Before Europe rose and
dominated the world by the mid-1700s, China and Islam were vast empires that
developed technology, science, law and culture. Islam was in fact the
last great contiguous land empire, stretching from Spain to China.
Ironically, Chinese achievements such as ships, gunpowder and magnetic
compasses, developed further by Muslims with algebra employed in such fields as
cartography (mapping the world), enabled Europe to sail to Africa and the
Americas, and to set up colonial empires that could be controlled in spite of
separation by great distances. America became the largest slave colony in
all of history, and just as Britain ruled the sea less than a century ago
America now rules the skies as well as corporate economics. We can now
dominate independent others. Chomsky and Zinn are two critics of American
empire and its brutality, as well as the fact that “the West” is still hailed as
the authoritative voice, the voice of authority and objectivity above and
beyond all other cultures.
Islamic civilization was
the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the
natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy,
technology, and culture before Europe, and it gave Europe an astonishing amount
of culture, technology and science. In spite of this, most scholars
remain entirely ignorant of Islamic achievements as we rarely look outside of
ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society.
There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American
scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which
acknowledges some depth. Here are some awesome Ahadith, sayings of the
prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of
knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach
knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is
better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar
is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for
a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and
took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use
algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to
Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural
and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed
them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of
Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the
Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic
Christians. Thus there is no reason to celebrate the rationality or freedom
of the West over and above the rest of human history.
Postcolonialism is a
movement in scholarship that argues the effects of colonialism persist in spite
of decolonization. As Fanon and Said argue, the West and the white is
privileged and pronounced the true humanity which knows itself while all others
are marginalized and denounced as savage and ignorant.
Franz Fanon (1925 –
1961)
Franz Fanon was a
philosopher, existentialist, Freudian and Marxist who began his career in
psychiatry and became a revolutionary whose writings are one of the central
sources of the Postcolonial school of thought along with Edward Said.
Fanon’s two most famous works are the Wretched of the Earth (or Damned of
the Earth, as an alternative translation of the French title) and Black Skin,
White Masks. His writings have been an inspiration to many anti-racist
and anti-establishment groups including the Black Panthers.
Fanon was born on the
Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony as it remains today similar to
US control of Puerto Rico. Though middle class, he witnessed the racist
brutality of the French military toward the African population who were
descended from slaves brought by the French to Martinique to work on
plantations, as Africans had been brought to Haiti by the French and to Jamaica
by the British. Nevertheless, Fanon joined the French military fighting
Germany and Italy in Algeria. When Germany was defeated, the white
soldiers were featured in parades while the black soldiers were removed from
sight. Fanon went to France and studied psychology and medicine, becoming
a doctor and psychiatrist. He also studied philosophy, and attended
lectures by the Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, former student of Husserl like
Heidegger, who argued that phenomenology and existentialism must be put in the
context of the human body and physical experience like Freud and later
Korzybski and Piaget.
In 1952, Fanon wrote
Black Skin, White Masks as an expansion of his doctorial thesis, arguing that
colonialism had a destructive impact on the physical and mental health of black
people. Soon after writing the book he moved to Algeria to practice
psychiatry, soon becoming the head of service for a major psychiatric hospital.
Fanon began experimenting with therapy that took cultural background of
Arabic and black patients and the effects of racism into account. When
the Algerian Revolution against the French broke out (well portrayed in the
famous French film The Battle of Algiers), he sided with and secretly supported
the revolutionaries as a member of the Algerian Liberation Front, providing
them with medical treatment and supplies. Fanon encouraged and trained
interns and nurses to support the cause, and in 1957 Fanon was deported from
Algeria and the hospital dismantled. Fanon became a member of the close
existentialist circle of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in France who
followed the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Sartre would later write the
preface and lend his fame to The Damned of the Earth, writing famously that it
was not a book for white people but white people should have the courage to
read to come to a greater understanding of what is at stake for the oppressed
in a world dominated by ignorant and racist first world European people.
In the Damned of the
Earth, which was published only in 1961 just before his death, Fanon argued
that colonialism had taught black people to interiorize racism such that they
considered themselves evil and ugly and become self-destructive and violent
against their fellow black people. Fanon, in accord with the
existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, saw racism as a form of lying to
oneself to avoid the endless transformation of our existence and the
questioning gaze of the other. The black body and mind is denigrated to
affirm and celebrate the West, white culture and achievements including
colonial control of the globe.
Just as Jews are
marginalized as the abnormally mental human subspecies, black people are
marginalized as overly physical, and thus sensual, musical, and sexual.
While Marx argues that class is the central struggle, the rich oppressing
the poor and the poor rising up in revolution, Fanon argues that racial
inequality is the key to class oppression. Rather than merely “celebrate
diversity”, all the while supporting the idea that Western culture is rational
and other cultures are less rational, we must accept not only the rationality
of all people but our own individual irrationality as human beings. Thus,
we accept the rationality and irrationality of white, black and all people,
getting beyond the Manichean categorical dualistic thinking that separates both
black from white and rational from irrational.
However, going beyond
the simple universal humanism of Sartre, Fanon argued that black culture
asserting itself as an “other” to white culture is valuable in the struggle, so
we should celebrate black culture as an independent and separate voice while
celebrating human equality and unity. Rather than impose capitalism or
communism, we should allow economies and nations to develop individually and
see what works for each local group. Gramsci argued for the same in the
wake of Stalin while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Through
continuous bottom-up transformation of society (much like Trotsky had wanted
for Soviet Russia), we can understand and enable the individual, the various
cultures, and the whole.
Fanon argued that in
some cases, such as the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, and the
Haitian Revolution, violence is an appropriate means for resistance to
oppression and brutality. Many Black Panther leaders and supporters,
including Marcuse’s student Angela Davis, read this text in Oakland and applied
it to their own violent and brutal oppression by the Oakland Police and began
carrying shotguns to defend themselves and their community, technically not a
crime if the weapon is unloaded and unconcealed. Soon, city ordinances
were passed to make this illegal in spite of the fact that no one had
considered this a threat before the Black Panthers. Fanon remained a
revolutionary for the rest of his life, writing on tactics and support
structures to aid African rebels and all third world people attempting to gain
independence from European colonial powers. For this, there were numerous
assassination attempts made on his life. It is rumored that the CIA
prevented Fanon from receiving treatment for leukemia just before his death in
America. In 1965, four years after Fanon’s death, Time Magazine wrote
that he was “an apostle of violence” and “a prisoner of hate” after the
assassination of Malcolm X. Fanon likely would have replied, “You and I
both, Time Magazine”.
Edward Said (1935 –
2003)
Edward Said, like Fanon
one of the central sources of Postcolonialism, was a Palestinian American and professor
at Columbia University who grew up Palestinian Christian during the founding of
Israel and the wars that followed. Like Chomsky, he first got tenure in
another subject (Comparative Literature) before he became a famous cultural
critic and hip within left leaning academia like Marcuse and Foucault. He
is most famous for his book Orientalism (1978), which argues that “the
Occident” an old term that has been replaced since the 1950s by “the West”,
views “the Orient” as other through a Manichean lens much like Fanon describes
that Said labels “Orientalism”. European white people, including
scholars, identify reason and freedom with the West, as Western virtues, while
marginalizing other large cultural groups such as African, Chinese, Indian and
Islamic as ignorant, authoritarian, emotional, and unselfconscious. Said
is particularly focused on Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures and
populations, criticizing the romantic portrayal of the wonders of the East by
Renaissance painters as well as modern day scholarship. The East, the
Orient, is presented as an alien place full of wondrous splendor but also
authoritarian despots and pre-scientific irrationality.
Today, we see much of
the same in pundits labeling Muslims as a violent and unreasonable people.
Bush saying “They hate our freedom” rather than looking to economic
oppression originally structured through colonialism and now alive and well in
spite of decolonization is a perfect example. Rather than understand
September 11th as a result of colonialism, it is presented as a clash of
civilizations between the reasonable and free West and the ignorant and
authoritarian Islamic Middle East. Asia and China, as Russia was, is seen
in a similar light. Russia was the East, vs. America and Britain as the
West openly in the rhetoric. My professor Ken Jowitt, a specialist in
Eastern Europe during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, told a full
auditorium, his political science classroom, that since the fall of the Soviet
Union America needs a new enemy, and that it is either going to be Islamic
terrorism or communist China. This was less than a year before September
11th. He had argued this in 1990 in a piece included in his book, New
World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, published in Berkeley. This was
10 years before September 11th, and we are still involved in multiple wars in
the Middle East 10 years after.
Especially given this
situation today, Said is hip on campuses around the world, his work spawning
many followers including the author of the book Said and the Unsaid, a joke
only funny to humanities graduate students. The TV show Lost, which names
several characters after philosophers and scientists, named its Iraqi character
Said, a name which means 'happy' in Arabic.
You can watch Said speak
on YouTube. We will be watching these clips in class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlRR-qRkcc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo
