Colonialism Is a System

Bibliographic Data

ID4546074
AuthorsJean-Paul Sartre, Jean‐paul Sartre (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume3
Issue1
Pages127-140
Publication date2001-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInterventions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13698010020027074
OpenAlexW2075374799
LanguageEN
Citations received10

With this issue, Interventions begins the first of a new series of 'Liberation Classics'. Despite the wide-range of cultural, philosophical and politics texts produced during the twentieth-century liberation struggles by activist intellectuals in order to define the mechanisms of the operation of colonialism and to produce forms of counter-modernity posited against it, the field of postcolonial studies draws on a relatively limited range of material for its immediate theoretical inspiration. We therefore intend to reprint or translate neglected or little-known material from the past in order to initiate the process of a fuller retrieval, and theoretical understanding, of the postcolonial archive. In this issue, we begin with a translation of a little known essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Colonialism is a System'. Sartre's 'Colonialism is a System', written in 1956 at the beginning of the Algerian war of independence, constitutes a thorough analysis of the mechanics of colonial economics that shows him fully immersed in the perspective developed by Marx, who argued that colonialism presented capitalism in naked form, stripped of the decorous clothing of European bourgeois society. Colonialism, Sartre was to add, also operates in a different temporality from Western capitalism, in the time of its secondary system; Fanon in turn would point to differences of temporality within the colonial domain, a 'time-lag' between the cosmopolitan modernity of the nationalist leaders and the peasantry. In this essay, Sartre shows a remarkable understanding of contemporary 'third world' differences of perspectives and need, in his emphasis on the questions of land and the agrarian problem, of the appropriation of land and resettlement, and, particularly, of landlessness, which have been central to the problems of many colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At the same time, despite the specificity of its historical and economic analysis of Algerian colonialism, Sartre's essay is remarkable in emphasizing the systematic basis of colonialism. In generalizing his account of Algeria through the claim of his title, Sartre did not mean that there was a single colonial system everywhere and at all times, but rather that colonialism represented a deliberate and systematic form of exploitation that could be analysed as such. Fanon took this a stage further, so that Sartre's Manichaean system provided the fundamental model for his much more abstract account of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance in The Wretched of the Earth . Despite the persuasive generality of Fanon's analysis, which has led to its use to describe a wide variety of colonial situations, Sartre's essay is a reminder that Fanon's account of colonialism was derived from his understanding of a particular culture struggling against the singular, violent conditions that operated in French Algeria

Aesthetics · Bourgeoisie · Capitalism · Colonialism · Epistemology · Modernity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Temporality · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · North African History and Literature · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub