[...] That year, the Iranian parlia­ment, the Majlis, nationalized the country' s oil industry (owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, where "Anglo" represented the English interests and "Iranian" simply referred to the place from which they drew the oil). [...]

there is the encomium to Iranian women for their buried labors

described the world as being sundered between "two poles or extremes [...]"

The general critique of cultural imperialism stays within a narrow ambit, because it is only the elite or the urban sections that have access to the symbolic and material items that enter the Third World

Europe could be dismissed out of hand because the answers to Africa and elsewhere lay within their autochthonous traditions.

most of the cultural commen­tary from the Third World, walked a fine line between the reification of the divide between the colonizer and the colonized, and the treatment of it as dialectical.

Cesaire moved away from the antinomic quality of this analysis, even if only partially

[...] 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.

the new nation had to protect the canon from chauvinism. It had to promote the idea of the composite cul­ ture or an inherent tendency toward syncretism

because his was not an involuted na­tionalism, he translated work from French and Russian letters