ROLL NO.

19PEN032
Subject . 3804

Analysis of frantz fanon’s essay “national culture” with context of edward’s

orientalism and the foucauldian concept of power and knowledge .

The essay “national culture” is the 4th chapter of the “the wretched of the earth”. The
chapter was about how a nation can form politically to divert the colonists after independence.
This chapter argues, relatedly: how can a national culture form after independence? Colonialism
demolishes and perverts culture, for instance teaching the colonized to consider their past as not
worthy or evil. What can the colonized do to claim or reclaim or newly generate culture after this
kind of brainwashing?

In post-colonial society, the rediscovery of identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon
named as “Passionate research… directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of
today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era
whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others” (Fanon)

“Colonisation is not gratified just with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s
brain of all form and content. By distorted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and
distorts, disfigures and destroys it”.

Fanonism, Orientalism and othering are key factors in understanding the colonial
experience and subject-construction. How colonised people and their experiences …were
positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical
exercise of cultural power and normalization.

Not only, in Said’s “Orientalism” sense, were we constructed as different and other within
the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see
and experience ourselves as “Other”. Every regime of representation is a regime of power
formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, ‘power/knowledge’. But this kind of fact is
internal, not external. It is one thing to spot a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a chief
discourse. It is quite different to subject them to that knowledge, not only as a concern of
imposed will and predominancy, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation
to the norm.

The colonizers, as the strong sector, led the discourse, and it prevailed during the era. The
discussion on the institution of discourse by fuoco, remarks on how power closely controls
institutional ratification.