Fanon describes a sort of domino effect of violence as well: once the colonized in one village use violence against the colonists, word spreads and soon there are more uprisings, more violent revolts. Fanon also reiterates that the colonists, who tried to use force and violence to control the colonized, now also experience force and violence as a threat to their power. Another way is when the Manichean mindset of the colonist gets reversed: now, the colonized depict the colonist as absolute evil. This is just one example of the ways in which the means of power exercised by the colonists end up working against them. This threatens the absolute supremacy of the colonist. Since the colonized represent a possible market, as colonization proceeds the colonized themselves slowly become consumers, gaining economic power. The global market needs constantly to expand. Moreover, the very capitalist system that first led the colonists to colonized land in order to extract their resources ends up working against the colonists. The colonized will fight to have their land back under their control. This is because the colonized primarily care about land, the source of their wealth from agriculture. But Fanon says the colonized tend to be “impervious” to such persuasions or bribes. They might turn to education or technology. At first, the colonists might try different strategies to contain the colonized. So once decolonization gets underway, violence starts to get directed at the colonists themselves, who are no longer the only ones using violence against the colonized. But during decolonization, when a fight for liberation begins, people lose interest in rituals, and start fighting their own oppression. In these cases, violent urges are redirected away from a mission to fight colonialism. During waking life, men might find physical release in dance or tribal rituals. Men have “muscular dreams” where they fly or fight beasts, but these are only dreams at night instead of practices during the day. According to Fanon, men always have violent urges-urges to use their “muscular power”-but under colonialism these urges tend to be repressed or redirected. 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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