Disavowing decolonization: Fanon, nationalism, and the problematic of representation in current theories of colonial discourse

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Periodical article

Title:	Disavowing decolonization: Fanon, nationalism, and the problematic of representation in current theories of colonial discourse
Author:	Lazarus, Neil
Year:	1993
Periodical:	Research in African Literatures
Volume:	24
Issue:	4
Pages:	69-98
Language:	English
Geographic term:	developing countries
Subjects:	nationalism anticolonialism literature French language
About person:	Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820255
Abstract:	A profound hostility towards nationalism is much in evidence in the work of influential colonial discourse theorists. Nationalist discourse - both metropolitan (i.e. colonial) and anticolonial - emerges variously as coercive, totalizing, elitist, authoritarian, essentialist, and reactionary. Anticolonial nationalist discourse is disparaged for precisely the same reasons as metropolitan nationalist discourse, and for one additional and paramount reason besides: it is held to amount to a replication, a reiteration, of the terms of colonial discourse itself. Nowhere is the view that anticolonial nationalism might best be represented as an ambivalent duplication of metropolitan discourse rather than as an uncompromising alternative to it more suggestively developed than in the work of Frantz Fanon. The main part of this article is devoted to a discussion of Fanon's writings and a review of the criticism his writings met with. Bibliogr., notes, ref.