Analysis Of The Wretched Of The Earth By Frrantz Fanon

Lindqvist ties together many written works by different authors to depict the brutal view on white colonialism. Colonial countries are invisible killers; they are able to kill the native people without having to be persecuted (pg.77). They can kill without being seen from yards away because of their gun power. They can kill because they feel they will not be persecuted or the rules from home don’t apply (pg.77). No one can see their brutal actions and the law of the blacks will not uphold against them. Think of what anyone would do if they

Frantz Fanon was a Martinique-born, Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post colonial studies, Marxism, and critical theory. He was born in 1925 and died in 1961. The quote above is from Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), originally titled as “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” Fanon, in this book is providing a prognosis about the lived experience of the black man. He is concerned with describing the place that is held by blacks in the mid 20th century and illustrates the issues of race and racism and to point the reader toward a better and free future for all men. The quote above shows how oppression gives rise to ways of being. Fanon’s experience and the background of the time period he was living in justifies his hostility when he argues that the black man is constantly trying, but never fully accomplishing, to be white and to integrate into the white man’s world. In this essay I will show the three phases Fanon goes through to reach this conclusion: to escape his blackness,

Zora Hurston wrote the essay ‘How It feels to be colored” in the 1920s. It is important notice that during that period a strong and open discrimination against black people existed. Racial segregation and unfair treatment added more constraints which made it more difficult for others to see beyond the skin color. The author writes and divides the essay in four different sections. Each part narrates and explains her childhood experience, black heritage, discrimination, social status and how she sees the world around her. As a starting point, Hurston utilized a strong phrase to clearly self-differentiate from others when she says: “I’m the only negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother side was not an Indian Chief” (Hurston, 144). In the essay, she continuously emphasizes and express how proud she is of her heritage and constantly reminds us that we should be proud of who we are no matter the race, color or where we come from. What really matters is the contributions we as human beings can provide to the society where we live.

In her essay "How it Feels to Be Colored Me", Zora Neale Hurston offers the reader an inspiring and positive stance on how she views America's brutal past of racism. She describes herself not even realizing she was colored until she had turned thirteen years old (1). She was born innocent like every other child as we can see when she says "During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived here." (2). With the use of vivid metaphors and colloquial language she expresses her project as showing the reader that it is possible to overcome the highly negative psychological effects of racism. Knowing the circumstances she was born into as a black female, and knowing the circumstances she lived through to write this essay in 1928, is astonishing.

Black history has taught us that the black community has been seen as “servants” a lower class in communities of white supremacy therefore, genocides against women, children and men have been carried out through history and how “colonization” has played an important role in the white supremacy actions against black. Cesaire cites in “Colonial Discourse” “The colonial encounter in other words requires “reinvention of the Colonized” the deliberate destruction of the cast, in other words what Cesaire calls “Thingfication”, colonialism works to ‘decivilize” the colonizer, torture,

A well-known American author and a critic of the Harlem Renaissance era, Richard Wright reprimands Hurston’s minimum approach to the problem of racism. In his writings, Wright rebels against the constraints of the white opinions to prove his point that white oppression is evoking the black youth. Therefore, he argues that amongst the fight for civil rights and the “New Negro Movement”, Hurston fails to accuse the white supremacists of their ruthless conduct (Wright).

The earliest movements for repatriation by Black Americans in the late nineteenth-century reflected the ways in which the gratuity of violence of both colonialism and slavery created a dialectical tension between Black Americans and Continental Africans. The psychological and social effects of this violence manifested in the concerns W. E. B. Du Bois discusses in relation to double consciousness. Amongst the most important of them would be the ways in slavery and colonialism had shaped Black Americans perspectives of themselves, Continental Africans and Africa as a land. While many Black Americans are representative of this process, people such as Martin Delaney, one of the first proponents for Black Nationalism, and Robert Campbell, a teacher at the Institute of Colored Youth in Philadelphia, exemplify the attitudes taken up by Black Americans in the late nineteenth-century and how both behavioral and structural violence shaped their understandings. Through the conceptual framework provided by people such as Du Bois, E. P. Skinner, Frantz Fanon and Frank B. Wilderson, III, one can begin to understand how these movements not only were a product of the ideologies of Black Americans, but also the products of white supremacist, anti-Black ideology.

Decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, where a nation establishes and maintains its domination over dependent territories. In the words of Fanon, in the reading The Wretched of the Earth, “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the na­tion to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.” (Fanon, 1). Frantz Fanon was one of many authors who supported decolonization struggles occurring after World War II. He breaks down decolonization into two senses: one being the physical act of freeing a territory from external control of a colonizer, and the other being the psychological act of freeing the consciousness of the native from the alienation caused by colonization. Fanon particularly advocated that violence was justified by overthrowing colonial oppression. In his reading, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote on why and how colonialism must be stopped. Fanon argued that the colonial infrastructure must be destroyed. “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement. Decolonization, we know, is an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance,”

It is this dignity that many African people's all but lost in the colonial period...The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost." (Achebe/Killam Eds. Pg. 159.)

In Fanon’s, The Wretched of the Earth, he sees the Native Intellectual as aggressive for command, nonviolent, a modern voice, and strategic. “The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He used his aggressiveness to serve his own individual interests,” (60). Here, Fanon emphasizes the native intellectual’s aggressiveness for power. He has hid his initial plan to eliminate the settler and take his position of authority, by assimilating to his beliefs. These revolve around the idea of a colonial world. This world is characterized as a division of action less and honorable titles where you

In the Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire illustrates a compelling relationship between colonized states and the proletariat class. He conveys that the proletariat socio-economic class allows for the possible unification of society against the powers of colonialism. Interestingly, the comparison reflects as these elements extend from constructed illusions to unequivocal creeds. By isolating and juxtaposing the two groups, Cesaire is able to elaborate on how he believes that race and class unite to dominate 'inferior subjects' in nations throughout the globe. Throughout the essay, Cesaire provides reasoning for the socially constructed experiences of those dictated by colonial imperialism, particularly Africans, and proletarian conflicts in

Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness,” a chapter from Black Skin, White Masks describes the anxiety felt while held in the gaze of the colonizer. A reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in conjunction with Fanon’s work raises questions and possible strategies on how to reject neocolonialism and contemporary white supremacy. Fanon’s idea of blackness is performative but not for the gain of the black man, rather for the white man. Butler suggests that regaining control of the black man’s fate comes from interpellation, the act, of interrupting the white man’s claims or ideas, or rather their misconceptions of the black man. A way of disregarding the white man’s claims is a form of rejecting that normativity, similar to Butler’s analysis of drag where one rejects normativity altogether. The black man’s lack of interpellation enhances the white man’s performativity furthering white supremacy; a way of rejecting neocolonialism that disregards societal norms.

Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon explores the roles of violence, class, and political organization in the process of decolonization. Within a Marxist framework, Fanon theorizes and prophesizes the successes and failures of independence movements within colonized nations. He exalts the proletariat as a revolutionary class that is first to realize the necessity of violence in the removal of colonial regimes. Yet the accomplishment and disappointments of the proletariat are at the hand of men. Fanon neglects women in terms of the proletariat’s wishes and efforts. In spite of this exclusion, Fanon nonetheless develops a theory that could apply to the proletariat as a whole, women included. For although Fanon failed to acknowledge women’s

The inferiority complex placed upon the subaltern is adverse, calamitous, and destructive. The subalterns are and have been alienated, isolated, marginalized, and outed from the hegemonic forces. They are distinguished as that of a lower class, inferior, and they do not have a voice in the world because they are outside of the hegemonic class; they are not able to tell their side of history. “To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense.” In the world today, the reason why that we rarely hear from the subalterns is because their voice is viewed as inferior, they have assimilated into the colonial power’s culture, and loss of personal identity. However, from becoming aware about African intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon, and historical references to the conscious development of “racial constructs” will allow people to view the static images of subalterns in films in a different light; a light of awareness and outrage. It helps to give the subaltern a chance to tell his or her side of history and it results in talk about race in the world. In Frantz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Mask, it expounds that films, from the subaltern’s point of view, help to create is discourse about race relations in the Unites States and the world alike through allowing the view to think differently, express sympathy for the subaltern, and give as to why we rarely hear from the subaltern.

Franz Fanon is one of the many profound voices of black identity during the 1950s. His work in the field of psychology features an unfathomed approach to critical theory, post-colonial studies and Marxism. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon dives into the Negro psyche through understanding its origin. In studying this, Fanon comes to the argument that the dehumanizing process of colonization renders both Blacks and Whites crazy. In analyzing Africans, specifically, Fanon determines that the “Negro [is] enslaved by his inferiority [and] the white man enslaved by his superiority” and that is why they are both mentally unbalanced. It is this neurotic orientation through which Fanon discusses the process through which Africans become second-class French people. In discussing the Negro neurosis, Fanon begins with this statement: The Negro “becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness.”