Political and Cultural Identity in the Global Postcolony: Postcolonial Thinkers on the Racist Enlightenment and the Struggle for Humanity
Angela Roothaan
Political and Cultural Identity in the Global Postcolony. Postcolonial Thinkers on the Racist Enlightenment and the Struggle for HumanityThis paper investigates how, in the condition of postcolonialism, claims of political and cultural identity depend on the understanding of humanity, and how this understanding ultimately relates to historical agency. I understand postcolonialism as the condition that aims at the decolonization of thought of formerly colonized and former colonizers together – a condition that is global. I will construe my argument by discussing the following authors: Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Amilcar Cabral, Achille Mbembe and Michael Onyebuchi Eze. Fanon for his criticism of modern Western philosophy as dehumanizing the other; Emmanuel Eze for his in-depth critique of Kant and Hegel’s ideas of humanity and the racialised and racist frames of thought they left behind and both Fanon and Eze for their proposals to understand humanity as a project under construction; Amilcar Cabral for his views on the interrelatedness of political and cultural identity in a situation of the building of new nations. Achille Mbembe because he showed the relations between the former colonizers and the formerly colonized to be characterized by conflicting temporalizations and Michael Eze for his understanding of historical agency in the condition of postcolonialism. Through this discussion I will disentangle the relations between identity (political and cultural) and humanity in the postcolony, and arrive, after a critique of the racist Enlightenment, at an inclusive, instead of an exclusive, understanding of humanity and historical agency.
