Week 7, Feb. 29: Challenging Colonialism: Guerillas, Collectivism, Violence.
SCREENING: The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966. 120 min.) * Watch in the library or check it out from the dept. office. The dept. office has a better quality print on DVD. As of Jan 18, also here in decent quality (turn subs on): https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=y-7j4WVTgWc
Readings:
1. Loomba, 120-28; 160-62;
2. Danièle Djamila Amrane Minne & Alistair Clarke, “Women at War.” 3. Recommended : Franz Fanon, “On Violence.” (pp. 1-62 in The
Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. [1963].)
PAPER #1 DUE THIS WEEK: MARCH 3RD aka Thursday
[ Week 8, March 7 : NO CLASS Reading Week. ]
When we come back we have this:
Week 9, March 14: Challenging Colonialism, II: Nationalism
Readings:
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (pp 1-40).
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We might begin in a different era and place than that of this film—not the 20th century but the days of American slavery:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. … If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by
sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others." --- Frederick Douglass, 1857
(Douglass was a former slave in America, who escaped his owners and went on to become a great intellectual, orator and leader of the abolition
movement. More here: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm? PAGE=4398 )
In a nutshell—this film, and the liberation movement of Algeria (like many others) illustrates this belief of Douglass’s. We will also look at it as
1. an illustration/representation of colonialism: its brutality but also its ways of seeing/thinking, including the
colonial/modern/occidental/white understanding of
native/brown/oriental women. And the place of knowledge within this —claims/ideas/beliefs about the natives, as when the one guard says “Don’t touch their women.”
2. AND representation of de-colonization/resistance and national
movement not just ‘politics and life as usual.’ Urban, guerilla
resistance—vastly out-powered militarily but able to resist. This entry is okay for basic data/info but is biased towards the French
unsurprisingly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Algiers_(1956%E2%80%9357) The actual battle was certainly a defeat but ultimately a moral victory in being a turning point for the resistance. A little bit like the Yanan or Long March saga of the PRC.
3. VIOLENCE. You see violence committed on innocent civilians, on both sides—French residents/Algerians and of course native
Algerians. And also violence committed on the partisans involved in the fight or in the colonial regime—soldiers and police, and resistance fighters. Are all these acts of violence the same? I.e. To be condemned as unjust? Why or why not?
a. Why is there violence in these cases? What does it tell us about this society – or two of them, French and Algerian -- and about colonialism in general?
b. How does the film portray it all? Does it condemn it? Praise it? Ambiguous?
c. Fanon’s argument [reference reading in coursepack] is that violence was an inherent part of the colonial scene and regime. Violence was also useful, acceptable, and even perhaps
necessary for the colonized to overcome the psychological damage of colonialism on the colonized, specifically an
inferiority complex or infantilized mindset. Violence was also the only language that the colonizer understood, i.e. it was the only way to get them to listen and force them to communicate. The very last line of the film seems to bear this out
Loomba
120-28: Fanon. Oedipus Complex; sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized./
122, 124 sex versus the Fanon described on 125 via Parry. Psychology and revolution.
POINT: the colonized are made neurotic or psychologically “messed up” by the colonial experience. Weak, dependent on Western/imperial approval. Slavish. It doesn’t have to be about pain and violence and oppression for this to happen. The colonized become dependent or feel inferior. Or they identify too closely with the colonizers. Like so-called Stockholm Syndrome (identifying with your kidnappers/abusers). Fanon suggests (as did others before and after him) that violent or forcible expulsion/rejection/liberation was necessary to get over or go through this trauma/damage.
160-62: on the veil and Algerian women in colonialism. >>> useful for another part of the film below (gender and the veil, the check-point scenes in BOA).
Fanon’s point, somewhat ambiguous, is that the colonized have to violently overthrow the colonizer in order to become healthier and healed psychologically. Just like one has to go through the Oedipal complex or scenario to be a normal/healthy adult. Now in other
writings Fanon does not insist on this as absolutely necessary, and he was aware that decolonization does not always take this form. But he meant it, and is clearly justifying the violence. He finds it ethical/just as well as useful. Leaving aside our possible moral objections to violence (if only temporarily) what do you make of it as a type of therapy, so to speak? And/or as a necessary stage or strategy (also Douglass’s point)? And finally: Can violence be justified? How so or when? One way to think about this is to think about how the film thinks about it! That’s what makes art useful….. [understanding vs justification].
1. NATIONALISM: WE’LL DEAL WITH THIS MORE next week. Follow the syllabus for that—Loomba and Anderson.
Nationalism: = the dominant ideology of the 20th century. [or #2 behind Communism]. “IMAGINED COMMUNITY.” Nationalism historically had been theorized as a ‘natural’ form of political community or nation-state in which people were united on the basis of blood/race/ethnicity, land, language etc. We’ll deal with this more next class. But BOA shows the place of nationalism within the liberation movement. Go to ending of the film—see the flags. Indeed part of its value is in showing for us what a
liberation movement was. While these were diverse in history, the film does illustrate their mode of organizing and defeating the colonizers. Guerilla warfare (vastly
outnumbered/outmatched ,militarily speaking) works in the end. You shatter, as well, the façade of “democracy” or “benign” or “helpful/civilizing mission….
2. GENDER and colonialism; Gender and nationalist resistance. (Seen already in Ngugi and Ray—i.e. that it is a central issue to colonialism). The place of gender among the colonized—“don’t touch their women” says the French soldier. The assumption that Muslim women are oppressed by a very sexist and
patriarchal oriental society. 161 in Loomba. Muslim women as victims and totally dominated, no agency/freedom/will. Therefore they would not fight the colonizers but would welcome them. The near-total oppression of women (esp. “oriental’ women) in the colonized’s societies: a standard trope of orientalism or colonial discourse. It can justify the colonization. They are there to civilize and protect and lift-up the women. What is interesting in BOA here: it shows the French having such an idea but then showing how it is contradicted by the relative freedom of the women in the movement. It also shows how the resistance drew on such stereotypes to subvert the colonial regime. Burqa-clad women can smuggle bombs more easily. Westernized female radicals can get the colonizer’s trust.
3. Power/VIOLENCE:
colonial powers denied that they used violence to subject the native populations. They would either pull the self-defense line or simply deny the use of violence and the fundamentally violent nature of colonialism—as something always lurking beneath the surface, if not out in the open, within a colonial society. It might be hard for Hong Kongers to see this—but even here the Brits used violence to enforce their rule whenever needed. No such thing as a kinder, gentler form of (modern) colonialism.
B. Fanon on this…. Why is it necessary? What are the limits of thinking only in moral terms about violence? Does the film show a certain justness to the violence of the Algerians? FF says the colonized must revolt and ac t violently if they are to heal themselves. They have been dehumanized and emasculated—i.e. disempowered and suffer from inferiority complexes. So violent resistance/revolution is also what earlier Chinese radicals called a “self Awakening” or “Cultural Awakening” movement on the part of the people, in response to feudalism and imperialism in China…
C. Here is Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth:
''Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.'' So you can see it is a matter of psychology —the colonized need to strike back violently not just for practical revolutionary reasons (power concedes nothing without a demand), but in order to free themselves of their mental dependency and general psychological malformation or sickness. He suggests
elsewhere that is also necessary at a social/cultural level—to rid the colonized society of the effects of colonialism and to help build a new, national culture. The latter idea about cultural revolution can be seen as the influence on Fanon and the anti-colonial movements of the Chinese revolution.
D. “violence” in Fanon is imply a fundamental aspect of colonial societies─ it can’t just go away without a fight. It is also a matter of symbolic and mental as much as physical violence as noted above. IT follows then that DECOLONIZATION will have to be violent
(a) The physical act of freeing a territory from external control of a colonizer. Typically we call these either revolutions or national liberations. If they are leftist/communist (anti-capitalist and so forth) they are the former; but revolutions are not necessarily about
colonialism. National liberations are.
(b) The psychological act of freeing the consciousness of the native from the alienation caused by colonization.
4. “PERMISSION TO NARRATE” (a phrase from Edward Said, the author of Orientalism): this is what the colonized lack and are not allowed. They can’t even speak. They have no voice. And no representation (in the political sense of representation). In
Battle of Algiers, they achieve it by the end: “What do you want?” are the final words of the French in the film, and in colonial
Algeria. Finally, they have to ask and the Algerians have the right and the power to speak back.
5. Rationality and Reason: Mathieu is quite rational. Calm and cool and collected, just like Outram. And equally barbaric and murderous. And Unjust. So rationality and reason, like
knowledge, are not simply neutral and objective and
disinterested. They are also often if not always about power. Rationality can do evil as well as good. In colonialism it was usually the former.
KNOWLEDGE: have seen it in CP/Ray and also in BOA: the French rely on this and use this (knowledge of Muslim women, for example)—they also produce it as in Chess Players (the monitoring of the King); so you see a certain use and production of “knowledge” which is far from neutral or objective, and is common to BOTH of these colonialisms (almost 100 years apart and different empires). The French attitudes towards the Algerian women is a perfect example of this.
RESISTANCE: where there is power there is resistance. But not always of the same type. It is not spontaneous but organized (anti-colonialism,
The Algerian liberation front is quite Marxist in this movie (and was for quite awhile in reality).
CLIPS:
“TERRORISM”: Is this “terrorism” or revolution/resistance/justice? Is this not very familiar in a way to today? Who gets to decide what a terrorist or revolutionary here/freedom fighter is?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XReG51HbqtU#t=48
