Özet:

Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) has been accepted as one of the satiric novels of the 20th century English literature. Being Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief includes a high concentration of satire and criticism through which the writer expresses his ideas on colonialism and the modern man in general. The novel is about an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a country in the heart of the oriental world. Seth, the Oxford-graduate emperor of a fictional Azania, fails to establish a correlation between the English-like Azania in his aspirations with the real cannibal-oriented country and its half-naked inhabitants. This study will analyze Waugh’s Black Mischief in terms of Frantz Fanon’s essay “On National Culture” (1959). A political philosopher and an intellectual from Martinique, Frantz Fanon has become highly influential in the discourse on colonialism and post-colonialism. His writing titled “On National Culture” outlines the steps to embrace the notion of national identity and national consciousness. This study will outline to what degree Waugh’s protagonist Seth fits into Fanon’s category of an endeavor to establish national culture. The study will conclude that Seth’s failure to establish his country heavily depends on the contemporary human conditions in the psychologically devastated universe.