Culture as Resistance

Frantz Fanon recorded the story of cultural resistance against French colonialism in Algeria in his classic book, The Wretched of the Earth, thus:

From 1952-53 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the content of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically