On Resistance in Anti-Colonial Marxist Writings

Postcolonial Studies as a field of academic enquiry has often neglected the writings of Marxist anti-colonial writers in the insurgent national liberation movements. This essay analyzes the strategic ideas of anti-colonial resistance by focusing on negritude as ethnic identity in writings by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor and national culture in Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon. It argues that these Marxist anti-colonial writers’ strategies of resistance are mainly based upon a relatively unproblematized notion of ethnic or national identity, which, though suspicious of essentialist politics of identity, is in accordance with the political urgency of decolonization for national independence in the historical context.