1. Lecture Code: PS_L.5
ENGL 559: Postcolonial Studies UNIT 1: KEY CONCEPTS “Framing Identities” by David Richards
Min Pun, PhD, Associate Professor
Dept of English, PN Campus
Pokhara
01 October 2018

2. David Richards
Professor at English Studies and Director of the Centre of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling, UK.
His research interests are in the areas of colonial and postcolonial literature, anthropology, art history and cultural theory.

3. The Essay: “Framing Identities”
In this essay, David Richards has elaborated Fanon’s theories of colonial and postcolonial identity.
Fanonian theories of (post)colonial identity are further developed by the theorists and critics like Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak.
After Fanon and Said, postcolonialism, sharing with other forms of poststructuralist analysis, sees identities not as fixed and rooted, but they are in a constant state of flux that construct multiple identities as hybrid, displaced, dislocated, and migrant.

4. Frantz Fanon
Born in 1925, Fanon was a psychiatrist, political philosopher, literary critic and revolutionary from the French colony of Martinique.
He was one of a few extraordinary thinkers supporting the decolonization struggles occurring after the second world war. For instance, he supported the independence struggle of Algerian people who waged war against France.
He draws on a range of disciplines such as existentialism, psychoanalysis, colonial anthropology, and Negritude.

5. Incident on the Train
Fanon has mentioned an incident on the train in his book Black Skin, White Masks that became one of his major ideas about (post)colonial identity. As a young student of psychiatry in France, he happened to face a white child as he recalls,
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. ….(Fanon, BSWM)
This incident has not only been a point of origin for many postcolonial theorists, critics and writers, it has also been a point to fight against racism.

6. Fanon’s Theory of (Post)Colonial Identity
Fanon developed his theories of (post)colonial identity in his books Black Skin, White Masks (1951) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
‘The Fact of Blackness’ is a central idea of his theory of (post)colonial identity. He proposed that ‘blackness’ is not a self-created identity, but is a social construct.
So blackness as a social uniform is fixed, making black people’s blackness a fact – that is what Fanon means by ‘the fact of blackness’

7. How Identities are Created?
Colonial Identity:
To justify the colonization of people, the colonizers used images to create identities of the colonized people. So the images used by the colonizers become a colonial identity. For instance, laziness, savage, irrational, etc. are some examples of a colonial identity.
Postcolonial Identity:
The construction of identity in the postcolonial periods is complex and multiple. So decolonized (newly independent) people develop a postcolonial identity that is based on interactions between different identities such as cultural, national, ethnic as well as gender and class based identities.

8. Negritude
‘Negritude’ was a literary movement launched in 1930s by French-speaking black writers and intellections from French colonies in Africa and Caribbean. Martinician surrealist poets like Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor were the founders of the movement.
The movement was marked by its rejection of European colonization and its role in the African diaspora, pride in ‘blackness’ and traditional African values and culture.
It emerged in an attempt to overthrow colonial rule and create a new black consciousness. It drew its inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. But Fanon rejected the Negritude movement as too simplistic.

9. Fanon’s Anti-Colonial Violence
In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon believed that violence is required in order to resist and overthrow the colonial rule.
So he strongly believed that the struggle for power in colonized countries will be resolved only through violent struggle.
Fanon’s view of violence in decolonizing process can be compared with Mao Zedong’s view of violence for social justice.
However, Fanon’s idea of violence was criticized by many critics.

10. After Fanon: Edward Said
Edward Said is one of the followers of Fanon’s theory of (post)colonial identity and popularize Fanon’s ideas.
Said published Orientalism in 1978 that became the foundation for postcolonialism.
Orientalism is a concept that depicts the East as inferior and irrational ‘other’.
The concept also became controversial in the sense that place the orient in a discourse that emphasized unequal power relations between the West and the East.
After Fanon and Said, postcolonialism sees identities not as fixed, but multiple entities.

11. After Fanon: Homi K. Bhabha
After Fanon and Said, there emerged other poststructuralist followers of Fanon such as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak who focused on multiplicity of identities.
Bhabha published his book The Location of Culture (1986) that expanded the ideas of Fanon.
Bhabha claimed that there is a split in the identity of the colonized other that allows for people who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer’s cultural identity.
He used terms like displacement, dislocation, migrancy, and hybridity to elaborate his ideas on postcolonial identity.

12. After Fanon: Gayatri C. Spivak
Like Bhabha, Gayatri C. Spivak also took postcolonial writers as presenting multiple, changing identities in his life and writings.
She published her work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? ‘ in 1985 that poses one of the fundamental questions of postcolonial identity theory.
Bhabha through this essay has tried to give voice to the voiceless.
For instance, in her reading of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Breast-Giver’ in which a wet nurse continues feeding the children of wealthy family until she dies of untreated breast cancer.

13. Conclusion
In conclusion, postcolonial identities are about the formation of new identities.
Unlike Fanon’s liberated postcolonial identities, these new identities describe a regime of globalized subjects that deal with ‘centre- periphery’ model of the world after the second world war.
Lastly, the relationship between poststructuralist theory and postcolonial discourse is to call attention to controversies and debates that rose at the same time. For one of the things these two movements have in common is that they have always dealt with unequal relations of power in literature and cultures.

14. Associate Professor, Dept of English Tribhuvan University
Min Pun, PhD
Associate Professor, Dept of English
Tribhuvan University
Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara
Website: