Anti-Colonialism and the College Curriculum

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2016). Other past winners include Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (1951), Ivo Andric (1961), Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson (1903), José Echegaray (1904), Odysseus Elytis (1979), Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1908), Paul Heyse (1910), Selma Lagerlöf (1909), Halldór Laxness (1955), Henrik Pontoppidan (1917), and Henrik Sienkiewicz (1905).

Not recipients that you’d expect.

Yet many household names never won. That list includes James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.

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Nor do the prizewinners include much in the way of geographical or cultural diversity. All told, the prize’s recipients include only three writers from Japan, two from China, and two of South Asian descent, one of whom never lived on the subcontinent.

Now, we can add one more name to the illustrious list of exclusions: Maryse Condé, who died on April 2nd. She provides yet one more reason to describe the literature prize as “a comedy of errors and omissions.”

Guadaloupe’s “grand storyteller” and a major contributor to Francophone and postcolonial literature, she will be long remembered—despite the errors of the Nobel Prize committee—for her ability to illuminate the complexities of colonialism and cultural identity through fiction.

As a card-carrying member of the historical profession, I guess I’m expected to uphold the value of academic history over historical fiction. But I won’t do that in this case. In such seminal works as Segu and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Condé examines the intricacies of colonialism and the experiences of indigenous peoples within rapidly shifting historical contexts. In her narratives, we encounter, on a profoundly emotional level, the historical events, cultural transformations, and personal identities shaped by these forces.

Segu recounts the history, culture and eventual decline of the Bambara Empire in what is now modern-day Mali from the late 18th to the mid-19th century through the life of Dousika Traore, a trusted royal adviser, and his four sons. Their stories reflect the tumultuous changes that disrupt their society. Tiekoro turns away from his community’s spiritual beliefs to adopt Islam; Siga champions traditional values, yet becomes a trader; Naba falls victim to slave traders’ capture; and Malobali joins a band of mercenaries and adopts Christianity, albeit with tepid enthusiasm.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, in turn, tells the story of the enslaved woman whose life straddled multiple cultural identities, African, Caribbean, and Puritan. The novel, which recounts her journey from Barbados to her confession under torture in Salem, explores the spiritual, medical and healing practices that the Puritan authorities labeled as witchcraft, transforming Tituba from a historical footnote into a symbol of agency and a fully formed, multidimensional human being who must make the best of circumstances she can only barely control.

Condé’s other books include:

• Windward Heights, a reimagining of Emily Brontë’s novel as a tale of interracial love in the post-emancipation French Caribbean.
• Hérémakhonon describes a West Indian woman’s search for self, purpose and a sense of a belonging in postcolonial Africa, and her feelings of disillusionment and displacement as she confronts African realities that challenge her romanticized images of African life.
• Victoire: My Mother’s Mother, the story of her mestiza grandmother, a cook for a family of white Creoles, in the French Antilles.
• Crossing the Mangrove, a study of the ambiguities of identity set against a backdrop of ethnic and political tensions, personal struggles involving dysfunctional marriages, incestuous liaisons and hereditary disease, and the conflicts arising from the abrupt growth of banana plantations in a Guadeloupean village.
• Waiting for the Waters to Rise, a tale of statelessness, immigration, and the color caste system through the intersecting lives of characters from Mali, Haiti and Palestine, societies whose histories of colonialism and political violence exert an indelible influence on their psychologies.

While works of history can provide essential facts and analysis, Condé’s fiction offers insights into the emotional and psychological dimensions of colonialism and indigeneity in ways that standard history texts cannot. Her characters embody the conflicts, struggles and resilience of colonized and enslaved peoples, offering readers intimate glimpses into the human aspects of life under slavery and colonial rule.

By reimagining historical events and figures, Condé invites readers to reconsider accepted narratives about colonialism, highlighting the stories and perspectives that have been overlooked or silenced and challenging readers to confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery and the strength of those who resisted and survived those realities.

Defying conventional genres, her works combine historical fiction, autobiography and magical realism, expanding the possibilities of narrative fiction, giving voice to characters and communities often left on the peripheries of history and literature, and showing how these characters embody the struggles, resilience and agency of those navigating the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Through her storytelling, Condé shows how spiritual beliefs, traditions and community dynamics were disrupted and transformed by colonial and economic forces, but also how cultural practices could serve as sources of resistance and mechanisms for coping under the most oppressive circumstances imaginable. Rather than showing colonized peoples as passive victims, her works underscores their agency, whether through acts of defiance and rebellion or the preservation of traditions and cultural and spiritual practices.

In other words, she shows how fiction can serve as a tool for cultural preservation and cultural reclamation, where historical gaps or silences are filled with the possibilities of what might have been, where traditions, languages and beliefs are recovered, and the dominant narratives imposed by older colonial histories are challenged.

Above all, her fictions underscore the diverse responses to colonial encounters, including instances of collaboration, accommodation, negotiation and complicity.

Fiction, in short, offers a degree of narrative freedom denied to academic historians. Novelists have the opportunity to re-imagine the thoughts, feelings and inner lives of their characters, while engaging with the counterfactual, “what if” scenarios that reveal history’s contingencies and the potential for different outcomes. Fiction also has a unique ability to engage readers emotionally, to recenter indigenous perspectives, and celebrate the resilience and creativity of colonized or enslaved peoples.

Condé was, of course, not alone in her focus on the psychological dimensions of colonialism, and thanks, in part, to a recent biography by Adam Shatz, a great deal of attention has focused on Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose work is seminal in the fields of postcolonial studies, critical theory, and studies of race and racism.

Fanon’s insights into the psychological and political effects of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizer and the dynamics of power, identity and resistance in colonial settings have made him a pivotal figure in discussions about decolonization, racial identity and struggles for liberation.

His deep involvement in the Algerian National Liberation Front’s fight for independence and its quest to restore Muslim Algeria informed his critical analyses of colonialism and its impacts on society and the psyche.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argued that colonialism imposes a white worldview that forces Black people to see themselves through the lens of the colonizer, leading to internalized racism and a sense of inferiority. This work examines how language and culture are tools of oppression and how adopting the colonizer's language can alienate colonized peoples from their own cultures and identities. He calls for a rejection of these imposed identities and the affirmation of Black consciousness and dignity.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explores the violence inherent in colonialism and argues that decolonization is necessarily a violent process, as the colonized must assert their humanity in the face of dehumanizing conditions. Yet he also calls for a new, postcolonial humanism that transcends the divisiveness of race and class imposed by colonial rule.

A foundational figure in postcolonial studies, his writings lay bare the mechanisms of colonial oppression and the conditions necessary to achieving decolonization. Especially significant is his critique of colonial psychology, the ways that racism and colonial oppression distort people’s thinking, and the need to decolonize people’s imagination. His ideas about liberation, identity and resistance, and his call for solidarity among the oppressed, transcending national, racial and ethnic divisions, have influenced a wide range of civil rights and liberation movements around the world, including in the United States, South Africa and Palestine.

In an intensely moving review of Shatz’s biography in The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman, the magazine’s senior the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, asks what Fanon has to teach us today. After all, this is a moment when a faculty member at an elite university spoke of the Oct. 7 attacks as “exhilarating” and “energizing”—echoing Fanon’s description of violence as a “cleansing force” and his battle cry: “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.”

The issue that Beckerman explores is whether violence is therapeutic—a way, in Fanon’s words, to liberate the colonized from an “inferiority complex and his passive or despairing attitude,” or whether violence psychologically damages its perpetrators, perpetuating a vicious circle in which violence only begets more violence.

Beckerman cites other paths forward, among them, Gandhi’s Salt March and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which “self-consciously countered the brutality of the oppressor with humanistic tactics,” thereby “breaking what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the chain reaction of evil.’”

Is it true, as the Italian Futurist and future fascist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, put it in 1914, that only violence “knows how to rejuvenate, accelerate and sharpen human intelligence for the better”? Or was Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew and, like Fanon, a bitter opponent of colonialism, correct when he argued that the violent fight against French rule was a struggle “not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness.”

Which is why this is the moment to read not only Fanon but Condé, and also historians like Vincent Brown, Caroline Elkins, Linda Heywood, and John Thornton, to examine, in our humanities classes, the profound issues that their works raise about colonialism’s impact and the diverse ways that colonized peoples responded—at times with violence and cultural resistance and, sometimes, with complicity, adaptation, innovation and nonviolent struggle.

And then we might reflect on those words that Martin Luther King spoke six decades ago, when he cried out for the justice that can only be achieved through acts of solidarity in the service of a moral revolution: