Assignments : 203 The Postcolonial Studies

 

Name – Janvi Nakum

Paper-  203 The Postcolonial Studies

Roll no- 11

Enrollment no –4069206420210020

Email id – janvinakum360@gmail.com

Batch- 2021-2023(M.A. Sem – 3)

Submitted to – S.B. Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Frantz Fanon

Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and political theory, and its influence across the global South has been wide, deep, and enduring. In his lifetime, he published two key original works: 

• Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) in 1952 
•  The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) in 1961. 
• Collections of essays, A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution Algérienne 1959) 
•  Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution Africaine), posthumously published in 1964, round out a portrait of a radical thinker in motion, moving from the Caribbean to Europe to North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa and transforming his thinking at each stop.
•  The 2015 collection of his unpublished writings, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, will surely expand our understanding of the origins and intellectual context of Fanon’s thinking.

Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria, where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry at Bilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society. Fanon published in academic journals and revolutionary newspapers, translating his radical vision of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization for a variety of audiences and geographies, whether as a young academic in Paris, a member of the Algeria National Liberation Front (FLN), Ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, or revolutionary participant at conferences across Africa. Following a diagnosis and short battle with leukemia, Fanon was transported to Bethesda, Maryland  for treatment and died at the National Institute for Health facility on December 6, 1961.

The Wretched of the Earth as postcolonial Studies

the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) changed Fanon’s global profile as a thinker of anti-colonial struggle, revolutionary action, and post-colonial statecraft and imagination.

In many ways, Wretched is a fulfillment of the short, suggestive promissory notes on anti-colonial struggle found in the many essays, editorials, and letters written in the time following Black Skin, White Masks. Those occasional writings and major essays shift focus away from anti-Blackness as a core theme and toward a broader sense of the effects of colonialism on the psyche, cultural formation, and political organization. That shift in focus allows Fanon to think more broadly about the meaning and purpose of revolutionary struggle.

"Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: A Post-colonial Text", is mainly devoted to approaching Frantz Fanon's influential text, The Wretched of the Earth, to explain how it is considered as an apparent  representative of the post-colonial texts. This chapter concentrates on Fanon's consideration of the role of violence as an inevitable means of resistance in the colonial context. For him the colonized people's use of violence is a natural reaction to the colonizer's violence, and it is the most effective strategy of resistance that compels the colonial authority to negotiate and give the chance to the colonized to speak. This chapter highlights Fanon's call for organizing and teaching the spontaneous sectors of the resisting people to bring the people's struggle into success. Moreover, he warns the Third World peoples from the danger represented in the bourgeoisie. Due to him, this class is politically vacant and its struggle stops when given some privileges from the colonizers. He shows the importance of educating the 'spontaneous' sectors of the people politically. This chapter concentrates on Fanon's concept of nationalism and discusses his warning of the pitfalls of the concept. In addition, it sheds the light on the inter-connectedness between the national culture and the struggle for liberation.

Colonialism, Racism, and Violence

The practice of taking political control of another country with the intention of establishing a settlement and exploiting the people economically. Colonialism began in Europe around the 15th century, and it is still practiced today in some parts of the world. Fanon, a French West Indian from Martinique, a French colony located in the eastern Caribbean Sea, had a personal interest in colonialism, and his book focuses on the ways colonialism historically sought to oppress and subjugate much of the Third World through blatant racism and repeated violence. At the time Fanon wrote his book in 1961, many colonized nations were struggling for independence, and the damage of hundreds of years of racism and exploitation was acutely felt by many. The Wretched of the Earth serves as a sort of guidebook for understanding the colonized and their struggle, and in it, Fanon ultimately argues that colonialism, an inherently racist and violent practice, can only be overcome by using violence in return.

Fanon maintains that colonialism divides the world into light and dark or in this case, black and white in a process he refers to as Manichaeism. Manichaeism is a Persian religious practice from the 3rd century that is based on the basic conflict of light and dark, and, Fanon claims, it serves as the basis for the racist practice of colonialism. Since “the colonial world is a Manichaean world,” Fanon says, the colonized individual is seen as the “quintessence of evil” and is considered void of any morals or ethics. Manichaeism assumes that light the white settler represents good, whereas dark the black colonized individual represents evil. To Fanon, colonialism is rooted in this basic racist belief. Based on the same Manichaean concept, the colonial world is likewise divided into the civilized and the savage. In keeping with the themes of light and dark, the white colonist is considered civilized, and the colonized is a savage. The colonized individual is “reduced to the state of an animal” and is referred to in “zoological terms.” Under the racist practice of colonialism, the colonized individual is completely dehumanized. According to Fanon, colonial countries are further divided into two separate “sectors'': the “colonist’s sector” and the “’native’ quarters.” The colonist’s sector is clean and well maintained; but the “native” quarters, which are crowded and neglected, are “disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people.” At the very foundation of colonialism, Fanon thus argues, is a basic principle that seeks to separate and oppress people based on the color of their skin. 

Racism 

In addition to a system of racism, Fanon argues that colonialism is also a system of violence, which seeks to control and oppress the colonized through violent means. From the beginning, Fanon claims that the colonial situation “was colored by violence and their cohabitation or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer continued at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire.” Colonial control was taken by violence and is maintained in much the same way. The colonized world which again is separated into the colonizer and the colonized is divided by military barracks and police stations. In a colonized country, Fanon says,

 “The spokesperson for the colonizer and regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier.” 

The mere presence of the dividing border between the worlds maintains order through intimidation and the threat of violence. Fanon argues that for the colonized, 

“all he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity.” 

Thus, Fanon implies, there is no end to the violence of colonialism; it doesn't stop once power is established. Rather, violence is a constant presence that is front and center in the lives of all colonized individuals. 

Violence 

Fanon refers to the widespread violence in colonial countries as “atmospheric violence,” which he claims is perpetually “rippling under the skin.” To Fanon, this constant violence is proof that colonialism cannot be overcome through peaceful or passive means. The colonized masses, Fanon asserts,

 “intuitively believe that their liberation must be achieved and can only be achieved by force.” 

For the colonized, “violence is a cleansing force,” and it also rids them of the “inferiority complex” forced upon them by the racist ideology of colonialism. As a practice rooted in violence, Fanon thus argues that colonialism must be answered in kind.

Oppression and Mental Health 

Fanon includes several cases of Algerian patients he treated for mental illness during the Algerian War of Independence. Fanon argues that their various illnesses are “psychotic reactions,” which are directly related to the stress of colonialism. Fanon includes the case file of an Algerian man known only as B, who was treated for impotence, migraines, and anorexia after his wife was raped by a French soldier. Each of B’s symptoms and conditions are in response to the violence of colonialism and the trauma of his wife’s rape. Fanon also includes the case of S, another Algerian man who was treated for “random homicidal impulses” after surviving a massacre in his small Algerian village perpetrated by the French military in 1958. Twenty-nine Algerians were killed in the massacre, and S suffered two bullet wounds. Since the massacre, S has had the urge to “kill everybody,” a desire that only began after the violent attack on his village by the French soldiers. Fanon also includes notes on a group of young Algerian children, each under the age of 10, whom he treated for adjustment disorders. The children, whose parents had been killed in the war with France, suffered from bedwetting, sleepwalking, insomnia, and anxiety, and like both S and B, their pathologies were also directly related to the psychological stress of colonialism.

Fanon also includes case notes relating to his work with colonial soldiers and officers, as well as their families, which suggests that colonialism has a negative psychological effect on both the colonized and the colonizer. Fanon includes notes on A, a young European police officer whom he treated for depression and anxiety, which began after he was expected to begin torturing Algerians on behalf of the colonial police. Like the Algerians Fanon also treated, A was likewise psychologically impacted by colonialism. Fanon, too, treated a young Frenchwoman who suffered from an anxiety disorder after her father, a civil servant, was killed during an ambush in Algeria. The Frenchwoman was disgusted and embarrassed by her father’s involvement in the oppression of the Algerian people, and she found it impossible to be proud of him. This shame is directly related to colonialism, and it has a negative effect on the young Frenchwoman’s psychological wellbeing. Lastly, Fanon includes his notes on R, a European police inspector who, after his involvement in colonialism and the oppression of the Algerian people, tortures his wife and children just as he tortured the Algerians. Like all of the patients mentioned in Fanon’s book, R suffers from a “psychotic reaction” that is directly related to colonialism.

Fanon argues colonialism

 “sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds.”

 In addition to being a moral stain on the history of Europe, Fanon underscores the psychiatric phenomena emerging from the colonial situation and advocates for colonialism to stop. Of course, at the time Fanon wrote his book in 1961, there was little evidence to suggest the colonial situation in Algeria would resolve anytime soon. “The truth is,” 

Fanon claims, 

“that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals.” In other words, there is no shortage of mental illness within the colonial situation.

Words : 1964