French anticolonial radicalism grew directly from anti-fascist and Resistance politics

Evidence

The inter-war years also witnessed the emergence of the first sizeable Marxist philosophical tradition in France (much later than in Germany or Russia or even Italy, but earlier and more articulated than in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries); the emergence also of mass labour and communist movements; the first Popular Front government; and the widely felt radicalizing influence of the Spanish Civil War. On the heels of all that came the Nazi Occupation, which gave numerous French intellectuals, especially those who actually fought in the underground Resistance, some imaginative understanding of the meaning of colonial subjection and the legitimacy of combat for liberation. Finally, it was in the French colonies, Indochina and Algeria, that the two great wars of anticolonial national liberation broke our. For a whole generation of French writers, from Merleau-Ponty to Andre Malraux, support for the anticolonial struggles was the natural extension of the anti-fascist struggles at home and the earlier movement of solidarity with the Republic in Spain; for others, the issues of colony and empire served to open up a whole range of other buried areas as well, from ontology to gendering. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 245

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could map how the Resistance experience gave French intellectuals their model of colonial liberation — and how that European mediation both enabled and distorted postcolonial theory’s birth.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s own biography and his location of the ‘race-struggle’ discourse in French aristocratic/nationalist historiography. — connects to: French postcolonial theory grew from the Occupation and anti-fascist struggles at home — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 245; Brazilian punk evolved from violent resistance to organized left-wing politics across two decades — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 128

Broader Connections

• French postcolonial theory grew from the Occupation and anti-fascist struggles at home #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 245