THE COLONISED MAN

The Colonised Man

The Colonised Man Finds His Freedom In and Through Violence

Introduction

Frantz Fanon was a Martini-can psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary whose writings established him as a leading thinker of the twentieth century. Fanon ushered in the de-colonial turn, in critical theory, a move calling on those both within; and outside of Europe to challenge the colonialism of age and to forge a new vision of politics in the postcolonial period. Fanon's greatest works include Black Skin, White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and the posthumously published Toward the African Revolution (1964). The contributions of Fanon to political theory centre on six areas of inquiry: existential phenomenology, the social-psychological critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, critical race theory, colonialism and the politics of empire, the relationship between violence and revolution, and the concept of freedom.

Fanon developed a novel branch of existential phenomenology that merged inquiry into lived experience with the analysis of race. Prior to Fanon, Heidegger addressed the question of Being, Merleau-Ponty investigated the phenomenology of perception, Simone de Beauvoir explored women's embodiment in a patriarchal world, and Sartre examined the premises of the anti-Semite's metaphysical creation of the idea of the Jew. None of these analyses, however, offered a sustained meditation on critical race theory at a moment when racial states defined polities worldwide. Fanon reoriented the existential phenomenological tradition by applying it directly to the topic of race and anti-black racism.

Fanon probes Sartre's contention that the anti-Semite abdicates freedom in upholding an attitude of bad faith—the conscious act of an agent who avoids responsibility by deluding other agents into believing they are not free. Fanon compares the case of the anti-Semite to that of the Negrophobe. For Fanon, despite areas of convergence, anti-black racism has uniqueness in that the anti-black racist creates metaphysical positions with regards to the black through over determining from the visual exterior the characteristics of this agent. Fanon, in turn, rejects universalizing ontological explanations of physical attributes because, as in the instance of the black Antillean, ontology alone cannot explain the Look or racial gaze. Fanon extrapolates this lived experiential position to denounce the universal categories of Freudian psychoanalysis, stating instead that all psychological studies must be understood within social contents.

Discussion

Colonialism was simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural project. It was also an act of conquest, by which a small group of European powers came to dominate a very large group of non-European countries. Culturally, as Edward Said points out, this process involved the emergence of the distinction between the “West” and the “Rest.” In conquering the “Orient,” Europeans came to discover themselves as Westerners, often in contrast to other people, whom they represented in highly inaccurate terms. (Loomba, 31)

Everywhere, colonized people fought back against colonial rule. Examples include the Inca rebellions against the Spanish, the Zulu attacks on the Dutch Boers, the great Indian Sepoy uprising of 1857, and the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899-1901. Yet Western powers, armed with guns, ships, and cannons, effectively ...