Abstract
This article engages with Frantz Fanon’s writings on different responses
by artists among colonised peoples to the fact of their colonisation. Fanon
develops a dialectical account in which an initial stage of assimilation of Western
techniques and paradigms is followed by a phase of immersion in African artistic
traditions. These two phases then function as prelude to a third, combative stage
which is presented as the most efficacious and authentic way for artists to play
their part in decolonisation. The article problematises the temporal logic and
implicit hierarchies of Fanon’s account. It does so by using Jacques Rancière’s
redemptive reading of early working class mobilisations in 1830s and 1840s
France, prior to the advent of Marxian proletarian politics, as a counterpoint. The
article here finds a different, more affirmative, non- dialectical and non-historicist
way of evaluating the liberatory potential of artistic practices by the colonised
prior to combative decolonisation.