Although the prevailing literary history doesn’t present it this way, the 1961 publication of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth falls between the release of two of the most important works on “resistance literature” written during the era of decolonization: Jean Sénac’s The Sun under the Weapons: Elements of Algerian Resistance Poetry, published in 1957, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine, which appeared in 1966. Fanon surely knew of the former; it was to the pied-noir militant that he entrusted a copy of his letter of resignation from the Blida-Joinville hospital in October 1956. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to encounter the latter. Yet Fanon’s own writing on “combat literature,” which occupies the middle section of “On National Culture,” synthesizes some of the key interventions of both texts––and leaves us with similar questions. Across these works and others published during the global 60s, a vision of decolonization as the disalienation of writing emerges, a vision that conforms with how Fanon figures decolonization as “the violent insurrectionary jettisoning of an alien text” and “the reconquest by a people of its authorial responsibility.” Kanafani’s attention to the qudsiyat al-kalima (“the sanctity of the word”),” Sénac’s view of “Poetry and Resistance [as] the cutting edges of the same sword upon which man relentlessly sharpens his dignity,” Mário Pinto de Andrade’s vision of the guerrilla poet as the “true bearer of a praxis”: these writers’ studies of the weaponization of literature were sustained by distinct if underexplored arguments about the colonized individual’s relationship to writing and “the word.” More precisely yet, they were concerned with the different phases that the relationship of the colonized individual to the writing of the colonizer and to a future writing by “the people” had to traverse.

This seminar invites engagement with the theories and programs of disalienated writing that partook of what Michael Denning has described as a “global cultural turn,” a turn to the reconsideration of culture as a site of determination on the part of leftist formations worldwide during the second half of the twentieth century. 

We particularly encourage perspectives on anticolonial literature that move beyond the committed literature-modernism debates to consider the relationship between writing and decolonization as a discrete political and aesthetic problem––a problem intimately linked to debates about national language(s), literacy, genre, spokesmanship, class consciousness, dialectics, and the temporality of decolonization.