Bruce Lee with Nunchaku in Way of the Dragon (1972)
A while back at the University I gave a lecture on Bruce Lee and the Postcolonial. Here are some quotations from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that chime with my theme:
"And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength."
“[In the colonial situation,] the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; […] that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motor cars which never catch up with me. […] The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can't say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter” (40).
“[In the colonial situation,] at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self respect” (74).
“Violence […] is Man recreating himself.” Sartre, in his Preface to the book, p.18.
Of course, as they say in newspapers, the views expressed in the above (as with other quotes on the blog) are those of the authors in question and do not necessarily reflect the position of 'Kungfu with Braudel'.
ReplyDeleteNote in particular Sartre's term "Man"...