In isolating these children classifying their disorders as insanity caused by colonialism he ironically is using the very thought systems and technologies that Foucault points out are symptomatic of the western disciplinary society.įanon’s book filled with his anger at colonial oppression was influential to Black Panther members Newton and Seale. In one instance he classifies two children who kill their white playmate with a knife as insane. In his last chapter, he brings up countless cases of children, adults, and the elderly who have been driven mad by colonialism. He fails to see how these natives and even the white world are also victims who in what Foucault calls the stream of power and control are forced into their roles by a society which itself is forced into a role.įanon also classifies many colonized people as mentally ill. His book though sees the relationship and methods of control in a simplistic light he classifies whites, and native intellectuals who have adopted western values and tactics as enemies. Fanon supported the most extreme wing of the FLN, even opposing a negotiated transition to power. He exalts violence as a necessary pre-condition for this rupture. Fanon calls for a radical break with colonial culture, rejecting a hypocritical European humanism for pure revolutionary consciousness. In all these questionings of basic assumptions of colonialism Fanon exposes the methods of control the white world uses to hold down the colonies. He questions whether the colonized world should copy the west or develop a whole new set of values and ideas. He questions whether native intellectuals who have adopted western methods of thought and urge slow decolonization are in fact part of the same technology of control that the white world employs to exploit the colonized. He questions whether violence is a tactic that should be employed to eliminate colonialism. Like Foucault’s questioning of a disciplinary society, Fanon questions the basic assumptions of colonialism. He responded to the shattering of his neo-colonial identity, his white mask, with his first book, Black Skin, White Mask, written in 1952 at the age of twenty-seven and originally titled “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” Fanon defined the colonial relationship as one of the nonrecognition of the colonized’s humanity, his subjecthood, by the colonizer in order to justify his exploitation.įanon’s next novel, “The Wretched Of The Earth” views the colonized world from the perspective of the colonized. But quickly Fanon’s assimilationist illusions were destroyed by the gaze of metropolitan racism both in France and in the colonized world. Fanon at first was an assimilationist thinking colonists and colonized should try to build a future together.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |