ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter an attempt was made to postulate the colonial encounter as an adversarial confrontation between two competing nationalisms. For all its revolutionary and therapeutic benefits, there are, as Fanon has written, many pitfalls to national consciousness. Clearly, the nationalist work of psychological and cultural rehabilitation is a crucial and historically expedient phase in the liberation of a people consigned, as Fanon puts it, to barbarism, degradation and bestiality by the harsh rhetoric of the colonial civilising mission. Postnationalism pursues such indeterminacies in the colonial encounter in order to bridge the old divide between Westerner and native through a considerably less embattled—if more politically amorphous—account of colonialism as a cooperative venture. Fanon’s hyperbolic utopianism has found a favourable constituency among postcolonial writers of divergent theoretical persuasions. Fanon’s insistence upon the fundamental instability and consequent inventiveness of anti-colonial conditions is reworked by a variety of postcolonial theorists to produce the discourse of hybridity.
