Coulthard Chapter 5

In this Chapter Coulthard explores the role of culture and cultural revival of colonized in the struggles for decolonization. He engages in the work of Fanon but first makes a detour through Sartre from which Fanon is drawing from and against.(In this he is also giving important insights about allyship in decolonial process).

He starts with the work of Sartre on anti-semitic racism, in which the jew have the option to deny who they are, flight and pass, or to assert who they are and confront the mockery. "Semitism" emerges from antisemitism. However, the black person has no option of flight and thus only to assert and reject racism as a subjective process. They is cornered. Culture can be a space of pride and resistance yet it may be restricted if it is only an inversion of the colonial order and nothing else. From a social perspective, however, for Sartre's assertion is a stage until the dialectic can be resolved in a classless/raceless society. Self-recognition and assertion is thus a stage only.

For Fanon on the contrary African past is a form of regaining self-respect by denying the racist tropes rejecting African culture as inferior and uncivilized. This past and culture in the past can also bring people together in a movement. Yet for Fanon, the fact that is still left in the past and does not engage with the material transformations effected by colonialism cuts the movement short. It also creates internal hierarchies amongst the movement that are not accounted for and are justified in the name of authenticity and an imagined past. The movement does not engage with the concrete material relations of the colonial society and does not recognize the (class) inequalities. [So in a way he is advancing and intersectional analysis]

Thus for Fanon too an emphasis on culture falls short and may fix a movement towards the future.

Here Coulthard makes the intervention over Fanon overlooking the role of culture in creating alternatives and not just resistance to colonial relations and politics.  The point is not just fixing culture in the past and turning it into a revival but also as a point mobilizing forces, understanding the arbitrariness of colonialism and also create other forms of life altogether. this can also enable a going beyond the colonial inversion mentioned above.  Culture is a space to go back and move forward and thus a space of resurgence.

For Coulthard, culture is an assertion, resistance, inversion but also beyond the relation and creation of new indigenous life. Some example is for him Idle no More.