I love this chapter. Fundamentally, it’s about what happens to the culture of a people when they are suddenly colonized. Every people are at a certain stage in political, social, and cultural development. What colonization does is completely freeze that development as the colonizers’ culture is forcefully imposed on the colonized. The colonizers’ culture is seen as “modern,” and if the colonizers’ control on the colonized culture is strong enough, the colonizer will sell a distorted and orientalized version of the ossified culture back to the colonized as a contrast to see how much the colonizers are more “civilized.” Not every colonized person will submit, but many who don’t submit will overcorrect by completely embracing every part of their ossified culture, even the most reactionary parts of it, and will be completely resistant to resuming cultural development. The choice given by the colonizers are essentially either becoming a color-on-the-outside-white-on-the-inside comprador bootlicker or some social reactionary larping as an orientalized version of what the ideal native would be 5 centuries ago.

You can see this dynamic play out numerous times with regards to queer rights. In Russia, almost everyone who is actually reasonable about queer rights is some self-hating liberal who wished they were Western European instead of a pathetic Slav and almost every Russian who has some appreciation of Russian heritage is some queerphobe who believes queerness is some globohomo conspiracy made up by Anglos. This regression of Russian culture in comparison to what they had with the Soviet Union is directly traced to the early 90s when the Soviet Union fell apart and their respective republics forced to submit to US hegemony. Or take Uganda passing that anti-gay law, which includes the death penalty for “repeat offenders.” The piece of shit president makes overtures of how being against gay people is somehow “decolonial” and “returning to our African roots,” never mind that the same president was a US sell-out for most of his political career and Africa was never as uptight about sexuality as British Victorian colonizers who imposed their bullshit heteronormality on the world.

So what’s the solution? The solution is to recognize that the source of the problem comes from the colonial occupation, and that until the colonizers are expelled and sovereignty is restored, cultural development will always be stuck between clinging to the distant half-fantasy past or just being a half-assed version of colonizer culture. This means that art ought to recognize the national liberation struggle as a just struggle and ultimately serve revolutionary ends, used as a tool by revolutionaries to wage revolutionary struggle. Art itself cannot be decolonized until the land has been decolonized, but art can serve as a tool towards decolonization. It’s not enough the art is anti-capitalist or pro-native pride, but it must be attached to a revolutionary organization. The Black Panthers had an official band, and they had songs like “Free Bobby Now,” a song that exists within the context of the party gathering support from everyday people in order to apply political pressure to free their cofounder, who was locked up on trump-up charges.

With decolonization comes the expulsion of imperialists and their compradors, and once they’re gone, cultural development can resume. Social reactionaries can no longer hide behind “decolonization” to peddle their reactionary bullshit, and if they insist on being reactionaries, they can be relegated to the dustbins of history.