proletariat, and their only, to strive for liberation. AimeCesaire is most clearly making the case for the role of the proletariat ascentral in the motor of history. Thisquestion of what the underlying theories are in the works of fiction related tohere, is a more difficult one. Thetwo novels referred, which we read in class, challenge the novel genreitself. So much so that manycommentators interpret them as tragedies. This is a particular interpretation,and I will briefly ponder on reasons why. Firstly, because they do not have a heroic figure as a maincharacter. Secondly, because romance isnot a central element of the story. Sothese are in a way counter-cultural to the West. If that is the intention of the authors indoing this, from a postcolonial perspective this is not a central issue. What is actually more important is to findconnections as possibilities, not as end in themselves. Both novels show theirconnections to Africa very clearly. Bothnovels also show, at the same time, their connectedness to the Western novel,to its language, its motifs, and cleverly know how to use these to questionassumptions about the natural dominance of European culture. Thenovels have, as one of their central concerns, education. It is education one of the main avenuesthrough which the culture of the colonizer invades that of the colonized. But it is also through education that thecolonized can enter into the ways of thinking and sometimes, with luck, intothe ways of governing as well, of the colonizers. This higher level of somewhatlegitimate access to colonial power will always depend on social class status,beyond others, that influence the penetrability of the colonialist enterpriseto the colonized people. One of theseentrances has been culture, ignited by education, through which the Westernphilosophies, literature, and discourses in general that were perpetrated forcolonialism could be read and contested. The language of nationalism as the basis for political authority,related to a population and territory, was greatly introduced into most placesin the world through European colonialism. Maybe this is why the literature of the colonized included -though notexclusively- stories ending in such tragic tones, in one possible andlargely Western, one might add interpretation? Allof the authors analyzed here agree that colonization involves the colonizerbeing in a problematic space, not devoid of its own forms of oppression. Colonizers produce, partially, their ownsubjection to colonization, which in turn they take back to the colonizingcountry, and this is when Cesaire speaks of the boomerang effect ofcolonization. The colonizer and thecolonized live thus in complex relations of power, which involve a profusion ofdifferent, nonexistent relations before colonization. These profuse differentlywith the local power struggles, no matter how forcefully the colonizers try tobe the direct masters of all of the people colonized under a certainterritory. Colonization is then amultiple reality, in which many struggles and accommodations exist within themultiple forms of both colonizers and colonized. However multiple, the reality is that everycolonized will discern colonizers, and vice-versa. The language of nationalism, then, insofar asit refers to the colonized as a category, will always be in great partanti-national in the eyes of another set of the colonized themselves. In stating this,