Guerrilla History - Subjectivity and Decolonization in the Post-Independence Novel and Film w/ Sarah Jilani

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we have the opportunity to discuss a fabulous new book, Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film with its brilliant author Sarah Jilani.  Through examinations of novels and film from Africa and South Asia, Frantz Fanon's materialist approach to self and representations of subjectivity and decolonization are discussed.  Really an outstanding conversation, we really hope Sarah will join us again for future conversations!  Another project Sarah is involved with is Revolutionary Papers, and we look forward to discussing this project in weeks to come.   Sarah Jilani is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London, and a 2021 AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is the author of several articles on postcolonial literatures and film that have appeared in Textual Practice, Interventions, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature, amongst others, and a widely published culture journalist.  Keep up to date with Sarah by checking out her website for more of her work, and follow her on twitter @sarahjilani. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. this podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use

the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. Yeah, absolutely. It's great seeing you, as always. We have a terrific guest and a really fascinating book that we'll be talking about in the conversation today. But before I introduce the guest and the book that we'll be talking about, I would like to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla

history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually, as well as what the show is putting out collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A- underscore podcast. So as I mentioned, we have a really terrific guest today and a really fascinating book, which I really enjoyed reading. Our guest is Sarah Jalani, who is a lecturer at City University of London, an author of the very, very new book, which actually is not even released by the time we're recording this conversation, but will be by the time you're hearing this listeners. The title of the book is Subjectivity and Decolonization in the Post-Independence novel and film. Hello, Sarah.

It's nice to have you on the show. Hi, Henry. It's great to be here. Lovely to see you. And like I said, I really enjoyed the book, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. But Adnan, you were the one who invited Sarah onto the show because you recently met her. I'm going to turn this over to you to get us into the conversation today. Well, absolutely. I mean, it's such a pleasure to see you again, Sarah. And it was really wonderful to meet you at an interesting event in London, a talk by a friend who hopefully will have on at some point as well. Well, Nuri Gana, talking about his new book, Melancholy Acts.

And you asked some great questions. And we ended up getting into a conversation afterwards. And I learned that you were both the author of a very interesting book and a listener to the show. And I said, okay, well, this is just clearly meant to be. And I was really excited to learn that you were working on literature and film in this very fascinating. period of the early post-colonial history of these, you know, new nations that had emerged out of colonialism through liberation struggles. And in reading the book, I've also been fascinated to see, you know, how much the importance of the kind of transnational connections that were

being forged make themselves present in your work. And listeners to the show will recall that I've talked a lot about the Bandung Conference as this momentous kind of meeting of Afro-Asian nations and a forging of solidities and creating a kind of new consciousness. And so in some ways, you've written a book that I thought needed to be written for a long time, which is how to put in conversation,

you know, works of art, of literature, of film that really get at what was happening in this moment and how a kind of culture of resistance and a culture of post-colonial solidarity was being expressed. So I wanted to ask you, first of all, like what motivated you to, you know, that's what was in my mind thinking that there needs to be work on this and then you've done it. But so what was really motivating you to try and work across media? So it's not just a work of literature, but literature and film. And across regions that are often kind of because of the tyranny, you might say, of the nation-state form, often isolate some of these discussions when it seems that people during this time did have a sort of collective consciousness, even if they had a national consciousness.

So how did you come to conceive of working with these kinds of materials in the way you do? In other words, what motivated you really to write this book? Honestly, that's music to my ears because actually that aspect of the book was one of the hardest aspects of it, right? We do pay a lot of lip service and academia to interdisciplinarity. But when it comes to actually putting it into practice, I feel that we find, a lot of barriers have been erected in front of us. For me, I felt I needed to persevere because the political commonalities to what I think we can call an arrested decolonization in Africa and South Asia can be discussed together. So I wanted a purposefully experimental

approach. I wanted to put into conversation texts that I loved, but I found we're usually kind of grouped by region or medium, so the African texts, the Indian films, and so forth, so forth. When in fact, as I was reading and viewing some of these texts, I felt there were multivalenced but adjacent kind of queries emerging, especially between visual and literary texts that shared post-independent circumstances. Yeah, that's, you know, that comes across here. It reminds me, you know, I mean, it reminds me of a really interesting passage in the autobiography of Malcolm X. You know, after he's taken his tour through Africa in the Middle East, visiting post-colonial nations that have, you know, fought wars of liberation or in the midst of doing so, you know, a lot of this seems to take place these communities of knowledge. of contact in Ghana, so in Akra, he's hanging out there and he describes, I think it's an evening hosted maybe at the Chinese embassy. I can't remember which embassy, but there were

Algerian revolutionaries showing films about the revolution. Now, this is, of course, before you have the Battle of Algiers, but there was already some kind of use of film. as part of a broad African decolonization sort of culture that's being fostered. And he describes this kind of wonderful event. And so it seems to me that if you group like, you know, Algerian and North African kind of film as separate from, you know, other parts of Africa or other parts of the Middle East or even East Asia and South Asia, you're somehow doing a disservice to the extent. experience of people who are part of these cosmopolitan connections of recognizing colonialism as a common and shared condition and problem that needed to be overcome and that there needed to be solidarity with one another in order to successfully, you know, emerge into the post-colonial

world. So I couldn't agree more. I mean, but I think that that's why I was drawn to the idea and the term of post independence. Ella Shohat writes that the term invokes an achieved history of resistance, but it also kind of shifts our focus to the emergent nation state and especially whether the nation state is fulfilling or pursuing those economic, social, and political promises that were fought for and promised by decolonization. So multiple cultures around the world across continents were having this moment of contradiction in the in the 60s and 70s. And the text that I look at are set within that contradiction. As you say, on the one hand, that period saw this articulation of a common kind of

subjection to and struggle against imperialism. So third worldist internationalisms, as you mentioned. And recently, and Khadija Alawi has talked about. something she termed straight Bandung, which I quite like. She uses it in reference to artistic forms, a protest that emerged that kind of nodded to the energies of Bandong. But this is also a period, sadly, where thwarted national experiments were derailing the promises of liberation, where the logic of colonialism was being transformed into capitalism. with often the participation or the kind of inaction of post-colonial elites.

So it's an incredibly rich moment that has on the one hand those third-worldest energies that you describe, which are all over the artistic production of this period. But on the other hand, there is a lot of anger and irresolution in these films and novels as well, precisely because I think the Ghanaian writer Aikwe Arma puts it really nicely because of the things that continue unsatisfied inside

that's from his beautiful ones are not yet born 1969 novel and I love that phrase because you can really feel that in these filmmakers and these writers stories they're full of hope they're certainly internationalist in their outlook but there's also so

so much irresolution, dissatisfaction, inertia, justified anger that comes through in these stories. I'm going to hop in here, and you mentioned the beautiful ones that are not yet born. That's one of the texts that's focused on in your book. So what I'm going to be asking here is kind of a multi-part question. So feel free to take it how you want. The listeners may be wondering about why the title of the book starts with subjectivity. And chapter one of your book really focuses on subjectivity and grappling with the phononian context of subjectivity. And I know that we had talked before we even hit record about how we want to kind of stay away from jargon and too much theory.

But I think in this case, we do have to hit this because it is why you are looking at the films and texts that you are in the way that you are. So the first part of this question is can you explain a little bit about what you're meaning by subjectivity and how you're grappling with phonon? to explain your conception of subjectivity. And then also, since you mentioned one of the texts that you focus on this book, can you talk about the works that you chose for this book? Let the listeners know at least some of the films and novels that are included in this book, why you selected these and how the question of subjectivity was on the forefront of your mind when thinking about their inclusion into this.

Because I'll be honest with you, a few of these I was familiar with before. reading your book. I know Usman Sembene, I'm a fan of his film. I really like Count Theroy, a great film, which is not the film that's focused on in this book. But a lot of these are completely unfamiliar to me, if I'm being quite honest with you. So it'll also be interesting for me to hear why these specific texts and films were chosen with the question of subjectivity in mind. So those are the two parts of the question. What is subjectivity in your context and Fanon's context? And how did that relate to the inclusion of the texts and films in this book. Sure. I think because as we talked about,

my scope was so wide and so interdisciplinary and cross-geographical, I needed something that brought them all together whilst allowing for their own historical moments to shine through. My concern with subjectivity actually came before my selection of books. As I was reading early kind of post-colonial texts of this period, 50s and 60s, I felt quite frustrated with what I found to be a lack of materialist rigor in discussions of psyche, self, interiority, the body on the one hand. And then also the rarity of finding these ideas discussed in critique that I found kind of satisfyingly dialectical and historicizing. This is probably also to do with post-colonial theories on little internal battles and so forth.

But as I read these stories, I kept returning to how they treated colonialism's exploitation of human labor in a mutually kind of effectual relation with the way colonialism exercised power or were people's ways of understanding and constituting their subjectivities. And I couldn't help but feel any practice of resistance cannot leave this addressed. unaddressed. So with the aid of Fanon, I began to think about, well, how can we understand the psychopolitical effects of colonialism as there lived and understood by people? And while I wasn't attempting a kind of philosophical treatise on subjectivity, I did want to pin down an anti-colonial and materialist definition drawn from Fanon for the purposes of the whole book. And chapter

one is dedicated to kind of working mostly with black-skinned white masks and wretched of the earth as well to tease out what I feel Fennon focuses on I talked about historicity, embodiment, and

creative agency as three key components to how I think Fennon approaches the self. And the reason he's concerned with these is because of the way colonialism acted upon the psyche and the body and our relations with one another and ourselves. He talks often about, for example, how colonialism posited the native as if they lived in an

unchanging timeless reality, right? It's crazy how we still hear this kind of rhetoric. I think a decade ago, Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of France, said something like, the African peasant lives in a timeless continuity, endlessly repeating the same cycles. I believe he said this in 2010s. So Phelon was spot on when he identified historicity, being able to change and being a historical agent as a component of self that colonialism denies the colonized. And then there's embodiment that I felt really came. through in Fanon's thought as well. That's where he's grappling with the pain of being in a black body in a colonial world. We, or maybe we may be familiar with that scene in Wretched of the Earth, where he describes being pointed at by a white French boy and said, you know, look, mom, and he says, look, mom, a black man, I'm scared. And he describes how he kind of feels dissociated from his body in that instant. But then he goes through.

this grappling with that and realizes actually the only way to confront colonialism is to in all of its pain remain an embodied self within this colonial world and to fight through it, so to speak, rather than try to escape from it. So then I was thinking, well, okay, what then is the thing that Fanon finds hope in? And I was really interested in his emphasis on creativity. And I felt the creative agency is the third characteristic he seems to constantly stress when it comes to constituting subjectivity. And that's where I felt that I could kind of discuss resistance very clearly in these texts as well. So I tried to arrive at an anti-colonial and materialist kind of phenonian approach to subjectivity

because Fanon is of the time of the text that I choose and because also it felt a little bit like the field was interested in for instance the psychic experience of migration, diaspora and then it was interested in nation

when it came to questions of their political economy and I felt quite frustrating because of Fanon I was picking up on all of these hints whereby which he understood the self as a material phenomenon that internalizes the colonial world and yet also contains all of these avenues for resisting and transforming that world. I'm going to hop back in with another somewhat conceptual question, and I do apologize to the listeners for front-loading the conceptual questions at the beginning of this before we really dive into the film and the novels themselves, which might be why some people

are listening to the conversation. But again, I think that this is something that's worth focusing on in the beginning. When talking about connections, one of the things that struck me throughout your book is your, and it's not something that's a surprise, but it is a pleasant thing to see because it's something that I also focus on is the connection to land. And this is something that I harp on all the time. It's all about the land. It's not all about the land, but the land is a huge component of it.

Connection to the land, control of the land, and how the land is being utilized and for whom. All of these sorts of questions are things that we always have to think about. It's not just, you know, who has the military control of some area. It's not just, okay, well, what are the social relations within? in the society. We also have to look at the question of land itself and how it relates to these other questions and who is benefiting from these relations to the land. And in your book, particularly in the later chapters, and you can bring up the novel in the film that you focus on with regard to land. If I remember correctly, it was the last chapter before the

conclusion where you're really focusing on the connection of these post-independence, post-colonial individuals to the land and how, you know, post-colonial is in some ways post-colonial in name only because of the specter of neo-colonialism. So can you talk a little bit about why you focus so much on the land? Again, something that I also do. So, you know, I'm just happy to talk about this subject. Can you talk a little bit about why you focused on the land and why you look at the specific film, the film and the novel that you did when you were highlighting the question of land and those relations that are taking place in the post-independent space. I feel that land was one of several fluid kind of conduits for thinking about decolonization

nation building and as well as the promises such as wealth redistribution and disalienation that decolonization originally promised. As you mentioned, I particularly focus on this in Chapter 5 because I found that a film called Bara or work by the Malian director Suleiman Sissay paired really nicely with an Indian post-independence novel called Nectar and a Siv by Kamala Markandaya to together consider essentially how

subjectivities are formed by spatial interactions, and what that means when space is slowly being co-opted and integrated into systems of global capitalist accumulation after independence. So both of these texts are set a decade on from independences, and they're set at a time when nation-building through dispossession is continuing apace. And Bland is incredibly central to the characters in that novel and that film for situating their very selves within their environments. And it is this situatedness that allows them to actually make sense of the sources of their oppression and allows them to understand that these new changes, which ostensibly

seem to be promising a kind of enriching, you know, of everyone kind of tide lifts all bolts. Actually, there's an actual agenda hidden under them that will ultimately dispossess the rural peasantry and impoverish urban workers as well. In Suleiman Sisei's film Barath, land is indelibly tied to the to the, to the, a role of cotton in the Malian economy. And the film is set in a textile factory. And we have characters who are kind of lump and proletariat kind of figures who are loathing about on the streets, looking for casual work.

And they come in to do dangerous, precarious work in this textile factory. And Sise shows us how essentially Molly's entire society is shifting. not towards a decolonized future in the 70s, but actually towards a kind of bondage to cotton prices and to the ways in which those will be handled by the U.S. and the World Bank. In Mark Kandaya's earlier novel, an industrial tannery arrives into the rural idyll of our character, and that actually accelerates her political consciousness,

but it also almost costs her the land that helps constitute her very self. So I was very interested in the land as an embodied movement and experience of one's spatial surroundings as one of the key ways in which these characters constitute their subjectivities through the rhythms of interacting with rural or urban space and how decolonization did not necessarily mean that those ties were strengthened and continued. Quite the contrary in these two stories, decolonization led by a centralized national sort of impetus actually irrevocably kind of marrs these characters' relationships to land.

You have talked a little bit about some of the films and novels that you deal with. But maybe just for the listener, let's get back to. you know, Henry's original kind of invitation for you to tell people, you know, broadly, which are the texts and novels you are treating in depth in this work and what are some of the films? And also I think, you know, it's very interesting how you pair a novel and a film sometimes. And, you know, you're no respecter of the genre. You put these things in conversation. And I think, you know, you're no respecter of the genre. You put these things in conversation. And I think very effectively because you're after some component of this relationship between subjectivity and decolonization. And so maybe you can refer a little bit to that in what are some of the works that you treat and discuss here, just so that readers, listeners, rather, have an overall sense of what the scope of this book actually is. Sure. I mean, as I mentioned, it is purposefully experimental, but I have an incredibly long introduction in which I hope to try to justify this pairing. So I have chosen four novels

and four films across Africa and South Asia. And they're of course all richly diverse in their historical backdrops, formal techniques, and cultural context. They kind of take us from the 50s, so my earliest text is Markandaya's 1954 novel, Necterina Siv, through to the latest film, which is Satyajit Ray's adaptation of Tabor's home in the world. That's a 1984 film, so we've got 50s to the mid-80s. But they are all concerned with different inflections with the problem of how and why decolonization should address the means for people. to reconstitute their subjectivities.

So they do different things with this relationship, and I try to focus on four overarching problems that I felt I could pair one film and one novel each around. So in my first chapter featuring two texts, I focus on women in anti-colonial nationalisms, looking at Ray's home in the world, the film, and Gugiwa Tjongos, grain of wheat that's the 1969 novel by the Kenyan kind of giant of letters and i was really

interested in asking the question in this chapter of whether anti-colonial nationalisms as envisioned in these two stories actually transform all subjectivities ray's film is set in the early 20th century And it's about the Swadeshi movement in India at the time, particularly Bengal. This was a movement that promoted the purchasing of home products against British Raj and its sort of power. And we have a lu up triangle in this story seemingly. But what I was interested in investigating is how in the story we have a female protagonist who is, who begins to acquire a nationalist consciousness.

She's exposed to Swadeshi ideology and she begins to understand the ills of colonialism even though she's quite an upper class and upper class Bengali herself. In the story, the two men around her, her husband and her love interest, both try to circumscribe and manage her growing political consciousness

in the direction they prefer. Her love interest is a firebrand nationalist who goes around preaching Swadeshi. Her husband is a kind of gentle, anglicized man who espouses a kind of liberal humanism. And we have a female character whose growing subject political consciousness, the transformation of her subjectivity once she encounters nationalist ideology becomes uncontainable by the story and its characters. I was very interested to find a very similar dynamic across the ocean in East Africa. In Gugis a grain of wheat, which is about the Mao-Mao, or so-called Mao insurgency and struggle against British rule in Kenya,

we have a series of male characters who are trying to come to terms with the psychic traumas of armed resistance. They have won, Kenya is independent, but they're all trying to reintegrate into community. And even though Ngugi introduces militant female characters into the story, the women never seem to move past beyond becoming facilitators of men's psychic healing after the ills and traumas of nationalist struggle. So, to text by two men, who very interestingly, flag up, but do not pursue the question of gendering subjectivity and what the tense relationship between anti-colonial nationalism and the uncomfortable fact that that nationalism is going to raise

women's consciousness as well. How's that going to play out? In the next chapter, I'm interested in well after this independence moment in West Africa when we now have rather entrenched elites who are at the hell of new countries. And I look at Osman Sembans' Kala, wonderful satirical 1975 film in which a Senegalese businessman gets the curse of impotence upon his wedding night to his third wife,

and he spends the entire film seemingly trying to find an antidote. Of course, it's all a wonderful allegory for the impotence of the Senegalese post-independence elites. And then I compare that with Ghanaian Aikwe Armas, the beautiful ones are not yet born, 1968 novel,

which is disillusioned with Kwame Nekrumas Ghana as it begins to fail to deliver the promises of wealth redistribution to ordinary Ghanaians. there I'm interested in the question how do these two artists deal with the fact that elites in post-independence context often had a crisis of subjectivity

they were often francophiles or anglophiles and Sabaen and Arma are concerned with how this is translating into politics on mass so they're not really interested in saving the elite but they are very concerned with, you know, what Semben once said in an interview, how they are dragging an entire people after them, right? I really love that phrase of his because that's the concern. These post-independence elites who are Europhiles,

who, as he says, don't feel good about themselves unless they speak to the peasants in French, you know, what are we going to do about the fact that the masses are internalizing what they are seeing? You know, so they wonderfully place the future of the nation in the hands of the peasantry and the urban lump and proletariat. They're not interested in fixing the crisis of subjectivity of these elites, but they are very concerned about the effects of this en masse. In Chapter 4, I felt that I couldn't not address the fact that post-independence decades also saw a lot of violence. border drawing and very violent internal and international displacement. And two texts that actually reflect a whole body of post-independence work were Rittwick Gotak's film The Cloud Cap Star.

He's a Bengali director. And he, in this film, looks at life after partition migration in Dhaka. and the Nigerian author Bucci Emacheta's Destination by Afra, and that's a 1981 novel, a rare woman's insight into the Nigerian Civil War. So the two big events in Chapter 4 are the partition of India and the Nigerian Civil War. And there I was really interested in how,

under post-independence conditions of violent border making, these two creators look to subjective experience as a depository of historical truth. Instead of turning to state-sanchinged historiographies, they actually turn to the confused and often strife-filled psychic experiences of their characters in order to describe the macro causes of these two big events in post-colonial history. very interesting because, for instance, Emma Chata's female characters discuss petro-capitalism as one of the massive causes of the Nigerian Civil War, right? A resource grab for eastern Nigeria's oil-rich areas.

But she does so through women's knowledges and through hearsay and through subjective experience. And so I was interested in where does subjective embodied experience give rise to objective knowledge that is useful for resistance, useful for resistance praxis in these contexts. And finally, Chapter 5, I already discussed, called Implacing the Self-Envarmine and Labor in Mark Kondaya's novel Nectrinus Siv and Suleyme-Mans-Ae film work, and there we're kind of moving towards settings

where it's becoming quite clear that the post-colonial nation has failed to deliver on the redistributive promises of decolonization, and we're now seeing post-colonial nation states being incorporated into the global capitalist system on its kind of lower rungs, on the rungs of exploitation. You've been talking about women and feminisms. I want to stick with this topic for just a second. You had mentioned that in Chapter 2, the works were doing treatments that were focusing in large part on women in this post-independence context, but from the perspective of a male who had created the work, whereas in chapter four you talk about Bucci-M-Cheda being one of the few women who produced these sorts of works

that were, you know, at least widely accessible outside of the place that they were made. And one of the things that you have, it's actually in a footnote in Chapter 4, you talk about how Mchetta's treatment of motherhood often correlates with several African feminisms at once, including womanism and motherism. You know, thinking about how we can think about feminisms and the role of women within revolutionary context, within post-independence context, within post-colonial contexts, how these different feminisms, these different conceptions of feminisms, can be treated by a woman who's operating in a post-independence post-colonial context versus a man who's trying to read the role

of a woman in this post-independence context. So I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the importance of having a treatment like the one done by M-Chatta, which is engaging with various feminisms that are operating versus, you know, perhaps very well-intentioned treatments by men of the role of women within these post-independence or revolutionary contexts. I think that that's a really important thing to keep in mind for the listeners as we talk about the role of women as, you know, who is doing this treatment and what are they engaging with individually as they're making this work. Absolutely. I think it's, it's, writers like Emma Cheta have a much more expansive view of women's roles within both revolutionary anti-colonial moments and movements, as well as the fallout from nation-building.

I quite like the concept that I use in Chapter 4, a Nigerian critic Christia Chebe uses the idea of secondary control mechanisms that, in her words, are where women attempt to accommodate to objective conditions in order to affect a more satisfying fit and control their psychological impact. This is the kind of material that Emacheta is able to excavate that the two men in chapter two where I discuss some gender

do not immediately see. It's probably because of the fact that when we think of resistance, we're thinking of various kind of models of what that resistance can look like. It could look like armed resistance. It could look like political organizing, labor organizing, and so forth. But a machete gives us a story of extremes, right? On a civil war situation where the front was everywhere and women were everywhere on the front as well. So I think a text like a machete's actually show us that the mechanisms of survival and resistance that women have employed in post-independence conflict involve managing interdependencies effectively, involve managing the detrimental effects of violence, sexual violence, starvation, and so forth.

And it also involves the passing on of intergenerational resistance knowledges amongst matrilineal, along matrilineal lines very often. And because these forms of everyday survival and resistance aren't as quote unquote sexy as picking up a gun and fighting the colonizer, you know, it is very, very often relegated to quote-unquote women's work with all of the derogatory implications of that, right? But Emma Chesa does not deny that role for women. We do have a character in Destination Biafra, Debbie, who joins the army and actually, unfortunately, participates in the torture and terrorization of Biafran soldiers.

So we have a militarized feminism that Emacchetta is not endorsing as so-called. girl power in that instance. But we do have that female character eventually change as she falls into refugee conditions and begins to relate to Nigerian women of various ethnicities at a lower class position than herself. So she does give us a protagonist who actually does do the resisting, quote unquote, in the typical or masculine sense of a of how it's usually viewed in post-independence literature, right, militant organizing. But that doesn't turn out to be the most community effective

and most psychically liberating form of resistance that the character actually finds. So I think what we get in that story, as you said, is a view of motherhood as a metaphor that goes beyond biological essentialism. It's a view of women's everyday resistance and resilience as some of the most difficult and militant forms of resistance. So I found that it was crucial for that third aspect

of the phenonian approach to subjectivity, that creative agency bit of the work that needs to be done after the independences, right? because it is in the thankless everyday survival that, you know, mechanisms that we find qualities of being both a gential and creative, which are systematically blocked by colonialism and its structures. So in many ways, women in that novel are doing the biggest resistance work of all. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about a concept that appeared a couple of times from, you know, just one of the most wonderful theorists, you know, Amy Cesar. Well, I just absolutely adore. So I'm so glad that he featured kind of powerfully in this. And his concept that you referenced and I think is in some ways the kernel for a lot of what you're unfolding here. is what he characterized as a good decolonization. And maybe if you could unpack a little bit more,

kind of what he meant by that and how you sort of interpret that through the lens of these discussions that are clearly taking place somehow artistically in these works. And in particular, I guess the pairing, you know, because we've talked about phenone and subjectivity, but you'll also pair in your conclusion, this relationship between structural decolonization, which we find this relationship, of course, in Venom, but the structural decolonization and some kind of element of altered consciousness and

subjectivity that Ngugi, in his theoretical work, you know, talks about as decolonizing of the mind. So maybe you could kind of wrestle, well, firstly, elaborate, what is Césaire getting at? And then, you know, how do you see these works really wrestling with that kind of concept that you've identified in Césaire? What's a good decolonization? And how during some of the later periods that you're looking at works where there is a kind of critique or a sense of concerned that that hopeful expectation where the possibilities of political decolonization were held to be just the first step in achieving some kind of hoped for, you know, improvement of material conditions, that somehow there is this kind of nagging disappointment that has to be

dealt with. That could be a bad decolonization. you know, if there is a good one. So perhaps you could tell us a little bit more and elaborate on that concept. Sure. I'm so glad you liked that quote, Adnan, because when I read it, I mean, I would recommend listeners

to read that whole article. It was published in 1959 in presence of african, and it's titled The Man of Culture and His Responsibilities. It's just fantastic for anyone interested in how cultural production is political. So Cesar, as you say, says inside decolonization itself, there are degrees. All forms of decolonization are not

equal. And he goes on to stress, quote, a good decolonization is, as he said, without aftermath. So I love that this simply, simple, seemingly simple warning brings into view multi-dimensional questions around decolonization. What does it encompass? Who is it for? How is it to be pursued? where to situate national independence on its trajectory, right? So I think I hope by now we, many, many scholars have, would agree that decolonization is a structure rather than an event. Sure, there was a particular aspect to that mid-century flag independence moment, but we're talking about something yet ongoing, right? And I think this task of decolonizing the mind, when I was reading the theorists around this period, it was expressed with differences in flexion, but it was consistently linked to the creation of a new economy and society and the transformation of people's ways of being and relating to others. So to sketch this out in a bit more of a concrete way, for instance, the revolutionary Burkinaabe leader, Thomas Sankara, for him this meant the cultivation of self-worth and integrity.

He wrote, we have to recondition our people to accept themselves as they are, not to be ashamed of their real situation, to be satisfied with it. So efforts towards liberation, decolonization, had to consider ways through and out of how domination had produced and every day continued to produce, you know, what Fanon called inferiority complexes, what M.A. says there called a skillfully injected mix of inferiority complexes, you know, racial self-hatred, misplaced anger, mask. and all these emotions we see in these stories. For others of the period, like the leader Amil Kar-Kabral, this meant actually taking a more time-consuming approach to political action, waiting, for instance, for the legitimizing force of psychic transformation en masse. I was really interested to find out that armed resistance began a whole decade in Guinea-Bissau after the founding of PAIGC

because Cabral and its fellow founders actually maintain that people themselves must come to decide on the necessity of militant anti-colonial resistance. So the decolonization that is good cannot be parachuted down in Fanon's phrase. It would be way too easy to terminate redirect or reverse in the post-independence decades, right?

So I think of neither Fanon nor any of the above thinkers kind of, you know, provide any prescriptive plan for what this would look like. They're, you know, they as many, many of them as Marxists, they always emphasize, we got to refer back to concrete conditions relevant to our moment. But there is this insistence that essentially this system of dispossession accumulation and exploitation is also sustained through its debilitating psychic effects, right? Social isolation, inertia, fear, nostalgia, disorientation, misdirected anger. And so for, I think, Cesar is good decolonization, we need two things, according to these thinkers

and these artists. On the one hand, sometimes it will mean the slower. and the more painstaking work of awaiting for people themselves to come to the decision that struggle or resistance is necessary and so and so is the method suitable for us and secondly it cannot leave political and economic systems transformed without getting rid also of the psychic effects of colonization like as aspiring to Europe such as continuing to deal with inferiority complexes, continuing to deal with racism in all of its guises, and so forth.

So I think all of these thinkers would say, a good decolonization will look slightly different everywhere depending on the concrete conditions of each struggle, but it cannot be parachuted down and it must come on the heels of a transformation in consciousness on mass. You know, you mentioned transformation. That's actually what I would like to follow up on here,

and specifically linking it to the works that you focus on within your book. So two of the things that you look at throughout the book, and of course I could bring up more things that you also talk about in the book regarding transformation after this independence, this at least flag independence takes place, two of the things that you look at are, you know, the realities of the revolution and the realities of what comes out of this and with regard to transformation. One of them is the contradictions of modernization that take place after this post-independence era. And one of the other things

that you also talk about, which I thought your discussion of was quite interesting, but to be honest, I would have liked to see it expanded more, and perhaps we can do that here. is the questions of ethnicity after colonial rule. One of the things that you say, you actually quote in the book, by praising the spirit of nationalism, he had abolished tribalism or he had the false impression that he had abolished tribalism by praising the spirit of nationalism. It's one of the quotes about halfway through the book

that you bring up from the work that you're talking about at that point. But the point is that we have this idea that, you know, know, the independence or achieving liberation from colonialism is this event. When I say we, I mean, this is like, you know, societal thinking of these things. Does that this event happens and now you are free and now you have the ability to do what you need to do in your post-colonial era. But you also look at there are realities that must be grappled with. And that's why I point out these two for perhaps some further discussion on modernization, which, you know, in many ways is absolutely necessary, but there are many contradictions that are

that rise up when you are going about figuring out how are we going to modernize after colonial rule. And then also with this question of ethnicity and tribalism that take place as a result of colonialism and how you have to grapple with the realities of the construction of things like tribalism that were in many cases put in by the colonists themselves in order to divide the people within the colony. And so thinking about the contradictions at play here and then how these contradictions are then treated within media is particularly interesting for me. I'm wondering if you can expand on that in any way.

Absolutely. I mean, the thing with doing, you know, comparative literature and film is, of course, I am constrained somewhat to analyzing my cultural texts. So it's hard to derive from ultimately fictional sources, large answers to sociological and historical phenomena. But still, literature and film and art in general here is, I think, capable of articulating hunches, reminitions, anxieties, fears, projections, and hopes, all real things, but may not be within the remit of a historian's work. So I'm just cameatting my answer with, you know, ultimately my sources are literary and creative. But that doesn't mean, of course, that they aren't saying important things about ethnicity and modernization.

In the quote that you mentioned, Bucci Amacheta's destination Biafra, there we have a really scathing picture of male leadership on both sides, both Nigerian and Biafran leadership and their myopia, you know, assuming, as you said, that nationalism is a strong enough rhetoric at this point to overcome tribal divisions. Now, I'm not a fan of using tribal without, you know, some concern because the division. Nor am I, which is when I wanted to raise the fact that it is a constructed division. Absolutely. So the real differences underlying this misleading, I think, title are, of course, differences that were manufactured by British colonialism in Nigeria, in the case of this novel's context through decades, right? Biafra tried to secede from Nigeria. It was mostly the

southeastern and eastern regions, and this was a predominantly Igbo region. Historically, the Igbo were amongst the first to convert to Christianity with the arrival of the British. And also the oil wells happen to be quite heavily concentrated in the east and the southeast. So these so-called tribal divisions that the leaders in the novel seem to take as a given are actually underpinned by historical and material differences. The leader of the Nigerian forces is a Muslim Hausa leader, and traditionally the north of Nigeria was left. less old uncle developed by the British. And so the pogroms that took place before civil war broke out, while they were framed as if they were age-old tribal rivalries, were very much about this long period of inequitable

development that had happened in Nigeria, which, of course, exploded with the civil war in So I think ethnicity in this novel, it clearly comes across as something that an elite Nigerian leadership is mistakenly thinking of in a rather essentialist way when the reality of it is a resource scramble in many ways, made even more complicated by the fact that the former colonial power, Britain, is still trying to do a managed transfer of those oil, areas, you know, and in the meantime, you have other players like the Soviet Union at the time, France and the U.S., all also looking to secure Nigerian oil. And to return to Amacheta's feminism, it's fascinating in the story that women see through the rhetoric of tribalism.

And, you know, we have a female character, say, wasn't the oil the reason for all this mess in the first place quite early on in the novel just as a Nigerian force a storm into her house and arrest her terrified husband so the story is full of women who kind of

full of male characters rather who belatedly arrive at the real causes of the civil war after a whole story after a whole period of time of just landing on the wrong thing

tribalism, failures, nationalism, so on and so forth. So a really great takedown of the notion that these conflicts were so-called age-old tribal rivalries takes place in these texts. With modernization, in Chapter 5, I think the novels, the novel nectar in a sieve and the film work, all use these spatial narrative methods to think about the coming of technologization and industrialization into spaces that either were rural, which is the case of the Nigerian novel, or were mostly concerned with local production. And I think they really reveal for the reader the contours of kind of an emerging world system,

where ecological destruction is technologically accelerated, and this is key, where national industrialization after independence unfortunately comes to mean dispossession for many. So even when it comes to the film work, which is set in an urban factory, we still have Suleyman Sisi mapping the post-independence environment as a place marked, by accumulation and divestment, production and social reproduction, and in turning his attention to kind of the material wealth that these spaces create, both texts illustrate that an emergent globalization is going to depend on penetrating these spaces and modernizing them,

which I personally take to mean incorporation. into the nodes of a hyper-exploitative global capsulism. Absolutely. I mean, that's a great reflection on those problematics there. I mean, you started your answer to that previous question of Henry's by trying to bracket these material existing historical and contextual conditions that works of fiction can't necessarily. provide complete answers for and so on. And so, you know, of course, I understand that. I'm a historian,

so, you know, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, of course, you can't just use literary and fictional and film works to answer those kinds of questions fully. But I think one thing that's so great about your work and about the book is that you do take a very historicist, even as you're dealing with psychic and, you know, subjectivities, things that would seem to be very removed from material reality. You're trying to ground it in a kind of materialist reading and understanding of subjectivity in these colonial and post-colonial works of art. And I think that's very important to think of this era and the kind of culture that's produced

as historically significant and interesting for what it tells us about the consciousness of the time and so on. So I'm very sympathetic to that. But I think in a way you have a more ambitious sort of project related to literature and film than that. And so I wanted to give you a chance, perhaps, to go beyond and really make the case that I think you're making here, which is what is the sort of role, really? Why is it important to wrestle with these works of cinema and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, novels in the way that you do as aiding somehow in this process of liberation in anti-colonial kind of work and and and organizing and I wondered if there was maybe something further to talk about if it isn't just representational it's not documenting you know it's not like

documentary films, it's, you know, but they, there is a realist kind of form to this, and this isn't magical realism or whatever, which is another kind of whole genre. You're dealing with realist kind of films, realist novels in this post-colonial environment. So then what is it? If it's not a document, but it is still fiction, you know, what is the importance and significance of realism? There's been a lot of work on social. Socialist realism. This is sort of post-colonial realism. What's at stake there? And just to add in, I would like to add in on that point, Adnan, you're hitting something very interesting and something that stood out to me is something that you pointed out in your book, Sarah, is that there is a difference in many ways to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union's media, whereas some of the individuals here, for example, like Sembend, you point out, incorporates African oral tradition into this as well. So in addition to what Adnan is saying, you know, also thinking about the like specificities of the media that's being produced in these post-colonial independent states rather than, you know, focusing solely on the socialist realism like the Soviet Union did particularly within those early years of the socialist project there.

Yeah. I'm really glad realism. Sorry, Adnan, do you want to go ahead? Oh, well, I mean, we've already overloaded you with like a really, really big question, but I guess just the kind of final point of it and maybe as a prompt for you to expand on. I mean, the way this book ends is to me extremely exciting and provocative. And this is where I was kind of coming to this question is that you did argue and say, you know, that fiction continues to wield the ability to draw on. those quote, and this is coming from again, Césaire, is just such a poetically powerful and insightful theorist, I think, the things that continue unsatisfied inside in order to imagine the kind of world that is desired instead, and that he said that people know better than anyone what they need, they know it from within, and they know that all creation, because

it is creative is participation in a combat for liberation. And you concluded, you know, saying that maybe it could be this embodied creative struggle as a resource for resistance in search for a justice that decolonization once promised. Maybe you can elaborate from that standpoint. I think that's where your argument really, really, really comes to. Absolutely. I would add to that another quote from Cesar actually, which I think expands on that, again from his man of culture and his responsibilities. He pauses on the social power of textual and visual narrative's ability to, quote, blend in the daily round of sufferings and denials of justice, memories and hopes from which people can draw in critical moments. I'd love the way he puts that, because it actually

it beautifully condenses something that is both very material and quite conceptual, right? And that is what is the role of storytelling in, on the one hand, signing the ontological resilience to survive under conditions of dehumanization and colonization. how are they depositories of experiences cultural knowledges or resistance practices or resistance practices which can be reinterpreted and reused as circumstances of resistance evolve and also how do they become something that people can draw on in critical moments right and the rest of the quote actually goes on to say in draw on in critical moments to assault their future and and you know again using the language of combat right a people assaulting their future and it is an

incredibly powerful image of making one's you know owns future out of out of the the confines of colonial structures so I think the realism allows us in many ways to bridge bridge that gap or do the, or be that depository of memories and hopes while still being ultimately a creative medium rather than, as you say, a document or an ethnographic kind of document. I went back to Lukash to rethink on why realism unites these four novels and four films in their different ways. I think we need to return to how Lukash attributes something to this mode that is about taking the subjective experience of your objective conditions and representing them.

So he highlights that a new immediacy is created by the twofold labor of the writer, we could also say the filmmaker, who, quote, uncovers the deeper, hidden media. and not immediately perceptible relationships that make up society and then artistically concealed these relationships. This is why film and literature both speaks to immediate political realities while still remaining fictional narrative at the same time, right? It's their ability to uncover the ways in which, in short, independence did not mean freedom. and why and who is to blame and who do they want us to blame instead and then it rehides these inside

a narrative that includes many many thematic concerns from death to sex to love to to coming of age and so forth but that is what realism is able to do in a sufficiently flexible and bendy way that both gives, I think, people that's Caesarian material to draw on in critical moments, material that is directly relevant to their lived political experience, while still hiding these relationships so that reading these stories is a new process of discovery for each person in each context. That's why I think, you know, while I, while I was a bit intimidated at the beginning, especially in the early stages when these ideas

were PhD work, intimidated by my cross-geographical scope and the interdisciplinary thing I was attempting, I felt more and more in control as I sort of hovered around realism, subjectivity, and decolonization. They seemed invariably bound together in some way. And the way it turned out to be, as I wrote, was that realism is the narrative form and worldview through which these fictional texts are able to illustrate that decolonization is an unfinished project that must include the constitution of our subjectivities out of the remnants of colonialism. So like a nice the triangulation there. Yeah, I want to step away from the theoretical for a second and talk more about the practical

in terms of the filmmaking itself. I think that there was something that was interesting that was sprinkled in a couple of places in the book, which was where these filmmakers learned filmmaking. And as you point out in a couple of different places, there's really three nodes that could be looked at you don't put these three right next to each other but reading throughout the book you can come up with these three notes in which the filmmaking process was learned one of which was being taught by the colonial you know rulers quote-unquote of the colonial subjects against again quote-unquote so even in the post-independence era many filmmakers as you point out in the

book had been given grants or were funded in some other way by the former colonial power that ruled over that piece of land. We also have some of the filmmakers learned filmmaking in the Soviet Union. So like Semben, I know that we talked a little bit about how he wasn't purely focusing on socialist realism, but was also incorporating some other narrative. devices like oral oral tradition within his film, but he did learn filmmaking within the Soviet Union. And then the third node, which was particularly interesting. And one in which I know the least about is not that I know the context the least about, but I don't know the films that came out from this is the films that came out of armed resistance directly. And if I remember

correctly, you point out Mozambique and Angola specifically. So, of course, listeners will be familiar if they've listened to our episodes focused on Africa on the context of Mozambique and Angola. And of course, just to tease that we have an entirely 32-part series on African revolutions and decolonization coming up soon. So, you know, stay tuned for that. Angola and Mozambique are most certainly going to feature at least a couple of times in those discussions over the course of the, you know, year, year and a half that that series is going to come out over. But, you know, I'm not familiar with the films that came out as a result of the arms struggle within those Portuguese colonies. And so if you could talk a little bit about the film,

the filmmakers that were products of these three, we could call them schools, they're not formal schools, but these three different ways of learning filmmaking. And how those ways, or locales of learning film and the ways in which they learned film making as a technique and as a medium, then came across into the product that they were then able to put together. So what is it about the Soviet filmmaking process that was infused in Sembens film? For example, versus what comes across when viewing these films, which I'm unaware of, that came out of the armed resistance movement within the Portuguese colonies. So, yeah, something important and really have no prior knowledge of.

I mean, cinema was very quickly recognized as politically consequential in the formerly colonized world. It was a major source of anxiety for a lot of colonial powers because of its capacities of critique and consciousness raising. The billmakers in my book are Osman Simben from Senegal, Satpijit Ray from India, Ritwit Gatak from India, and Suleiman Sisset from Mali. And they all have a partial subscription, I think,

to different facets of a practice called third cinema. But they're not straightforwardly third cinema. So loosely, The third cinema is a reaction to what was deemed first cinema, the Hollywood capitalist model of cinema, and second cinema, a kind of bautour cinema spearheaded by Europe. Third cinema emerged with concerns such as participatory screenings, guerrilla filmmaking, democratized distribution networks, moving screenings. and so forth, and often had a clear pedagogical intention of raising kind of third-worldest internationalist consciousness. But as you mentioned, we have various backgrounds that are both inspired by those goals and

they move away from them. So both Semben and Sissé's formative career years saw them receive training in Moscow. Sissé was trained as a film projectionist. on a three-month scholarship in 1961 at the State Institute of Cinema. And Semben, as some fans of his work, will know, you know, he was a late bloomer. He was nearly 40 when he decided to study cinematography at the Gorky Studios in 62. And while they were there, they were there along with other African filmmakers like Sarah Maldoror, who looks at Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau with her Sam Bezanga.

I can talk a little bit about that in a while. But whilst they were there, Sisei and Samban were taught socialist realism. But they were also interested in figuring out how, as you mentioned, they could incorporate African oral traditions, mask traditions, into this form. Lind B. Dobe has some work on these three and their experience in Moscow, where they were both indebted to, for instance, the dialectical montage of Eisenstein. They were fans of Battleship Potemkin in October.

But whilst in their studies, they did feel that there were some limitations to socialist realism. They did want space for oral performance. They did want space for folktale, for song, for gestural forms that were more traditional to customary African practices. So they, I feel, both borrowed elements of socialist realism that sit well with them, such as a cinema unabashedly for and with the exploited.

But they also wanted to prioritize representing African contemporary realities in their full complexity. Satijit Ray and Retweek-Gasak, they're often grouped under world cinema. I have a problem with categories of world cinema and transnational cinema. They're not a value-free judgment. Very often, they seem to have a post-political positioning, as if world cinema is simply just the cinemas of the non-Western world. So there is a kind of deliberate aligning of certain films. with this category probably in order to market it in certain circles.

Ray and Gatak are more often placed in this box. However, there is again another partial subscription to Third Cinema. Ray, for example, takes on some of its tenets, like using non-actors and having very social realist camera and aesthetics, whilst making some other choices more commonly, you know, associated with the avant-garde. Ritwick Giatak has this time has been criticized for his melodrama, for instance, which I propose to read is actually the register in which he is expressing the crippling psychic effects

of partition dispossession. Again, there's a value judgment there to assume that his style can't fit social realism. I think it's a judgment that often comes the way of Bollywood and an Indian parallel cinema. This kind of sensory overload needs to happen when we're talking about Indian cinema. And Gatshak actually uses melodrama in a realist manner to express the psychic states of his characters. So these filmmakers all take what they're going. training has given them and they make of it what they will out of their shared priority of representing the experience of post-independence struggle. Fascinating. I mean, I had intended actually

to ask you a little bit more if you could tell people about what's at stake with this third cinema versus world cinema. And I, of course, being outside the field, have just seen a lot of proliferate. I hadn't heard as much about third cinema, and particularly this militant third cinema. But I had, of course, heard about world cinema and transnational cinema. And it just seemed like, as you're pointing out, those categories have been purposefully perhaps depoliticized. And it's, it's, you know, really interesting to see how new markets have emerged for consumption in the first world? And that reminds me of the whole problem that I had a colleague once who wrote a kind of scathing critique of literature in the non-Western world that is written for translation.

And of course, you know, there's also the kind of question here of what languages are things actually written in? And then is there a way in which certain kinds of literary works or cinematic works are already positioned for a kind of global market, i.e. global meaning first world consumption of, you know, cinema. Like, you know, there's Iranian cinema that some people feel is just made not for its home audience in Iran, but for the festival circuit, for translation and subtitling in some other con. And much similarly with novels. And I wondered what you thought about, that seems to me a little bit more a feature of like late 80s, 90s, 2000s, right, where this starts to emerge as a question. But this era is a little bit different.

It seems that the audiences really are, you know, countrymen or other people in what we call like the global South now in this kind of culture of transnational resistance literature or anti-colonial culture. But I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what you think is at stake in that component of it besides the technical dimensions of the third cinema's sort of interest in things like, you know, non-professional actors and democratized circulation and so on.

But, you know, also the question of language and audience, How is that being wrestled with here? And, you know, how would you connect that to the problematics of subjectivity, you know, in that context? Semben actually, of course, decided to put the pen down when he was writing stories in French and decided that cinema is his medium precisely because of its reach and because he wanted to work. work in local languages. I mean, unsurprisingly, colonial and post-colonial structures of funding, distribution and production around the 60s and 70s, in Africa in particular, were trying to have their cake

and eat it. The French Bureau de Cinema would often like to finance, you know, African, abutting African filmmakers. the loads of conditions of course and then market them to European audiences art house festival audiences whilst at the same time flooding you know

Western African markets with blockbusters from America and Europe that had these high overhead costs that required a lot of bums on seats in order to break even so it was it was always trying to manipulate

whether African audience could actually see African films in both the colonial era and in the post-colonial era. I recently read an interview with Medhondo, the Mauritanian director, who is working pretty much around the same time as Semban and Sisset, maybe a little bit younger.

And he described how he had gathered three million francs for one of his films, a historical drama about pre-colonial Mauritania. and the French Bureau of Cinema insisted he needed to get to four million francs before he could make the film. And he went to Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, who, amidst all the work he was trying to do in Burkina Faso to raise people out of poverty, found him a one million franc loan because he felt Hondo's film needed to be made. So it was a time that was a lot more ambiguous, as he said, than the post-80s, 90s moment where now we were really kind of getting into an age where Western festival circuits were looking for one poster child per country to be the person who explains ex-country, you know, again, re-entrenching national borders and film categories and so forth. So I felt that also this post-independence period was a lot more of a fertile time in terms of what's the first generation of post-independence filmmakers were trying to do.

So we have, we have, I mean, Sam Ben called the situation a web of contradictions. So it wasn't pretty. It was, it was full of difficulties. He still felt like he was waiting on an African government to give him the budget to make the film he wanted, and eventually he would accept European funding because the national culture ministries weren't yet at the level where they could finance national cinemas. So it was a give and take situation, which was made all the more difficult. by the censorious attitude of the former colonial power in these spaces.

But it was also a time marked by those alternative sources of support and funding, which then grew more and more rare after the 80s, right? It's unimaginable to think of an African still maker

with radical views and a pre-colonial story of African empowerment going to a a president of a central African republic right now and getting an unquestioned one million franc loan because the president thinks the film must be made so it was also a different time that was suitable

to trying to push the boundaries of the festival circuit and the Hollywood circuit which were the two big forms of cinema that the West wished to finance and sustain. Yeah. That reminds me, I mean, actually, when you talk about the funding, and in a way, what I was trying to get at is, like,

is it possible to decolonize literature and film of the era itself in some ways because of the politics around languages, audience, but also because filmmaking is expensive. It requires all of this investment. time, labor, and so on. It's quite expensive as a medium, you know, to produce, particularly in this era. And it did make me think that, you know, your discussions of some of the funding sources and so on, that, you know, during the Cold War, in particular the United States, was very interested in funding and patronizing and supporting certain kinds of, you know, cultural productions. You have

things like the Congress of Cultural Freedom and, you know, so the contradictions there have to be sort of dealt with. How does one really decolonize? It's less decolonizing the mind than decolonizing, you know, the funding to have the space to really, you know, creatively explore some of these issues or themes. Yeah, I mean, I fully agree. It is worth mentioning that Semben was a son of a fisherman and his first camera was a cast off that he brought back with him from Moscow to Senegal

Ritwick Gatak died an alcoholic and destitute despite the success of a cloud-capped star expelled from the Communist Party of India so in many ways the filmmakers in the book are not unique in the way they tried to still

create memorable cinematic stories about their own conditions despite the lack of funding and despite, you know, they were nowhere near independently wealthy had no kind of family inheritance with which to make films. So I guess the question there would also be,

what do we mean by decolonizing in this case? Because are we trying to imagine a kind of puritanical situation in which, you know, filmmakers only make films when they feel that their sources are, you know, maybe community funded, and they feel that the language is used in the film are non-hegemonic and so forth.

I mean, I think that we can't suggest that these filmmakers aren't interested in decolonial methods simply because they don't often succeed in securing them, right? Like Sam Ben said, he said, I would be very happy if an African government were to offer me money to make a film, but in the same time, I'm not going to sit in my chair waiting for that to happen before I make a film. So there is, I think, something profoundly decolonial in an intention like that, where it is there is the need to get the sources right and the distribution right, but there is also the question of what would happen if the story. he wasn't told, you know, in one way or another. So they're always in this balancing act where the narrative itself will also do the work of decolonizing the mind. Should that be forsaken because its conditions of making are imperfect? I want to follow up with a question that's

related to the cinematography, but then we can also expand it to looking at the production of this media more generally, not just the film. One of the things that you talk about in the book in several points actually with regard to several of the films is that certain shots are used to create connection between the subject and the viewer. Now, it's important to consider that

even in media that's created outside of post-colonial formerly colonized locales, there is this effort to create connection between the viewer and the subject because this connection allows there to be some sort of invest

of the viewer into that work, and that investment then engages the viewer more. And in most places, this is done simply for commercial reasons. However, if we're talking about the works particularly that you're focusing on here, but then also if we're looking at political, post-colonial, post-independence media, the necessity of creating a connection between the subject and the viewer is not just commercial. it is because there is a message that is trying to be conveyed. So what I'd like to ask is if you can explain a little bit about how this connection is fostered in some works in which you utilize in your book, not just the films,

also in the novels, but how this connection is fostered between the viewer or reader of that work and the subjects of that book. And then also the radically different importance of creating that. connection in if we're talking about books that have a political end in mind particularly in a post-colonial post-independence space versus a space that has you know cultural and political hegemony of the globe in which that connection is being fostered primarily for let's face it putting people into the seats in the theater or buying DVDs and creating a connection

between their favorite superhero and themselves. Yeah, I mean, wow, that's a big question. But I can start off with, for example, the ways in which the films I look at in the book enable this, there's a lot of formal methods that both novels and films use to bring that closeness and make that connection. And then I'm hoping to open out more into answering the last point. part of your question about kind of what's at stake in cultural production that seeks to especially reach out to audiences and alter their, what I would call political consciousness,

I suppose. But do correct me if I've misunderstood your question. In, for instance, Suley Mons-Sisse's film work, we are introduced to a kind of spatial order through the movement of the camera that makes use of both. the material aspects of that space and the lived experiences of these social environments. One way I loved viewing that this happens was the way Sisi uses what has been called haptic sort of a haptic eye, haptic close-ups throughout the film. He uses these extreme close-ups of the factory workers. we have close shots of their faces and hands and creations.

These are welders, dye makers, assemblers, print makers, cotton spinners at the factory where the story takes place. The close up traditionally in cinema is often used to reveal hidden meaning, disclose a character's inner state, or encourage the viewer to look on an object or subject in a new light. But when Sissay gives us extreme close-ups, his forehead to chin, I feel that he is attempting to use the eye almost as a function of touch. We see the physicality of the workers' labors, again, linking back to embodiment and subjectivity. We see the sweat on their faces, hair texture, street dust on their skin. In a way, Sissay is kind of demanding a ground zero of mutual recognition.

from the viewer here. We're not invited to see people as ethnographic kind of subjects. We're not invited to see this as an alien space where we can learn what goes on in Amalian factory. Instead, we see the cotton being spun, their dirty, agile hands. We see the local mosque with the young men milling about in the courtyard. We see the grios, the traditional storytellers,

their hands on the street for their oral storytelling. So I feel like the camera here is used as a way to challenge these sort of alienated depictions of people of the global South, but also challenge that the idea that their labors, the labors that these bodies do in these spaces are somehow unrelated to the view. life. The camera is forcing us to understand that the activities going on in, for example, a factory in Mali. And the people whose bodies are being consumed to do that work is indelibly tied to our lives and our, you know, consumerist practices wherever we are, whether we're in the global south or north. So I think the camera has a language of its own, heptic visuality is

just one formal method through which Suleiman Sissy achieves that mutual recognition from the viewer. With the novels, we have realism put to the service of, I think, the every day. None of these stories are ostensibly about, you know, big uprisings, massive political questions, organized struggle, some like a grain of wheat. flashback to periods of organized struggle, but all of these literary texts are about the every day of post-independence life. And it's through the emphasis on everyday practices that reveal the fact that colonialism didn't end in all of its myriad ways, that we are in a way

we're made to understand that we are all enmeshed inside that ongoing. you know, imperial setup to our world. Well, before we get to our final two and a half questions, two and a half, because Adnan and I are going to tag team the final question. I do want to thank you for taking this much time to talk with us. And these final two questions are two and a half are going to be rather large. So it's a, you know, we're saving the big ones for the end here, as if some of the questions we have been asking weren't already big.

One of the things that's talked about in your book is how. how the question of class versus racial consciousness is grappled with in these media that you focus on in these books and films, but also how it's thought about in the post-independence context more generally, particularly by those on the radical edge of that post-independence space. So if you could talk a little bit about these two visions of class and racial consciousness and how these are grappled with within the media, and then we'll get into our concluding question after that. Sure.

I think what's interesting about this period of text is that there is a more ostensible focus on class consciousness. It was a period where this topic was very hot. We had, you know, the festival of black arts in 1966 happened in Dakar. and I mentioned this in the book because it's a nice anecdote that encapsulates the tension that you outlined Henry it was presided over by Leopold Sedar Sengor

the rather Frankophile first president of Senegal and the festival awarded one of its literary prizes to Osman Semben for his short story The Money Order, Le Manda And it's ironic because in many ways,

Semben and Sengor are quite diametrically opposed in their views about what form of consciousness should post-colonial artists be focused on raising. Sador, Sengor prescribed to Negritude, a movement that, in his words, sought to uncover, quote-unquote, the black soul in its own. art and its expression. Semben was, despite winning the prize at the 66 festival, very skeptical about this idea. And he definitely felt that the post-colonial artist in Africa needed to be focused on consciousness

raising, but he would have disagreed with Sengor about racial consciousness being the primary way through which this is done. I do think, and I don't know, maybe I'll get some flak for this, but perhaps the reason racial consciousness is so central to many discussions today is because of how often examples around oppression, diasporic experience, liberation, hierarchy, hegemony are drawn from the context of global majority. experiences in the global north today. We have texts here in this book from the 60s to the 80s that are by people who didn't leave or couldn't leave. And so the context they're most concerned about is the thwarted promise of the redistribution of wealth, which was central to anti-colonial struggles in Africa, South Asia. As a result, the novels and the films in the book selection, I have to say do prioritize class

consciousness, especially in contexts such as the West African texts, which we've already discussed, for instance, how ethnicity and the notion of tribes were so often kind of emptied of real analytical usefulness, but still utilized as a weapon in context of divide and conquer, right? So in the situation, for instance, like the Nigerian Civil War narrated by Bucci and Macheta, what use is racial consciousness in foremost tackling those, the reasons behind, you know, secession and partition? and civil war, if those reasons lie in the unequal distribution of natural resources and divisions in ethnic, divisions amongst wealth and education between ethnicities that are an entrenched result of, you know, mission work in West Africa in the colonial era. So I think there

we, I think the books, the books text, I would say, whilst certainly in, interested in questions of ethnicity and racialization, and especially in terms of what racialization does to the psyche under a colonial setup, they invariably have to refer to class and class consciousness in order to grapple with their primary concern, which in this era and place isn't racism per se. It is the unequal distribution of land and wealth in the post-independence. context. Well, this is setting up the grand finale very well. We've got a big, big double question coming for you, but the way that you close that previous answer really does lead us to this final question. And again, I want to thank you for being as generous with your time as you have then. I'll open with a paraphrasing of a question that was posed within your book, and then I'm going to turn it over to Adnan to add in some additional context and questions. on his end. So to paraphrase your book, you essentially ask, or more or less directly

ask, can those who have struggled in armed anti-colonial struggle necessarily say they have decolonized their minds? It was a note that I took down while going through your book and something that I've been dwelling on quite a bit since I've gone through it. And I think that that's a very thought-provoking thing for us to end on, but Adnan, feel free to add in anything that you would like to. Well, just that it seemed that there were two aspects of this that I was intrigued by. One is that, you know, this whole book in discussing subjectivity is really, from a materialist perspective, is really wrestling with this kind of, you know, relationship between subjective, mental, psychic kind of dimensions. And, you know,

the larger material structural conditions and it just seemed that you might have a very interesting take to conclude on about what post-colonial psychology, you know, really, you know, how it has to be understood because, I mean, I think you pointed out that the very invention of that kind of discipline and of at least the modern language of psychoanalysis is happening at the same time that there are people who are categorized as radically lacking, you know, subjectivity in the same way. Like, it is a kind of product of a colonial perspective on, you know, the nature of the mind, you know. So that was one kind of component. But the second one was really, of course, dealing with Phenom because he is the maybe the key central thinker here. And there's so much

controversy or continuing controversy about how to interpret Fennon, even in our own time now when we're talking about resistance and its consequences, anti-colonial resistance, resistance to occupation. And, you know, somebody like Adam Schatz has written this book recently that, you know, it kind of twists Fennon in a different direction. Whereas on the other hand, though, there are some people who, you know, it seems like they almost only read the first chapter of Fennon and, you know, regard this kind of anti-colonial resistance, armed struggle as the healing process that transforms consciousness, which of course, Fanon is arguing. It does do something. But somewhere between these two things, he also has a chapter about colonial mental disorders and, you know,

the pitfalls of national consciousness. And so I just wondered if you had any kind of take you wanted to kind of give people who are right now wrestling with Fanon in public discourse now, and he is being fought over. There was an interesting Boston Review article, Who's Afraid of Franz Fanon, you know, looking at kind of these different positions. So I just wanted to give you, since you clearly have thought a lot about Fanon and particularly about this relationship between psychoanalytic ways of relating psychoanalysis or at least the idea of a psyche and subjectivity to material conditions, you know, you know, what, you know, how would you take that? I mean, I've uploaded you again with a really big problem, but I'm really glad you outlined actually

those two things that are equally, you know, incomplete, right? the kind of revision of Fanon as a, you know, an existentialist thinker who we can kind of play word games with and this and maybe forget the Fanon who wrote for, you know, and Mohadjidin and was a was a propagandist for the FLN in Algeria. And then as you say, there is also those who seem to simply be interested in the one chapter in which Fanon discusses violence in a very specific context of psychic liberation and applies that to his entire politics. Phelan studies a massive field. I can't pretend to have the final word on him, but I think that the reason why people grapple with this is because they seek to separate the Fanon who is interested as a practicing

psychiatrist in what colonialism does to the colonized and the colonizer from the Fanon of the Algerian Liberation Front, who wrote extensively on the pitfalls of post-independence nation states and so forth. I feel like what unites both Fanon's, which is perhaps where we may find the thing that worries him the most, the thing he scratches at for a lot of his writings, is that anti-colonial struggle, in his words, opens up spheres people never even dreamed of and awakens people's intelligence. Yet, at the same time, there is no blueprint or prescription for how people can become through and out of colonialism. So I think Fanon argues that even after the ostensible end of colonialism,

people must continue to express their will and co-create the new conditions of life. And I think because this does not necessarily center militancy, it has often been misread as a Fanon who is thinking very existentially about questions such as what is freedom, what is nation, and so forth, and what is agency and free will. But we forget he asks all of these rather existentialist questions within a specific context.

For example, when he talks about creativity, people making the new nation, he warns, the moment for a fresh national crisis is not far off if a government treats their people like sheep. And when he looks at what are the social and psychopaths, political resources people can draw on in violent militant struggle, he talks about reforge, he talks about forging the new. He talks about being aware of mummified fragments, of reactionary ways of harkening back to the past. He talks about humanizing the other. He talks about the fact that, you know, picking up a gun has psychic afterlives, that you're very going to have to deal with once the flag has been raised. That chapter you mentioned is so

harrowing in its two examples. One, a young Algerian boy who kills a white French playmate, not quite cognizant of the weight of what he's just done. And another example is an Algerian man who turns homicidal himself after witnessing the French massacre his village. So those who would place Fanon as a figure that preaches, you know, violent revolution always and in every context would do well to remember these chapters and Fanon's concern with creating the new that must come after this violence. So it's a big question. I've tried to give a couple of, you know, ways in. But I think ultimately, Fanon doesn't give that new human content, right, the new man, he says, the decolonization will create because it's the outcome of a

dialectical process. You cannot predict it. But he does always emphasize that it cannot just be another variation on the colonial order. So the way I tried to put it in the book was this is about inventing what becoming free is when it will no longer mean becoming like the master. I think that that's a terrific note to end on, and I highly recommend the listener to pick up this book, which, of course, we will link in a show notes. Again, listeners, our guest was Sarah Jalani, who is a lecturer of English at City University London, and author of the book that we've been discussing, subjectivity and decommonization in the post-independence novel and film. Sarah, thanks for coming on the show. It was a really terrific discussion. I really enjoyed it.

Can you tell the listeners where they can pick up your book and how they can keep up with your work and maybe follow you on social media if you want to share that information? It's been an absolute pleasure, Henry. Thank you so much for having me on. The book is out on the 30th of June from Edinburgh University Press, and they can search for the title on the EUP website and purchase it directly there. I'm Sarah Jelani on X slash Twitter and on most other social media platforms you may sometimes catch me on BBC Radio 4 as well in the program Free Thinking where I occasionally go on

talk about African cinema most of the time and yeah so my next project I think will continue to think on the problem of political consciousness through these thinkers and think about more explicitly about what is the role of cultural production in that unfinished task that the thinkers of this era left us with, which is the raising of political consciousness. Yeah, terrific.

I will have all of that linked in the show notes. And Sarah, I think I speak for both of us when I say we hope that we can bring you back to talk about revolutionary papers with. Perhaps one of your comrades that's operating within that project, and, you know, perhaps just to chat again, because this really was enjoyable. Absolutely. How can the listeners find you in your other excellent podcast? Well, firstly, just I love this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your work.

Really wonderful. It's a beautiful book. It's full of so many interesting ideas. I feel like we could have just kept talking for hours. You already were very generous to speak with us for this long, but we'll have to have you back on again sometime soon in one of several capacities. But again, thank you so much for joining us, Sarah. And, you know, listeners, you know how to get a hold of me at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N on Twitter X. And you can also listen to the M-J-L-I-S.

We've got a couple of episodes that we're trying to. produce. They've been recorded. So look forward. You know, they should be coming out soon by the time this comes out. Hopefully those are out too. So go check those. Check those out. Of course, I highly recommend that, listeners. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. That's H-U-C-K-1995. You can also follow Iskra Books on Twitter. I believe it's at Iskra Books. I'm an editorial board member there, and we've got some very exciting works coming out, which to reminder, all of the PDFs are available for free at isperbooks.org. Or, of course, you can buy a physical copy, which helps with the operating expenses, despite the fact that we're all

volunteers there. As for guerrilla history, you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by following us on Twitter at Gorilla. Sorry, going to patreon.com forward slash guerilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that we're putting out individually and collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.