Postcolonial Theory:

Aimé Césaire
Frantz Fanon
 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism
• The essential thing is to ask the innocent first
question: What is colonialism? To agree on
what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a
philantropic enterprise
• The chief actors are the adventurer and the
pirate, the gold digger and the merchant,
appetite and force – it is about greed and
domination
 Cesaire
• Hypocrisy is of recent date – the first
colonizers were simply killing and plundering;
the apologists came later and laid down the
dishonest equation: Christianity = civilization,
paganism = savagery
• Has colonization really placed civilizations in
contact?
 Cesaire
• Colonization works to decivlize the colonizer,
to awaken him to buried instincts and moral
relativism. Each time a crime is committed in
the colonies and in Europe they accept the
fact, a universal regression takes place: the
Europeans lose their moral standards. This is
how Hitler came to power.
 Cesaire
• Until Nazism, barbarism was only applied to
non-European peoples; the Europeans
absolved it and shut their eyes to it. Hitler
applied to Europe colonialist procedures
which until then had only been reserved for
Arabs, Africans, Indians (e.g., the Herero tribe)
• European pseudo-humanism: sordidly racist.
Renan: ’inequalities shouldn’t be eliminated
but made into a law’
 Cesaire
• Renan: the notion of a ’master race’, race of
warriors and conquerers (he also views the
Chinese as a race of workers and the Blacks as
a race of farmers)
• The boomerang effect of colonization: it
dehumanizes even the most civilized men; the
colonizers sees the other man as an animal in
order to ease his conscience, and
consequently transforms himself into an
animal
 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth
• Fanon’s condemnation of colonialism is moral:
he argues that the colonizers systematically
dehumanize the colonized nations. This is
what makes the struggle for decolonization
justified: the colonized subject reconstruct
himself and reclaims his humanity.
• Althusser: ISAs and RSAs. Forms of control are
more subtle in the capitalist society
(institutions and ideological conditioning)
 Fanon
• In colonies, however, the order is maintained
’by rifle butts and napalm’ (direct intervention
by the police and the military) – RSAs.
• Theories about the inborn aggressiveness of
the Algerians were taught at university. Trivial
reasons for murder: a gesture, an ambiguous
remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an
olive tree or a sheep. ’The Algerian has a need
to see blood’ – a preference for the knife.
 Fanon
• Imperialist ideology: the natives are regarded
as irrational, sub-human beings without a
moral sense; the white colonizers strives to
enlighten them.
• Quasi-scientific theories regarding a different
brain structure. ’The normal African is a
lobotomized European’; ’he uses his frontal
lobes very little’, almost as though he had no
cortex (Dr Carothers, World Health
Organisation)
 Fanon
• Fanon deconstructs these claims in his study.
The aggressiveness of the colonized natives
has nothing to do with their brain structure –
it is a direct consequence of colonial
exploitation.
• The colonized world is a world of rigid
divisions (Manichean world). It is petrified –
’the first thing the colonial subject learns is to
remain in his place and not overstep its limits’.
 Fanon
• This oppression and petrification are inscribed
into the body of the colonized subject –
aggressiveness becomes ’sedimented in his
muscles’, whereas aggressive vitality and
energetic body movements appear very often
in his dreams.
• The colonized subject will first train this
aggressiveness against his own people.
 Fanon
• Fanon argues that violence is inevitably
present in the system of colonial injustice – it
is only possible to re-direct it towards the
colonizers.
• In the fifth chapter of The Wretched of the
Earth Fanon problematizes this argument. He
discusses revolutionary violence and its
psychological consequences.