Fanon’s
definition of the colonized and post-colonized intellectual really struck me.
It made me realize how much of a colonized intellectual I am. I come from a country
that was colonized by France. In fact, this very book was written in my
hometown after Frantz Fanon was exiled from Algeria in 1956, the year of the
Tunisian independence. It is through Tunis that Fanon was able to communicate
with the leaders of the FLN (Front de liberation nationale)
According
to Fanon, a colonized intellectual is one who has internalized colonialism. It
is one who has been taught all his life on the superiority of western thought,
thus resulting in an alienation from the original culture. Looking at myself
now, I feel that most of the values that we refer to as “western” have been
engrained in me, whether it was through my education or the people around me. I
cannot imagine an efficient political system without the “western” ideal of liberty.
I cannot come to terms with the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia and simply
think of it as part of the culture.
Since
I was six, I was taught in French. I can speak French more fluently than
standard Arabic and I can write in French very comfortably. I can have a
conversation with a French person and be asked: Are you from Toulouse or Lyon? My
philosophy courses in high school did not have a single Arab philosopher. Actually,
the whole educational system is copy-pasted from the French one.
This
feeling of estrangement has become worse and worse after coming to Columbia. We
are taught here to embrace diversity in all of its shapes. As I go back home, I
see headlines like: “A Tunisian attacked by an African student”. I see people
being arrested for their sexual orientation and LGBT activists being aggressed
daily.
When I say universal values, I simply mean western values. When I say philosophy, I am referring to Rousseau or Sartre. In another part of the book, Fanon states the following: “The native intellectual will try to make European culture his own. He will not be content to get to know Rabelais and Diderot, Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe; he will bind them to his intelligence as closely as possible”. This also made me think about the core, all the western literature and philosophy I have read, the western music I learned to appreciate…
Response to Rostam’s post on Fanon’s “colonized intellectual”
ReplyDeleteRostam, your post really struck me, and one of the things it made me think about was the dialectic between oppression and violence that exists today surrounding many victims of racism and (neo)colonialism. Fanon’s discussion of the colonized intellectual highlights how a person’s thoughts—in addition to their body and capacity for labor—can be invaded by colonial forces. The idea of individuals who have grown up surrounded by European intellectualism that Rostam discusses reminds me of the discourse that surrounds various resistance groups today. In several Black Lives Matter protests, for example, some protesters have destroyed property as a way of expressing their anger at a nation that does not value their lives (and actively seeks to destroy them). This use of violence was again met with intense criticism by both liberals and conservatives, as it breaks with the western liberal mores that have frowned upon the comingling of violence and the political project for many generations. For me, the two key issues with this criticism of protesters’ violence are (1) the tacit assumption that people who have experienced physical and/or psychological violence at the hands of the state because of their race/origin should be expected to conform to the very western political thought that led to the formation of a state that denied their existence and personhood and (2) the implicit statement that the dominant group in a society can dictate how those it subordinates and exploits should resist said degradation. I think that this case is an application of the idea of the colonized intellectual in the U.S. that isn’t even overtly related to colonialism, but still seeks to confront similar problems.
Rostom’s personal anecdotes certainly add another dimension of understanding to the notion of colonized intellect. The assertion that Fanon’s discussion is intimately related to the dialectic between oppression and violence is certainly reinforced by contemporary “social” events. Yet before we can analyze these movement through Fanon’s work, we need to make a certain distinction between the colonized intellect and the influence of Western thought. One may contend that throughout its existence (and prior to it), America has been guided by Western thought (more specifically ideals ramified from the ideals of enlightenment thinkers), thus it is meaningless to articulate the notion of domestic colonization of intellect. The notion of colonization is imbued with a nuance of invasion, thus it is the existence of Western thought (or the clash between it and other incoming modes of thought) that drives the predicaments Nina discusses and not the colonization of intellect as previously discussed.
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