Week 5: The Post-colonial

In the essay cited at bottom of this page, Frantz Fanon argues that at the peak of colonialism, native culture is completely devalued, and indigenous elites attempt to adopt wholesale the culture and values of the colonizers. During this time, native culture is essentially frozen in amber: it doesn't change, but is preserved. However, when anti-colonial nationalism arises among the natives, native elites and plebs begin to celebrate native culture. But while celebrating it, they also change and rework it; they blend it with the forms of the colonizing culture, at the same time as they ensure that the forms of the colonizing culture do not dominate. We can see this process at work in the art of Mexico. Around 1850, Mexican high art attempted to adopt wholesale the culture and values of contemporary European high art. But by 1915, the Mexican Revolution had broken out. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as overthrowing a sociopolitical system dominated by European-obsessed racist elites who were in effect continuers of colonialism. With the Revolution came a new anti-colonialist nationalist high art, most famously produced by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their murals celebrated the patterns and themes of indigenous Mexican art, but at the same time blended them with the forms and concerns of European high art. Indeed, the new art that Rivera and Siquieros created was so powerful that it soon influenced European high culture.

In the images below, all taken from Mexican art, you can see this change at work.

Mexican Art Dominated by European Values

Indigenous Mexican Art (Pre-colonial)

Mexican Mestizo Folk Art (Mixing Indigenous and European Styles)

El Arbol de la Vida (The Tree of Life)

(Wikimedia Commons)

Mexican Anti-colonialist Nationalist High Art of the Revolution

Diego Rivera, as you see above, as a young man produced Eurocentric paintings, yet in his prime he produced paintings that ingeniously blended the art of Europe with the art of mestizo Mexico and the art of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. It is interesting to note that Rivera was a founding member of Mexico's Atheneum of Youth in 1909, a center from which the young generation in Mexico challenged the positivist philosophy of their seniors, and so touched off the philosophical aspect of the Mexican Revolution. The positivists had tended to see indigenous cultural products as inferior to European: in his prime, Rivera sought to combat that valuation by producing hybrids of their themes, which gave the art of each equal value. So we can see Rivera's art as following his philosophy: he first casts off the philosophy of the colony--positivism; he then casts off the colony's valuation of art: Eurocentric art is better than native-influenced art, which is better than indigenous art. He then creates a new high art which challenges this valuation, and brings him world fame.

You can also find this progress--from indigenous ways, to colonized imitating colonizer, to anti-colonial nationalist mixing of the two cultures--in dress fashions.

South Asian Pre-colonial dress--Kurta (easy-fitting tunic cut straight)

(Image Consulting School; fair use--click to enlarge)

So you'd like to know more about the themes of Week 5...

Richard Sandbrook et al, "Burdens of History," Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (Cambridge UP, 2007): 35-62.

Crawford Young, The Post-colonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960-2010 (UWisconsin Press, 2012)

John Dryzek and Oran Young, "Internal Colonialism in the Circumpolar North: The Case of Alaska," Development and Change 16 (1985): 123-145

Frantz Fanon, "Mutual Foundations for National Culture and Freedom Struggles," The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 170-181