What was Marxism’s relationship with African decolonization? And how did that relationship shape Latin American leftist critique? Although the 1983 symposium Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture was hosted during a time in which the world was coming to terms with leftist decolonization movements in Africa and the Global South more widely, only a handful of essays from this event mention it. Moreover, only Jean Franco—one of four Latin Americanists invited—delved concretely into the impact of the putative “Third World” on Marxist theory in the West. If outside the 1983 seminar and conference much of the conversation on Black Marxism revolved around the application of the ideas of Karl Marx to the Black Atlantic, Franco’s 1983 intervention, conversely, applied African Marxism and the Third World to cultural studies. Written from her position as a Latin Americanist whose discipline was just as marginalized as African Marxism, her essay thus paved the way for what is today termed South-South studies. “Latin America (and third-world societies) generally occupy some exceptional and therefore awkward position in mainstream scholarship,” Franco writes—that is, “not yet ‘in’ it at all.” By “mainstream,” she was referring to the Western academy but also the British structure of Marxist theory that had convened her. As a British-born Latin Americanist who worked in the British academy until 1972, Franco was particularly well suited to bemoan the ways in which Western theory had deduced that “the Third World is not much of a place for theory” (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 503). As a corrective, Franco proceeds to exhibit just how profoundly that putative nonplace of the Third World shaped a contemporary Marxism that had snubbed it.

In the couple of decades leading up to 1983, anticolonial liberation movements had been raging. Leaders of the early decolonization efforts in Egypt and Algeria were inspired by Marxist-Leninist thought, while others, like Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, later opposed those ideas, and still others, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, attempted to come to terms with a Marxist-based nonsecular socialism (Falola 43). The place of Marxism in Black liberation lent itself to discussions all over the globe like those of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956 in Paris or the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Festival of Negro Arts) in Dakar, Senegal. An excitement for a Marxism applied to the African continent was made apparent in major figures like W. E. B. Du Bois in his essay “Lenin and Africa” (1959), or Vladimir Lenin himself, who criticized the so-called Scramble for Africa (like terming King Leopold of Belgium a “manipulator” and “swindler…who bought the Congo for himself” [523]).Footnote ¹ These discourses shaped Africanists like Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub, whose Socialist Schools in Africa (1966) and other works sought to adapt material dialectics within conservative societies.

Even if contemporary work on Marx’s writings revealed his curiosity about North Africa, from a discernment of the British occupation of Egypt to the communal strategies in Algeria to resist imperialism (Anderson 198, 242–43), Black intellectuals had wrestled with Western Marxism’s shortcomings, as the work of Cedric J. Robinson or Benita Parry made clear. The Marxists in the European and later American academies inquired little into the anticolonial movements, and a mere eight years before the birth of cultural studies, the American Comparative Literature Association had been just as indifferent to the inclusion of decolonial Africa as the 1983 summer institute (Slaughter 215, 217). Apart from Cornel West’s singling out of apartheid in South Africa (32), A. Belden Fields’s passing critique of French neocolonialism in Algeria (142), or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s brief mention of the French African colonies (289), the mutually constitutive effects of African decolonization and Marxism remained out of mind for the audience members at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And when African Marxism was discussed in passing within the context of a Third World revolution, its representative theorist was Frantz Fanon.

But the absence of Africa from the 1983 summer conference in Urbana-Champaign is also quite strange considering that the convention’s main speaker, Stuart Hall, had stated in a prior coauthored work that the world was witnessing “a decisive shift in the location of revolutionary struggle from Europe to the Third World” (376). Moreover, the same year the 1983 conference convened, the journal Contemporary Marxism published two back-to-back special issues on African decolonization with contributions by Marxist powerhouses Immanuel Wallerstein, Bernard Magubane, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Samir Amin. Some of these essays reflect on the ideas of the Guinean leader Amílcar Lopes Cabral, who for years to come would be hailed as the more practical decolonialist, as opposed to Fanon, and who would contest the notion of the peasantry as “spontaneously” revolutionary (Rodney 5). These debates were urgent for Global South theorists in Contemporary Marxism, while at the Urbana-Champaign conference, Cabral’s pragmatic approach to Marxism remained a footnote.Footnote ² And yet, Franco’s contribution to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture—the only one delving concretely into Third Worldism—draws on these Fanon-Cabral distinctions. Thus, when Franco’s essay addresses norms of masculinity as an obstacle for revolution in the Third World, the Fanon-Cabral framework becomes central for assessing a shifted paradigm regarding the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. To do so, Franco draws from Fanon’s context of the Algerian war, applying his insights to leftist Latin American literary and social movements.

Franco’s “Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power, and the Third-World Intelligentsia” opens with Fanon’s fellahin, which precedes Spivakian subalternity as a concept. Fanon traces the subaltern resistance of the fellahin to antiquity: to the Egyptian Arab peasant. Franco chose the specific figure of the fellahin to discuss how Fanon’s displacement of revolutionary agency from the West was central to Marxism: “What makes Fanon’s contribution of value is that he recognized that there was something distinct about the colonial struggle, that the separation between manual and mental labor was reproduced in the relationship between the fellahin and the intelligentsia, and that this hierarchy had to be destroyed if the revolutionary struggle was to succeed.” The fellah as signifier of “manual labor” was crucial to Franco, since her essay addressed how a male bourgeoisie and Third World intelligentsia claimed the creative process for themselves and subordinated both Indigenous people and women through manual labor (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 504). Famously, Fanon had concluded that this hierarchy must be destroyed to achieve Third World liberation. Franco admits the limitations of Fanon’s view from the vantage point of her present: that Fanon had not been able to see, as a poststructuralist Marxist would, that colonized subjectivities were constitutive of social and economic discourses rather than just reflective of them. And yet, Fanon’s fellahin unlocked the African decolonial spaces in the 1983 event.

Fanon’s epitomic revolutionary subject was indeed the peasantry. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon states that the “fellahs who were able to judge and see for themselves the produce they had harvested were eager to understand how it worked…that work presupposes freedom, responsibility, and consciousness,” and thus their “work” could be transformed into the struggle for land sovereignty (133). Fanon’s use of the phrase “The land belongs to those who work it” in the context of the Algerian revolution sought this reterritorialization and was also reminiscent of the Mexican peasant and revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Zapata’s renowned slogan during Mexico’s revolution, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” from 1911, mobilized the peasantry and gained currency in Latin America as a model for revolutionary thought in the early twentieth century and, later, as of 1994 for the Zapatista movement. For Franco, this was precisely the class consciousness that would break down the “bewitchment” of aligning with Western values (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 503)—a feeling of internalized inadequacy that Fanon had theorized in Black Skin, White Masks. Franco writes that “it is within the power of the wretched of the earth, the fellahin, to overcome immobility” and that once detached from the ethnocentrism that confined them, they would be “converted into revolutionary potential.”

Franco might have also seen another Latin American resonance in the fellahin when it came to class consciousness. Fanon described the Algerian fellahin as undergoing “enlightenment experiments.” During this time, Fanon “witnessed the edification of man through revolutionary teachings” in which “the peasant clearly grasped the principle whereby the clearer the commitment, the better one works” (Wretched 133). These “experiments” echoed Cuba’s 1961 literacy campaign focused on rural communities, and it was precisely the triumph of Cuba’s class consciousness that brought Fanon to write about the South-South solidarity that Franco only alludes to: “The liberation of Africa and the development of man’s consciousness have enabled the peoples of Latin America to break the spiral of dictatorships where one regime looked very much like the next. Castro takes power in Cuba and hands it to the people” (Fanon, Wretched 54n9). The fellahin for Fanon and Franco served as a synecdoche for the Third World revolutionary subject—one that should be valued.

The ethnic group of the fellahin, land laborers whose ancestors contributed to Egypt’s prominence in antiquity, led one of the twentieth century’s earlier Third World revolutions. In 1919, peasants rose in arms against thirty years of British occupation, seeking land reform. After the 1952 Egyptian revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser—Egypt’s first prime minister and the cofounder of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)—oversaw agrarian reforms that redistributed land to the fellahin. But reforms would ultimately fail because of demands of landowners and foreign investors (Margold 11).

It was precisely this alliance between the fellahin and the landowners that Fanon warned against. In his “Letter to a Frenchman” (1956), Fanon damns the nameless leftist deserters of decolonization. In a text that is far less known than The Wretched of the Earth or Black Skin, White Masks, the poem also mourns that the fellahin, which he gallicizes as “fellahs,” were alone in their cause:

Fanon’s use of “fellah” in this epistolary poem harks back to the discussions of the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie outside Europe that would shape the Third International, or Comintern. I am referring to the debates between Lenin and M. N. Roy that forced Lenin to revise his thesis. From his vantage of Mexico, Roy observed that in the context of what he termed “colonies,” the petty bourgeoisie had no class consciousness and therefore could not pledge allegiance to revolution. Lenin then revised his Europe-focused thesis in which alliances were to be sought only with a petty bourgeoisie that was revolutionary; this expansion became a mantra of the Third International (see Mahler and Capuzzo 3–5). It is precisely this debate on alliances that would resurface in the context of African Marxism, with Fanon and Cabral on opposite ends of the spectrum.

When Fanon engaged this debate of the fellahin, he saw the Latin American precedent as a portent of doom: “We only have to look at what happened in Latin America…U.S. businessmen, banking magnates and technocrats jet ‘down to the tropics,’ and for a week to ten days wallow in the sweet depravity of their private ‘reserves,’” he writes, clearly alluding to Cuba (Wretched 101). Fanon concluded that no privileged class, whether domestic or foreign, could join the cause for African unity, and this preclusion became a point of contention in the fall 1983 issue in Contemporary Marxism (titled Revolution in Southern Africa). Magubane, among others, was quick to distinguish Fanon’s bourgeoisie as “parasitic,” whereas Cabral saw this class as a social laboratory where different outcomes were possible (19). “Thanks to the creative application of historical materialism,” Magubane writes, “Cabral was able to scientifically organize the class struggle of the Guinean proletariat” and “determine what alliances were possible” (18). Magubane and Wallerstein would both find in Cabral a less reactionary approach to revolutionary alliance.

In this vein, African Marxists differed on Fanon’s stance regarding violence. Reacting to Latin America’s failed decolonization, Fanon believed that class consciousness would awaken the proletariat into “militant work” where violence was the “absolute praxis” (Wretched 44). Hall and his coauthors explained that for Fanon the task of violence fell on the peasantry (whom he “regarded [as] the key social classes in the colonial struggle”) and that “[i]t is Fanon,…writing of the Algerian and other African struggles, whose ‘revisions’…laid particular stress on a violent (as opposed to a purely military) solution to the question of colonial oppression” (377). Indeed, in the context of Kenya’s anticolonial struggle, Fanon stated that all those who join are required “to work toward the death of the colonist,” since the “colonized man liberates himself in and through violence” (Wretched 44). Meanwhile, for Cabral, Magubane argued, violence was just part of a “larger political struggle” and not the only means by which to achieve liberation (23).

Just as Fanon was applying Latin America’s failed decolonial lessons to the African context, Franco applied ideas gleaned from the African context to Latin America. Franco read Fanon’s revolutionary violence as a masculinist “oppositional politics” that heroes like Ernesto “Che” Guevara would perpetuate. In a Third World subsumed under the guerilla death drive that Fanon championed, Franco regretted that Latin American writing was “trapped within a negative eros…that values the violent confrontation with death over community and life” (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 512), and one in which women would rarely emerge as creators of their own discourse. It is in this context that her position—which I will come back to—shared commonalities with Cabral, who offered a far less paternalistic approach to anticolonialism.

The secretary-general of a successful African revolutionary movement, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Cabral was a trained agronomist whose advocacy for the liberation of Guinean agriculture drew from Marxism and Maoism (Cabral, Return 87; Chabal 51). He was also a noted feminist who implemented education reforms for girls and advocated equality for women in all political sectors. He was chiefly known for his thesis on “class suicide,” or on the need to persuade the petty bourgeoisie to join working-class interests. Wallerstein admitted in his 1983 contribution to Contemporary Marxism that the unlikelihood of a scenario in which the members of the petty bourgeoise would give up their privilege—“since its consciousness is defined by the pursuit of its class interests” (167)—generated criticism in what developed as Cabralism. In Cabral’s words, if they were “capable of committing suicide as a class,” the petty bourgeoisie would be “restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs” (Unity 136). But in his pursuit of theory as praxis—Cabral’s “weapon of theory”—his focus was not only on fomenting alliances but also on restoring “the condition of a revolutionary worker.” Cabral did so by articulating the preoccupations of cultural studies.

Cabral posited culture as inextricable from an African Marxist revolution a full decade before cultural particularity became the subject of heated conversations at the 1983 seminar and conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Even Hall and his coauthors in 1978 had mentioned, “It is Cabral’s rather than Fanon’s version which seems most sensitive to the specific social and cultural factors helping to determine the political role of the different class strata” and therefore provided a much more “sober assessment of the role of the lumpenproletariat” (378). In a speech that would boost his popularity among US liberation groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Cabral declared that “national liberation is necessarily an act [of] culture” (“National Liberation” 6). Cabral’s materialist analysis was most clearly articulated when he argued that colonial liberation translated into sovereignty over both modes of production and the expression of culture. As if echoing Guevara’s El hombre y el socialismo en Cuba (Socialism and Man; 1973), Cabral stated:

Cabral’s materialist analysis here attempted to remediate a previously occluded relationship between Guineans and their past. This dialectical relationship was predicated on both the tangible modes of production and the intangible cultural domain. But the latter, he argued, was expressed in intersectional class struggle. Cabral was among the few African decolonialists who held that Marxist theory needed to be molded into the complexity of demographics (Saucier 56). For Cabral, liberation was not only a product of culture but also “a determinant of culture” (“National Liberation” 14). The economic theories of historical materialism might not have accounted for ethnicity or gender, but these categories were essential for the liberation of African nations.

Hall could not have agreed more. In the context of discussions of race in South Africa, Hall argued against “neoclassical ‘development’ economics” by proposing a turn toward sociological tendencies that “agree on the autonomy, the nonreductiveness, of race and ethnicity as social features” (“Race” 196, 197). For Hall, ethnic relations were not reducible to the economic. Indeed, West termed this a “racial problematic” of Marxism (17). Rather, in the context of the political struggle in South Africa, to paraphrase Hall, race had to be given its specificity and weight as an autonomous factor of that struggle (“Race” 198).

Franco took this theory a step further. If the Third World revolution could provide a recognition of heterogeneity, in turn, “women and indigenous peoples can take the production of meaning into their own hands” (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 505). Because women had previously been confined to private spaces—whether at home or in the brothel—Franco explained that the struggles for Third World liberation allowed for a “resemanticization of the sexual division of labor” (509). Whereas global-sixties giants like Carlos Fuentes or Gabriel García Márquez failed in her view to attribute creative enterprise to Indigenous peoples and women, Franco saw hope in a handful of 1980s women’s movements in Latin America—movements that shared a philosophy with Cabral. Instead of seeing Indigenous peoples as reproducing the labor force that Franco criticized (513), Cabral’s advocacy of the integration of Guinean women into all levels of political participation drew on a deep understanding of the social structures of various ethnic groups. As Stephanie Urdang notes, Cabral bemoaned the lack of rights afforded to Fula women, who could not own what they produced (107). He sought to educate girls to transform religious institutions that discriminated against them and personally went into the field to contribute to their education (Chabal 118). Revolution, for Cabral, hinged on an understanding of precisely these contexts of ethnic and gendered divisions of labor and required questioning how that labor can be modified to liberate women.

But at the end of her essay, Franco attributes the model she heralds to Fanon.Footnote ³ Although Cabral’s essays circulated widely in Latin America and the United States, it is not known which of them Franco accessed, if any.Footnote ⁴ What is certain is that institutional spaces in the United States, where Franco worked, failed to bring these expressions of a shared Marxist ideology together. While the snubbing of African decolonization by Marxist intellectuals is in great part to blame, the links that Franco made with a Third World revolution nevertheless paved the way for South-South studies, or an engagement between different poles in the Global South. Her pioneering push to link the Third World through Marxist thought produced what Franco termed “a common habitus”: “common perceptions, dispositions, practices, and institutions” (“Beyond Ethnocentrism” 504). Decades later, Franco would dub this South-South apparatus “the imagined community of the Cold War period” (Decline 103). Before Walter Mignolo, Franco stated that this South-South habitus was founded in the ethos of Bandung in 1955, where heterogeneity was meant to “suppress differences among those nations, allying quite disparate forces in the struggle against imperialism” (Decline 103–04). In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002), Franco used Guevara’s military intervention in the Congo as an example. Although she characterized the political intervention as “frustrating,” she upheld its ideology (104). This expression of Cuban internationalism became representative of a “planetary vanguard,” a term she borrows from Fernández Retamar’s 1971 essay “Caliban” (107). Fernández Retamar’s narrativized internationalism was interpreted differently on the postcolonial spectrum, from “the restoration of community and repossession of culture,” in Edward Said’s terms, to an inability to narrate decolonization in Latin America, in Spivak’s estimation (Decline 107). Franco neither denied nor embraced either position. Instead—and perhaps reflecting on the commentary of her fellow 1983 conference participants all those years ago—Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City was also a reflection of how her thoughts about South-South history had evolved from their 1983 humble beginnings. In any case, it is worth remembering on this fortieth anniversary of the 1983 seminar and conference that these musings in Franco began by considering how much African decolonization offered to Marxism itself.