What Does Fanon Mean By Decolonization?

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,

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

In the essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, author Zora Neale Hurston writes to an American audience about having maturity and self-conscious identity while being an African American during the early 1900’s through the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance. Hurston expresses and informs her audience about how she does not see herself as a color, and instead sees herself as all she is made up of on the inside. Her primary claim is that she is not “tragically colored” and she should not have a single care about how the world reminds her of how she should act about her race. Her essay chronicles her personal experiences in being an unapologetically colored woman and creates the argument that she should not ever feel self-pity for being black. She utilizes her personal anecdotes and weaves them with metaphors, analogies, and rhetorical questions in order to create an immersive experience for the reader. Furthermore, Hurston engages the reader with her slightly sarcastic, strong, and blissfully positive tone effectively creates a way with words that communicate her claims in an entertaining way.

“Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” is an article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Through the article, the attempt to explain that the widely used term, “decolonization” is not applied as the term itself specifies. According to Eve and Wayne Yang, the term “decolonization” is now used in social justice rethoric such as enhancing the quality of societies and education and schools (Tuck & Yang, pg 3). The authors argue that decolonization must not lose its initial sense and meaning because any use other than what decolonization insinuates, turns the terms into a metaphor.

On a sociological basis, the notion of race is understood as a social construction. As a black student in France, Frantz Fanon writes of how the white man has made him a “slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of [him] but of [his]

In the "Lived Experience of a Black man" chapter, Fanon asserts his anger towards the white man because a black person 's skin color is the basis for prejudice and thus they are not the ideal human. He is annoyed that when someone mentions a physician or a teacher and they are black, the white society seems surprised that these black scholars are gentle or intelligent. His anger leads him wanting to be accepted by the white man. He writes, "Like all good tacticians I wanted to rationalize the world and show the white man he was mistaken"(Fanon 98). He feels the need to show the white man that they are mistaken about believing all the negative thoughts about black people.

In the beginning of this essay, Hurston describes the superiority dynamic between herself and White Northerners passing through her hometown. Specifically, Hurston reflects that the passing white travelers only valued her as a source of amusement: “They liked to hear me speak pieces and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la.” (Hurston 42). Almost as if Hurston was a common servant; the passing white people would pay to see an innocent black girl dance and sing just as a king demands a show from his jester. Furthermore, Hurston’s youthful naivety in the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow America made her exploitation all the more grotesque. Hurston includes this reflection in her essay to show how black people were degraded by white society even as young children. Which creates the impression that the social hierarchy of races was thoroughly integrated into the lives of African Americans. Essentially, it was part of an African Americans social identity to be inferior due to their complexion.

Through the depiction of Chiron and his struggle in the film Moonlight Jenkins shows that the system one lives in and the internal self results in domination against oneself. Chiron the protagonist of the film is considered weak and fragile in comparison to his classmates and the people in his community and thus Chiron is targeted by his peers and even within his own household. In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks it is argued that the black man plays a part in their own domination by constantly viewing themselves as less than the white men.

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,”

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

The book "Strength in What Remains" by author Tracy Kidder recounts the story of Deogratias (Deo) and his escape from the brutal civil war in his hometown of Burundi and Rwanda to a place of refuge in New York City. However, Deo encounters dereliction in a place where he hoped to find humanity and is instead subjected to corrupt nature of the world and must resort to homelessness in Central Park, New York City. The act of being discriminated against is something Deo must endure again, but not because of ethnic identity but rather of skin color. This racial profiling is in part involuntarily similar to the arguments that Fanon makes; the ideas that represent Fanon's ideologies of the dehumanizing effects of colonization resonate in the war between the Hutu's and the Tutsi's. It shows how the protagonist Deo, is involuntarily affected by it and live in constant fear of oppression and guilt for something he knows so little about.

Living in the same region for an extended period of time will endow the human inhabitant with a sense of pride in their homeland. When this idea is extended to a certain group of people living in the same area, pride turns into nationalism. The residents not only feel like they geographically own the land, but their history of culture in that given area lends them an emotional connection as well. When people of elsewhere come to take the land from the native inhabitants, many changes occur. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon gives his insight into how the process of colonization and decolonization happens, and the resulting physical and mental effects on both groups of people. Telling this from a strictly historical and

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.”

Franz Fanon, in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, argues that decolonisation alias restoring nationhood is always a ‘violent phenomenon’: “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up…. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: "The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence.”