[...] The multinational perspective questioned the racist claim that the darker nations could only be primordial, that blood and custom reduced the imagination of certain people. They could only be tied to kin and co-believer, not to a republican nationalism whose locus was both anticolonial and populist.

In this realm at least, Third World nationalist movements absorbed the idea of nationalism and digested it in accord with the rhythms and demands of their various histories. Fanon, who had learned about cul­tural regeneration in Algeria, developed the second strand of Césaire' s cultural program in terms of the idea of nationalism. Like Césaire, Fanon argued that the period of nationalist struggle enabled a people to rethink the feudal forms legitimized by colonialism. These liberation struggles, as opposed to those for conquest, did not feel the need to jus­tify themselves based on crude biological concepts. The colonial power tries to mobilize every racist idea to break down the morale of national­ism, but with each such attempt the imputed superiority of the colonizer wanes. The people, once held down, now determined the pace of change." Those who were once immobile, the congenital cowards, those lazy beings who have always been made inferior, brace themselves and emerge bristling." The colonial ruler does not understand what has transpired." The end of racism begins with this sudden failure to understand." Finally, the end of colonialism means that the "rigid, spasmic culture of the occupier is liberated," and it opens itself up to the culture of the colonized. "The two cultures can confront one another, enrich one another." Rather than turn inward, away from Europe or any oth­ers, Fanon contends, nationalist culture will explore other cultures as re­sources. In the struggle lies liberation, or at least the process of national struggle gives energy to the national culture, which is now able to come alive and grow. Fanon overplays the lack of racism or the mobilization of biological notions in national liberation movements. Na­tional pride or patriotism often slid into the ugly language of racism or exclusion. But if what Fanon found is not a fundamental rule, it is at least a tendency.