РефератыИностранный языкThThe Wretched Of The Earth A Review

The Wretched Of The Earth A Review

The Wretched Of The Earth: A Review Essay, Research Paper


The Wretched Of The Earth: A Review


Fanon’s book, “The Wretched Of The Earth” like Foucault’s “Discipline


and Punish” question the basic assumptions that underlie society. Both books


writers come from vastly different perspectives and this shapes what both


authors see as the technologies that keep the populace in line. Foucault coming


out of the French intellectual class sees technologies as prisons, family,


mental institutions, and other institutions and cultural traits of French


society. In contrast Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) born in Martinique into a lower


middle class family of mixed race ancestry and receiving a conventional colonial


education sees the technologies of control as being the white colonists of the


third world. Fanon at first was a assimilationist thinking colonists and


colonized should try to build a future together. But quickly Fanon’s


assimilationist illusions were destroyed by the gaze of metropolitan racism both


in France and in the colonized world. He responded to the shattering of his neo-


colonial identity, his white mask, with his first book, Black Skin, White Mask,


written in 1952 at the age of twenty-seven and originally titled “An Essay for


the Disalienation of Blacks.” Fanon defined the colonial relationship as one of


the non recognition of the colonized’s humanity, his subjecthood, by the


colonizer in order to justify his exploitation.


Fanon’s next novel, “The Wretched Of The ` “Earth” views the colonized


world from the perspective of the colonized. Like Foucault’s questioning of a


disciplinary society Fanon questions the basic assumptions of colonialism. He


questions whether violence is a tactic that should be employed to eliminate


colonialism. He questions whether native intellectuals who have adopted western


methods of thought and urge slow decolonization are in fact part of the same


technology of control that the white world employs to exploit the colonized. He


questions whether the colonized world should copy the west or develop a whole


new set of values and ideas. In all these questionings of basic assumptions of


colonialism Fanon exposes the methods of control the white world uses to hold


down the colonies. Fanon calls for a radical break with colonial culture,


rejecting a hypocritical European humanism for a pure revolutionary


consciousness. He exalts violence as a necessary pre-co

ndition for this rupture.


Fanon supported the most extreme wing of the FLN, even opposing a negotiated


transition to power.


His book though sees the relationship and methods of control in a


simplistic light; he classifies whites, and native intellectuals who have


adopted western values and tactics as enemies. He fails to see how these natives


and even the white world are also victims who in what Foucault calls the stream


of power and control are forced into their roles by a society which itself is


forced into a role. Fanon also classifies many colonized people as mentally ill.


In his last chapter he brings up countless cases of children, adults, and the


elderly who have been driven mad by colonialism. In one instance he classifies


two children who kill their white playmate with a knife as insane. In isolating


these children classifying there disorders as insanity caused by colonialism he


ironically is using the very thought systems and technologies that Foucault


points out are symptomatic of the western disciplinary society.


Fanon’s book filled with his anger at colonial oppression was


influential to Black Panther members Newton and Seale . As students at Merrit


College, in Oakland, they had organized a Soul Students’ Advisory Council, which


was the first group to demand that what became known as African-American studies


be included in the school curriculum. They parted ways with the council when


their proposal to bring a drilled and armed squad of ghetto youths onto campus,


in commemoration of Malcolm X’s birthday, the year after his assassination, was


rejected. Seale and Newton’s unwillingness to acquiesce to more moderate views


was in large part influenced by Fanon’s ideas of a true revolutionary


consciousness. In retrospect Fanon’s efforts to expose the colonial society were


successful in eliminating colonialism but not in eliminating the oppression


taking place in the colonized world. Today the oppression of French colonialism


in Algeria has been replaced by the violence of the civil war in Algeria, and


the dictator of Algeria who has annulled popular elections, a the emergence of


radical Islam which seeks to replace colonial repression with religious


oppression. But this violence might be one of the lasting symptoms of Frances


colonial brutality which scared the lives of Algerians and Algerian society;


perverting peoples sense of right and wrong freedom and discipline.

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