Fanon supported the most extreme wing of the FLN, even opposing a negotiated transition to power. He exalts violence as a necessary pre-condition for this rupture.
Fanon calls for a radical break with colonial culture, rejecting a hypocritical European humanism for pure revolutionary consciousness. In all these questionings of basic assumptions of colonialism Fanon exposes the methods of control the white world uses to hold down the colonies. He questions whether the colonized world should copy the west or develop a whole new set of values and ideas. 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 violence is a tactic that should be employed to eliminate colonialism. Like Foucault’s questioning of a disciplinary society, Fanon questions the basic assumptions of colonialism.
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 nonrecognition of the colonized’s humanity, his subjecthood, by the colonizer in order to justify his exploitation.įanon’s next novel, “The Wretched Of The Earth” views the colonized world from the perspective of the colonized. But quickly Fanon’s assimilationist illusions were destroyed by the gaze of metropolitan racism both in France and in the colonized world.
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.įanon at first was an assimilationist thinking colonists and colonized should try to build a future together. Both books’ writers come from vastly different perspectives and this shapes what both authors see as the technologies that keep the populace in line.įoucault coming out of the French intellectual class sees technologies as prisons, family, mental institutions, and other institutions and cultural traits of French society. Fanon’s book, “The Wretched of the Earth” like Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” question the basic assumptions that underlie society.
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