Frantz Fanon on National Culture
In “On National Culture,” an essay collected in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon foregrounds the following paradox: “national identity,” while vital to the emergence of a Third World revolution, paradoxically limits such efforts at liberation because it re-inscribes an essentialist, totalizing, fetishized, often middle-class specific understanding of “nation” rather than encouraging a nuanced articulation of an oppressed people’s cultural heterogeneity across class lines. […]