Exhuming the Nation: Frantz Fanon & M N Roy on Decolonising (through) Marxism

Abstract

Much of the critical pressure of anti-colonial work is borne by the singular moment of national liberation. But what does it mean to be liberated from the idea of the nation itself? This paper explores the relationship between Marxism and postcolonial theory, examining how Marxist frameworks have been adapted in anti-colonial struggles of India and Algeria. It addresses the tendency within contemporary postcolonial scholarship to reject Marxism’s universalism, and argues that Marxism’s inherent hybridity lent itself well to decolonisation in the Global South. I consider as case studies, Frantz Fanon of the Algerian Liberation Movement, and M.N. Roy, founder of the Communist Parties of India and Mexico. By reading them comparatively, this paper investigates the gap between nation-formation as a Statist project vs. the revolutionary struggle towards decolonisation; and how Marxism as method is decolonised in its application by Roy and Fanon. I locate three crucial points of engagement between the two thinkers: their implication of the liberal bourgeois or the colonised intellectual in the trappings of the ‘nation’, their redefinition of “national culture”, and both their movement towards a new or radical humanism. In Roy and Fanon’s vision of reorienting decolonisation to enact a global shift in its philosophical footing, I am interested to see what form of the nation is exhumed from history, retained in the present, and taken forward into a decolonised future.