Summary
In Chapter Three, III of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, the enterprise — instanced by Senghor’s negritude, the Rastafarian movement, the Garveyite back-to-Africa project and rediscoveries of unsullied pre-colonial Muslim essences — of asserting a native past standing free from worldly time, which Said argues must be rejected or at least reconceived (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.255 / printed p.228).
Details
- Nativism reinforces the imperial distinction between ruler and ruled even while revaluating the weaker or subservient partner, because the first principle of every colonial relationship is that a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction should remain constant between ruler and ruled (PDF p.255 / printed p.228).
- To accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself; to leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentializations that turn human beings against each other (PDF p.255-256 / printed p.228-229).
- Soyinka’s 1976 critique, as Said gives it, holds that negritude trapped itself in a primarily defensive role, staying within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis and redefining the African in those externalized terms (PDF p.256 / printed p.229).
- Nationality, nationalism, nativism: the progression is more and more constraining; the alternative figured by Aimé Césaire’s Cahier is liberation, not nationalist independence — in Fanon’s words, a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness (PDF p.256-257 / printed p.229-230).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, W. B. Yeats, Aimé Césaire, Imperialism