Overhauling the colonial world, in which men are divided into good and evil according to their status as colonist or colonizer, is a violent process. One consequence of this is that decolonization must also turn to violence, according to Fanon. The colonized are “kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm.” In other words, colonial police, soldiers, and their threats of violence, more than education or ideology, keep the colonized in submission. But in colonized societies, Fanon argues, submission is maintained by more overt exercises of power. The working classes, for instance, are taught that having less power is part of the natural order of society. In more capitalist Western societies, like England and France, the exploited members of a society are kept in submission through education, religion, and morality. People can organize around a national or racial consciousness, coming together and uniting in coalition to fight the colonized.įanon considers the different means by which the colonizer creates colonized subjects and maintains power over them. But this can also be a resource for those who fight against colonialism. The colonized are lumped into this one category of brute evil, which means forms of difference within that category-like gender, religion, and class-get erased. The colonist depicts the colonized as absolutely evil, and sometimes goes so far as to depict the colonized as subhuman or a mere animal. In turn, to decolonize means creating “new men,” people with an entirely different mindset, one suited to freedom rather than submission.īecause the colonial world is strictly divided between the colonist and colonized, it is what Fanon callas a “Manichaean world.” That means a world cut into white and black, good and evil, with no room for complexity. The colonizer creates an entire mindset of submission and inferiority on the part of the colonized. He argues that the colonizer “fabricates” the colonized subject, which means that colonizers create the colonized identity. Fanon begins The Wretched of the Earth by considering the identifies of colonizer and colonized.
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