beyond the nation-state framework.

The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization,” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, 179) states “national consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anticolonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?

The story that unfolds in this special issue is a complex one, and the answer provided to the overarching question of the issue (escaping the nation?) is ambivalent at best. This ambivalence stems from the uneasy relationship Fanon himself traces in two of his chapters, “Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” and “On National Culture,” between national consciousness and the nation-state form. Here, he sketches the contours of the idea of national consciousness as “born out of the concerted action of the people, which embodies the actual aspirations of the people and transforms the state, [and] depends on exceptionally inventive cultural manifestations for its very existence” (179). What becomes evident from this articulation (and from its repeated iteration throughout the Wretched of the Earth) is its insistent emphasis on the political, social, economic, and cultural ownership by the people as a political and social body of both the anticolonial struggle and the post-independence vision. In other words, such ownership is the sine qua non for the instantiation of national consciousness. Nowhere is this articulation more palpable than in Fanon’s clarification that national consciousness should not be the endpoint of anticolonial mobilization. Rather, he states that once national consciousness is reached, “we must rapidly switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness” (142).¹ Put differently, the ultimate goal of anticolonial struggle is not simply the removal of the colonizer (thus ending the colonial occupation) and the establishment of an independent nation, but rather the overall transformation of state and society.² The latter is possible only when the masses/the people – as an organic political and social entity – consciously and enthusiastically appropriate and thus own the revolutionary programme (142–143). Fanon presciently warns against the capture of the postcolonial state by a bourgeois elite (however revolutionary its goals and aspirations):

A bourgeoisie that has only nationalism to feed the people fails in its mission and inevitably gets tangled up in a series of trials and tribulations. If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end. A bourgeois leadership of the underdeveloped countries confines the national consciousness to a sterile formalism. Only the massive commitment by men and women to judicious and productive tasks gives form and substance to this consciousness … The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people … If the national government wants to be national it must govern by the people and for the people, for the disinherited and by the disinherited. (Fanon 2004, 143–144; added emphasis)

In Fanon’s vision, then, nationalism becomes a sterile formalism if it simply entails leadership by a small elite in the name (but not the substance) of the people. He goes on to explain that no leader, however worthy and charismatic, “can replace the will of the people,” and a national government’s first goal should be to “restore dignity to all its citizens” (144). As Robert Young remarks, the

Wretched of the Earth is as much concerned with a critique of possible forms of the post-independence state as it is with national liberation as such. Fanon would not have been the least surprised by what happened in Algeria after 1962. (Young 2019)

This betrayal by a leadership that turns away from the challenge of building the new nation in favour of private interests, replacing their will for the will of the people, underscores Fanon’s exhortation that “each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it, in relative opacity” (Fanon 2004, 145). As Lewis R. Gordon points out, Fanon recognized that the generation who takes on the mission of decolonization is not necessarily best suited for the next stage of liberation: “As the fighters for national liberation are nourished on that unique struggle, they often maintain their legitimacy in those terms, and the result becomes an almost perpetual renegotiating of colonial relations in the form of neocolonial ones” (Gordon 2015, 122). Here, Fanon observes the emergence of this national bourgeoisie that “discovers its historical mission as an intermediary” (2004, 100) – a bourgeoisie that often includes

the leadership who fought for the liberation of the nation and who now face a form of legitimacy so embedded in the struggle that they are often caught in a web of negotiations the consequence of which is the maintenance of colonial relations in the heroic face of the liberators. (Gordon 2015, 123)

This distinction between nationalism as sterile formalism and national consciousness as a collective ownership of the goals of anticolonial struggle clarifies Fanon’s vision of national liberation. The relationship between national consciousness and internationalism is, however, a complex one.³ Far from suggesting the pursuit of “non-national orientations to decolonization” and thus by-passing the national stage, Fanon (2004, 179) warns that “the mistake, heavy with consequences, would be to miss out on the national stage.” Put differently, however laden with traps and dangers the national stage might be, it is still crucial to restoring dignity to the colonized. National consciousness, then, in Fanon’s vision, is a bridge both between the local terrain of national liberation and the larger/transnational terrain of anticolonial solidarity and connectivity. According to Charlie Veric, anticolonial nationalism is “a spatial double consciousness” that “establish[es] the national and the international as correlative domains of freedom” (2013, 7).

The uniqueness of anticolonial nationalism is its inextricable connection and connectivity to other colonized spaces and other anticolonial struggles: “the birth of national consciousness in Africa strictly correlates with an African consciousness. The responsibility of the African towards his national culture is also a responsibility toward ‘Negro-African’ culture” (Fanon 2004, 179; see also Young 2001, 2005). Initially delivered in 1959 as a paper at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, organized by Présence Africaine in Rome, “On National Culture” ends with this startling affirmation: “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives” (Fanon 2004, 180). While this double consciousness (as Veric calls it) crystallized, to a certain extent, in the praxis of many national liberation movements during (and even after) decolonization, this special issue gestures to a much more complicated story of anticolonial mobilization. The implicit question articulated by the various contributions here is the following: has the national liberation project “failed” (see Scott 2004; Wilder 2015) because, as Fanon warned, it did not translate into social and political consciousness, or did it fail because the nation-form is intrinsically contained within the colonial grammar of Enlightenment, and thus beholden to the tropes of modernity/modernization, progress and development? The former entails that there is a way to rescue the nation-form from its attendant violence;⁴ the latter suggests there is no such thing as “good nationalism.”⁵

Jasmine Gani’s contribution here takes up the latter possibility, and articulates an argument around the inherent violence of the nation-building project. She focuses on the anticolonial imaginary of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (with a specific focus on the figure of Hasan al-Banna), an imaginary that clearly attempted to escape and transcend the nation. In doing so, she also highlights what she perceives as the limits of Fanon’s thought, arguing that his vision of and choice for national independence remains caught within the quandaries of the Eurocentric blueprint of the nation-state form wedded, among other things, to secular – religious distinctions. Alina Sajed, on the other hand, highlights not so much the limits to Fanon’s vision, as the deep and painful ambivalence between his unswerving loyalty to the FLN and his theoretical articulation of a nation-building process that was at odds (in fundamental ways) with the FLN’s rigid nationalist agenda (Macey 2000, 469; Shatz 2017). His visionary prescience regarding the perils and traps of decolonization was ironically fulfilled in post-independence Algeria. Sajed’s analysis brings to the fore the ambiguity of anticolonial nationalism, caught between its impulse for liberation, retrieval of collective dignity, and its connectivity to other colonial spaces, and its stubborn rootedness (however emancipatory its horizons) in a Eurocentric grammar of exclusion and rigid boundary-drawing, so intrinsic to nation-building.

Other contributions focus on the potential for using the idea of national consciousness to articulate diverse anticolonial experiences, such as those in Ghana (Emiljanowicz), Africa in general (Bose), Lusophone Africa (Gruffydd-Jones), Palestine (Quenzer), and Algeria (Sajed). Paul Emiljanowicz takes seriously the idea of “double consciousness,” and argues Kwame Nkrumah’s project of national development needs to be understood within the tensions, inherent in his thought and praxis, between the promotion of national and continental consciousness, on the one hand, and his conception of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism, on the other. Emiljanowicz argues the postcolonial state can only be understood as part of wider networks of anticolonial connectivity. In a more radical take on Fanon’s dialectics between national consciousness and internationalism, Anuja Bose argues Fanon’s vision was never meant to be translated into the rigid confines of the nation-state form. Rather, she sees his project as one of “intercontinentalism as a form of political community that emerges out of dialectical tension and conflict.” Her analysis indicates that Fanon’s insistent emphasis on the international dimension of anticolonial struggle is crucial to a vision of national consciousness that aims to ensure it “does not ossify into exclusionary forms of political affiliation.” If Jasmine Gani’s contribution sees national consciousness as emancipatory in its potential, but ultimately beholden to a rigid Eurocentric blueprint of political community, Bose, on the contrary, argues Fanon’s anticolonial imaginary was inherently transnational and intercontinental in its scope and vision. Nonetheless, both readings implicitly gesture towards escaping the nation as a desirable political horizon.

Branwen Gruffydd-Jones’ intervention is not concerned with the question of escaping the nation, but rather with the types of critiques that posit the anticolonial project as a failed one (see Scott 2004). She cautions against conflating the predicaments and contradictions of postcolonial states with the exhaustion of the anticolonial imaginary. The hauntingly pertinent question she launches is the following: “How, from the position of our postcolonial times, should we engage with anticolonial struggles of the past?” Contrary to Gani and Bose’s analyses that attempt to answer the question of whether Fanon’s vision escapes the nation, Gruffydd-Jones’ engagement provides an ambivalent answer: while the anticolonial nation-building process fell within the larger paradigm of Eurocentric modernity, it also articulated vivid critiques of progress and civilization. A similar ambivalence can be found in Alina Sajed’s intervention on anticolonial struggle in Algeria: while the FLN posited a rigid and totalitarian vision of independent Algeria, it was simultaneously the only viable option for Algerians, not only for independence, but also for a collective retrieval of dignity. Katlyn Quenzer’s essay focuses on a number of Palestinian intellectuals active in the PLO between the 1960s and 1970s, and examines the ways in which they went against the grain of Arab nationalism. In that sense, she finds Fanon’s concept of national consciousness to be crucial to understanding the horizons to which such colonized intellectuals (to use Fanon’s terminology) were aspiring beyond the rigidity of Arab nationalism. Since Palestine is not an independent postcolonial state, examining the competing visions for liberation of the main factions within the PLO (Fatah and PFLP) throws a very different light on the question of escaping the nation. According to Quenzer’s engagement, the question that emerges for these intellectuals is whether to see the Palestinian struggle as larger than the locale in which it is embeded and thus seek for a more systemic change, or to limit itself to the goal of Palestinian nationalism and independence tout court.

Timothy Seidel’s essay continues the focus on the Palestinian resistance but moves away from political factions, and instead examines what he calls “political economies of resistance.” Seeing the impact of the Oslo peace process as a signaling of the end of the Palestinian anticolonial utopia, Seidel sees Fanon’s idea of national consciousness articulated differently today through acts of resistance that are local as they are transnational, arguing that nationalist commitments – wedded to liberal notions of economics and politics – obscure these acts of resistance that interrupt the postcolonial present in Palestine. In a thought-provoking narrative, Khadija El Alaoui and Maura Pilotti reflect poetically on the betrayals of the national liberation state in the Arab world.⁶ To make sense of the disillusionment of the postcolonial present and the unfulfilled promises of the national liberation state, they rally the rage, passion, and bitterness of contemporary Arab poets. Echoing Fanon’s injunction that the revolutionary struggle should be appropriated by the masses if it is to morph into national consciousness, Alaoui and Pilotti, through the language of fire in Arab poetry, rearticulate a sense of collective and individual dignity that emerges from human relations based on respect and compassion, and not on domination/repression and power. Melody Fonseca’s essay continues to reflect on contemporary postcolonial settlements by focusing on Puerto Rico. With its status of unincorporated territory of the United States, Puerto Rico is another case of unfulfilled national liberation, perhaps even more ambiguously situated vis-à-vis the idea of national consciousness, since the nationalist struggle was small and rapidly contained by the United States. Fonseca takes up the idea of national consciousness to examine how contemporary activist mobilizations in Puerto Rico go beyond a national liberation frame – and its production of what she describes as a “colonial entrapment” – to resist current neocolonial arrangements by the United States, and thus articulate a sense of political community that is more inclusive and engaged than that imagined by nationalist movements.

Seidel, Alaoui and Pilotti, and Fonseca’s interventions thus bring the question of escaping the nation into the postcolonial present. Although the points of focus differ from one essay to another, all three contributions highlight the intersections between nation-building (as aspiration in the case of Palestine) and neoliberalism, and how current mobilizations among civil society groups and activist movements provide a critique of neoliberal globalization and also of the national liberation state that betrayed its formative ideals and horizons (in the case of Palestine, Seidel focuses on the Palestinian Authority, while Fonseca takes to task the pro-status quo political establishment of Puerto Rico). In the case of contemporary Palestine, the question of escaping the nation is ambivalent at best, since for many Palestinians (and Palestinian political movements), statehood continues to be a much-desired goal.⁷ As an unincorporated US territory, Puerto Rico and the question of escaping the nation seems even more ambivalent, since the horizon of independence continues to hold sway (though mainly in the form of plebiscites). In the case of Arab states, with established postcolonial states, the question becomes one of the betrayal of the initial revolutionary impulses that founded the national liberation states (especially in the case of states such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Tunisia).⁸

This betrayal underscores, again, Fanon’s exhortation that “each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it, in relative opacity” (2004, 145). This helps to explain Fanon’s qualified emphasis on “national culture” that returns us to the theme of this special issue. National consciousness and national culture can play an important function in terms of providing “a source of coherence for the constitution of ‘the people’,” but it must be “a living form of cultural resistance” that avoids “petrification” – a cultural production oriented toward a future not yet known and so “paradoxically a challenge to its own permanence” (Gordon 2015, 127). This paradox speaks to a fundamental aspect of Fanon’s view of the human being as “a relational reality,” with the implication that “genuinely human activity always reaches beyond itself” (Gordon 2015, 127). And, as Gordon observes, it is what leads Fanon to conclude: “Self-awareness does not mean closing the door on communication. Philosophy teaches us on the contrary that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension” (Fanon 2004, 179).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributors and reviewers for this special issue, and the many colleagues and conversation partners in the Global Development Studies Section of the International Studies Association, for all of their insights and efforts. And many thanks to Robert J. C. Young for his interest and support in making this special issue happen.

Additional information

Funding

Alina Sajed's work on this article was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant Number 430-2018-00760].

Notes

1 For further examination of Fanon’s idea of social and political consciousness, see Sajed (this issue) and, especially, Sajed (2019).

2 For a critique of Fanon's heavy emphasis on armed struggle at the expense of political organization, see Nghe [1963] (2018). Though Nghe's critique has been seen as not entirely fair to Fanon's complex handling of the various aspects of decolonization, it still remains a thoughtful critical engagement with Fanon's vision of national liberation.

3 For a critique of current postcolonial/decolonial literature that deradicalizes Fanon’s unique understanding of anticolonial nationalism, see Salem (2017).

4 Salem (2017) seems to suggest this line of thinking about anticolonial nationalism.

5 For reflections on this, see Sajed (2015, 2017).

6 For an engaging account of the betrayals and pitfalls of the national liberation state, see Prashad (2007).

7 Of course, not all Palestinians or Palestinian groups see statehood as a viable or desirable option. Especially in the post-Oslo context of what many see as ongoing settler colonialism (Salamanca et al. 2012), state-building efforts, and even the goal of the nation-state captured by the vision of Oslo, are increasingly interrogated as part and parcel of a global regime of neoliberal governance that reproduces colonial logics and institutions (see Dana 2015; Haddad 2016; Tartir and Seidel 2019; Seidel, this issue). In recent years there has also been a movement toward a “one-state solution” in historic Palestine that does not take nationalist commitments as a point of departure but the advocacy of civil and human rights, reflected, for example, in the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

8 Prashad underscores the critical distinction between elite and popular goals and interests that destabilizes an ossified nationalist agenda in his observation that despite the political death of Arab nationalism “in the fires of sectarian war and chaos that runs from Iraq to Libya, from Yemen to Palestine,” the Arab revolution “remain[s] alive and well in the hearts of the Arab masses” who “want something better, something other than endless war and occupation” (2016, 6).