The Agrarian Questions of Decolonization: Revisiting Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Frantz Fanon's Works on Land and Peasant Questions

This paper delves into the connection between agrarian issues and the process of decolonization. The discussion on decolonization and decoloniality has gained popularity in social sciences and humanities. However, this phenomenon has been criticized as becoming a trend in academia, referred to as the "decolonial bandwagon" (Moosavi 2020). In this context, the paper argues that the crucial elements of the decolonization process, such as agrarian transformation and changing property relations, are significant aspects of decolonization. Without transforming political economy relations, the decolonization process is considers artificial and limited to only changing the political structure of rule without altering the fundamental political economy relations established and grounded within a hundred years of the global division of labor. One issue in the scholarship is that it does not consider the national liberation question, including land and peasant elements in the South (Moyo, Jha & Yeros 2013). Following this critique, the paper examines the perspectives of two thinkers, namely Pramoedya Ananta Toer from Indonesia and Frantz Fanon, and argue both formulate the agrarian questions of decolonization within the context of Indonesia and Algeria. Firstly, Pramoedya's perspective highlights the Javanese peasantry as the foundation of the Dutch Empire for centuries. Commentators have recognized the importance of peasants in Pramoedya's second tetralogy, "Child of All Nations," in transforming the protagonist's consciousness in the novel. However, none of the commentators of the second tetralogy further proposes that Pramoedya's work is a form of the agrarian questions posed in literary style. Secondly, in "The Wretched of the Earth," Frantz Fanon recognized only two fates of the peasantry in the South: "colonization or decolonization." The paper will explore parallel ideas of Pramoedya's novel and Fanon's anti-colonial thoughts as agrarian questions of decolonization in underlining the critical role of land and the peasantry in creating national consciousness and decolonization.