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Culture race and class essay
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Culture race and class essay
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In 1961, Frantz Fanon published, The Wretched of the Earth, an analysis of the colonized and their path to decolonization. Fanon critically analyzed the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. In The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to introduce Fanon’s beliefs. However, the preface provided by Sartre displays conflicting views with the ideas proposed by Fanon. The habit of reliance upon the preface to educate the reader developed confusion and conflicting views throughout the rest of the analysis about the book’s audience and true message. In the preface, Sartre fails to understand the objective of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth due to Sartre’s differing beliefs about the …show more content…
Fanon continually discusses the necessity of violence to help achieve liberation and ultimate decolonization. Fanon even writes that decolonization must only be achieved by force, suggesting violence as essential in the process of liberation. Fanon states that, “decolonization can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.” Fanon’s attachment to violence for the sole purpose of decolonization leaves the colonized in the dust. While Fanon believes violence leads to decolonization, Sartre takes an alternative approach to violence by expressing through his preface that violence leads to the development of human status: “Don’t be mistaken; it is through this mad rage, this bile and venom, their constant desire to kill us, and the permanent contraction of powerful muscles, afraid to relax, that they become men.” Through the raw and energetic violence suggested by Sartre, it is proposed that the colonized subjects redevelop their human status, previously experienced before the acts of colonialism. While violence seems irrelevant in developing manhood in a colonial society, it is surprisingly the only force that will have a lasting effect upon the colonized’s manhood. Although Fanon suggests violence as a tool for purely decolonization, Sartre repurposes Fanon’s ideals to suggest that violence also helps redevelop the human nature of the
In the course of Colonization, the world was divided into binary categories of the colonizer and colonized. These binary groups were based on a division of class, gender, race, ethnicity and the oppression of cultural traditions. Traditions of language, religion, labor, and social values were based on theologies of the colonizers, enforced upon the colonized. These binaries can be associated with the Manichean binaries discussed by Frantz Fanon in his book entitled The Wretched of the Earth. In Post-Coloniality, societies gain independence either through diplomatic political transitions or violent revolutions against the occupying force. Regardless of how independence is achieved, these societies undergo a multitude of socio-cultural changes. The colonized populations struggle to rebuild their communities, individual identities and national identities. The process of this decolonization is a long-term and strenuous procedure that varies from one culture to the next. Periods of colonial oppression have negative repercussions on social structures and prohibit certain cultural growth. It is the nationalism that bonds individuals together in creating a national identity, rebuilding the state while imagining the community and representing it in the traditional cultural affiliations of the indigenous populations.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, recounts the story of a child who is born in West Africa, but is kidnapped and thrown into a Western world completely foreign to him. Equiano is a slave for a total of ten years and endeavors to take on certain traits and customs of Western thinking. Not only is it an in-depth account of his life in enslavement and as a freedman, but also it is the first autobiography to ever be published by a former slave and becomes apart of a broader Humanitarian Revolution. It is during the eighteenth-century, in the awake of the Enlightenment movement that new concepts are created; concepts such as: human rights, equality, progress, and tolerance.1 These concepts are what lead the success of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and point to a larger transition in European views about slavery in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The author of this paper disagrees with this assessment. TWE is more than that; it is an informed way out of a psychological deadlock, cannot be resolved in any other way. It is an attempt to stop a severe form of subjugation and degradation that focuses on the wellbeing of the oppressed. The only player in the “Manichean game” that was willing to end it. Fanon’s “regression” to violence is not a sign of resignation, nor of radicalization. It is a well-informed recourse to get rid of an abuser that has proven to be hopelessly egocentric, unsuited to live in a truly humanist society, even less so in bringing it about. Hence, Fanon was to the very end committed to improve the lives of the
Throughout the post World War Two era, many people became homeless in countries such as France, Poland, Belgium and other territories of war because of the economic collapse. A Cold War also emerged between the two rising power countries in the world, the USSR and the United States. The emergence of the United Nations, which was a council where the countries of the world could get together so they could discuss global issues, had given some hope to those but only on the surface. In France specifically, there were homeless people all over because of economic weakness, little military power because of Hitler’s occupation of France, and most importantly the corrupted psychology of the people. Jean Paul Sartre became part of the miserable France after World War Two. Sartre fit right into the era of doubt and dismay. He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and critic. He also became one of the primary figures in philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, along with being a leading figure in 20th century philosophy and Marxism. When Sartre was captured during World War Two by German troops, he realized no person existed that did not make an impact on the entire human race such as Hitler who had made a negative impact on the world. What makes Sartre unique to the era of misery in France because he questioned God and changed France’s presence in the world by making the French change how they acted towards one another and how to question, with the new philosophy of existentialism that states one person fashions the entire race.
The colony is not only a possibility in the geographical; it is a mental dominance that can imperialize the entire self. Entire continents have be domineered, resources completely dried, and at colonialism’s usual worst, the mental devastation of the indigenous culture has left a people hollow. Indigenous culture is no longer that. In the globalized world, no culture is autonomous; culture cannot breathe without new ideas and new perspectives, perspectives that have traditionally come from the people who have lived within the culture. But, the imposition of dominant cultures has certainly benefited from culture’s own vulnerability, as global similarities now exist throughout most different, yet not separate cultures. Postcolonialism is imperialism with a mask on, nothing less. As Franz Fanon puts it “that imperialism which today is fighting against a s true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.”
The beginning of colonization also marks the beginning of decolonization. From the day the colonists start exploiting the colonized people and belittling the colonized people for the colonists' self-aggrandizement, the colonized ones have been prepared to use violence at any moment to end the colonists' exploitation (Fanon, 3).Decolonization is violent, there is a necessity for violence. This is a point that is repeated again and again throughout The Battle of Algiers and The Wretched of the Earth. Here, the focus will be on The Battle of Algiers to discuss the violence of
Fanon focuses on two related desires that constitute the pathology of the colonial situation: “The Black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (p. xiii). As an unconscious desire, this can result in a series of irrational behaviors and beliefs, such as the Antillean speaking French, the desire for a white
In both of his major works, Fanon describes the active involvement in this process as an essential part of the liberation of the self; as in his view, agency was central to self-actualization. However, in Fanon’s model, violence, which could plausibly be manifested on a symbolic rather than physical level, is only the beginning; the first step of a painful and lifelong struggle to overcome the psychological damage inflicted by the colonial aggressor. Hence, violence is not a release of accumulated tension, but rather a reclaiming of subjectivity that moves the colonized from a zone of nonbeing to the zone of being through an act of active self-assertion. Fanon does not promote violence for its own sake. For him violence in never a Selbstzweck; it is a last resort to eliminate a system created and maintained through violence. Moreover, Fanon makes clear that this use of violence could negatively affect the colonized. In the final part of the book, in which he describes the psychological long-term effects violence has on both victims and
At the time of his death on the fifteenth of April, 1980, at the age of seventy-four, Jean-Paul Sartre’s greatest literary and philosophical works were twenty-five years in the past. Although the small man existed in the popular mind as the politically inconsistent champion of unpopular causes and had spent the last seven years of his life in relative stagnation, his influence was still great enough to draw a crowd of over fifty thousand people – admirers or otherwise – for his funeral procession. Sartre was eminently quotable, a favorite in the press, because his statements were always controversial. He was the leader of the shortly popular Existential movement in philosophy which turned quickly into a fad for the disillusioned post-World War I generation, so even when the ideas criticized were not the ideas of Sartre’s Existentialism, he still came to the public mind. Sartre was alternately celebrated and vilified, depending on which side of the issue the speaker or writer was on, and whether or not Sartre had early espoused – and possibly later turned against – the ideals in question. Despite Sartre’s many political and philosophical about-faces, fellow Marxist political philosopher Herbert Marcuse said of him, “He may not want to be the world’s conscience, but he is.” [Hayman, 458]
In his analysis of French colonization in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon relates
Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Ways of Reading. Fifth ed. Ed. David Barholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999, 312-342. Print.
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 role in a post-colonial society, his theory of the revolutionary proletariat applies to Egypt’s lower class women.
Frantz Fanon states that achieving freedom through decolonization “is always a violent phenomenon” (“Wretched of the Earth” 35) as is the case whenever and wherever peoples live under a system of domination. Under any system that restricts the freedoms of peoples to live their liv...
In the French film entitled Lumumba, director Raoul Peck recreates the revolutionary struggle of Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected Prime Minister of The Congolese Republic. In the movie, we do not see much of the independence struggle against the Belgian government, but we begin to see the reconstruction of the African state in African hands. While no one ever claimed that decolonization was easy, maybe this particular example can best be explained by Fanon’s simplified little quip “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. ” In this paper, I will seek to locate where this post-colonial violence is located in discourses regarding race, class and gender. Particularly, I will look at the representations of race and class, and the lack of the representation of gender, in order to draw conclusions about the nature of representation and the effects this has on anti-colonial film.
He deplored a European culture that was imperialistic in its economic, social, and psychological relations with the colonized people of the world, and expressed solidarity with the anti-colonial strivings of these people whose political movements liquidated the “stultifying inertia” of the pre WWII era (Wright 19). Black Skin, White Mask is a book about the mindset or psychology of racism by Frantz Fanon. He repeatedly tells the story of young people leaving Martinique to study in France with the expectation of being assimilated to White Society, only to discover upon arrival that they were perceived as black. The book basically looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and the strange effects that it has, especially on black people. It is broken up into a few chapters: the black man and language (if you do not learn the white man’s language perfectly, you are unintelligent but if you do learn it perfectly, you have washed your brain in their universe of racist ideas), the woman of color and the white man (these women look down on their own race and deep down want to be white), the man of color and the white woman (these men want to be white too or at least prove they are equal to whites), the so-called dependency complex of the colonized (argues that people of color have a deep desire for white rule, that those