Colonialism & Postcolonialism
Before
Europe rose and dominated the world by the mid-1700s, China and Islam
were vast empires that developed technology, science, law and culture.
Islam was in fact the last great contiguous land empire, stretching
from Spain to China. Ironically, Chinese achievements such as ships,
gunpowder and magnetic compasses, developed further by Muslims with
algebra employed in such fields as cartography (mapping the world),
enabled Europe to sail to Africa and the Americas, and to set up
colonial empires that could be controlled in spite of separation by
great distances. America became the largest slave colony in all of
history, and just as Britain ruled the sea less than a century ago
America now rules the skies as well as corporate economics. We can now
dominate independent others. Chomsky and Zinn are two critics of
American empire and its brutality, as well as the fact that “the West”
is still hailed as the authoritative voice, the voice of authority and
objectivity above and beyond all other cultures.
Islamic
civilization was the world’s great civilization before European
civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the
progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture
before Europe, and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of culture,
technology and science. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely
ignorant of Islamic achievements as we rarely look outside of ancient
Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a
greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one
that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges
some depth. Here are some awesome Ahadith, sayings of the prophet
Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law
and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in
Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue
her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his
income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European
persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’
society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a
good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and
Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish
Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic
Christians. Thus there is no reason to celebrate the rationality or
freedom of the West over and above the rest of human history.
Postcolonialism
is a movement in scholarship that argues the effects of colonialism
persist in spite of decolonization. As Fanon and Said argue, the West
and the white is privileged and pronounced the true humanity which knows
itself while all others are marginalized and denounced as savage and
ignorant.
Franz Fanon (1925 – 1961)
Franz
Fanon was a philosopher, existentialist, Freudian and Marxist who began
his career in psychiatry and became a revolutionary whose writings are
one of the central sources of the Postcolonial school of thought along
with Edward Said. Fanon’s two most famous works are the Wretched of the
Earth (or Damned of the Earth, as an alternative translation of the
French title) and Black Skin, White Masks. His writings have been an
inspiration to many anti-racist and anti-establishment groups including
the Black Panthers.
Fanon
was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony as it
remains today similar to US control of Puerto Rico. Though middle
class, he witnessed the racist brutality of the French military toward
the African population who were descended from slaves brought by the
French to Martinique to work on plantations, as Africans had been
brought to Haiti by the French and to Jamaica by the British.
Nevertheless, Fanon joined the French military fighting Germany and
Italy in Algeria. When Germany was defeated, the white soldiers were
featured in parades while the black soldiers were removed from sight.
Fanon went to France and studied psychology and medicine, becoming a
doctor and psychiatrist. He also studied philosophy, and attended
lectures by the Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, former student of Husserl
like Heidegger, who argued that phenomenology and existentialism must
be put in the context of the human body and physical experience like
Freud and later Korzybski and Piaget.
In
1952, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks as an expansion of his
doctorial thesis, arguing that colonialism had a destructive impact on
the physical and mental health of black people. Soon after writing the
book he moved to Algeria to practice psychiatry, soon becoming the head
of service for a major psychiatric hospital. Fanon began experimenting
with therapy that took cultural background of Arabic and black patients
and the effects of racism into account. When the Algerian Revolution
against the French broke out (well portrayed in the famous French film
The Battle of Algiers), he sided with and secretly supported the
revolutionaries as a member of the Algerian Liberation Front, providing
them with medical treatment and supplies. Fanon encouraged and trained
interns and nurses to support the cause, and in 1957 Fanon was deported
from Algeria and the hospital dismantled. Fanon became a member of the
close existentialist circle of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in
France who followed the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Sartre
would later write the preface and lend his fame to The Damned of the
Earth, writing famously that it was not a book for white people but
white people should have the courage to read to come to a greater
understanding of what is at stake for the oppressed in a world dominated
by ignorant and racist first world European people.
In
the Damned of the Earth, which was published only in 1961 just before
his death, Fanon argued that colonialism had taught black people to
interiorize racism such that they considered themselves evil and ugly
and become self-destructive and violent against their fellow black
people. Fanon, in accord with the existentialism of Heidegger and
Sartre, saw racism as a form of lying to oneself to avoid the endless
transformation of our existence and the questioning gaze of the other.
The black body and mind is denigrated to affirm and celebrate the West,
white culture and achievements including colonial control of the globe.
Just
as Jews are marginalized as the abnormally mental human subspecies,
black people are marginalized as overly physical, and thus sensual,
musical, and sexual. While Marx argues that class is the central
struggle, the rich oppressing the poor and the poor rising up in
revolution, Fanon argues that racial inequality is the key to class
oppression. Rather than merely “celebrate diversity”, all the while
supporting the idea that Western culture is rational and other cultures
are less rational, we must accept not only the rationality of all people
but our own individual irrationality as human beings. Thus, we accept
the rationality and irrationality of white, black and all people,
getting beyond the Manichean categorical dualistic thinking that
separates both black from white and rational from irrational.
However,
going beyond the simple universal humanism of Sartre, Fanon argued that
black culture asserting itself as an “other” to white culture is
valuable in the struggle, so we should celebrate black culture as an
independent and separate voice while celebrating human equality and
unity. Rather than impose capitalism or communism, we should allow
economies and nations to develop individually and see what works for
each local group. Gramsci argued for the same in the wake of Stalin
while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Through continuous
bottom-up transformation of society (much like Trotsky had wanted for
Soviet Russia), we can understand and enable the individual, the various
cultures, and the whole.
Fanon
argued that in some cases, such as the American Revolution, the
Algerian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, violence is an
appropriate means for resistance to oppression and brutality. Many
Black Panther leaders and supporters, including Marcuse’s student Angela
Davis, read this text in Oakland and applied it to their own violent
and brutal oppression by the Oakland Police and began carrying shotguns
to defend themselves and their community, technically not a crime if the
weapon is unloaded and unconcealed. Soon, city ordinances were passed
to make this illegal in spite of the fact that no one had considered
this a threat before the Black Panthers. Fanon remained a revolutionary
for the rest of his life, writing on tactics and support structures to
aid African rebels and all third world people attempting to gain
independence from European colonial powers. For this, there were
numerous assassination attempts made on his life. It is rumored that
the CIA prevented Fanon from receiving treatment for leukemia just
before his death in America. In 1965, four years after Fanon’s death,
Time Magazine wrote that he was “an apostle of violence” and “a prisoner
of hate” after the assassination of Malcolm X. Fanon likely would have
replied, “You and I both, Time Magazine”.
Edward Said (1935 – 2003)
Edward
Said, like Fanon one of the central sources of Postcolonialism, was a
Palestinian American and professor at Columbia University who grew up
Palestinian Christian during the founding of Israel and the wars that
followed. Like Chomsky, he first got tenure in another subject
(Comparative Literature) before he became a famous cultural critic and
hip within left leaning academia like Marcuse and Foucault. He is most
famous for his book Orientalism (1978), which argues that “the Occident”
an old term that has been replaced since the 1950s by “the West”, views
“the Orient” as other through a Manichean lens much like Fanon
describes that Said labels “Orientalism”. European white people,
including scholars, identify reason and freedom with the West, as
Western virtues, while marginalizing other large cultural groups such as
African, Chinese, Indian and Islamic as ignorant, authoritarian,
emotional, and unselfconscious. Said is particularly focused on
Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures and populations,
criticizing the romantic portrayal of the wonders of the East by
Renaissance painters as well as modern day scholarship. The East, the
Orient, is presented as an alien place full of wondrous splendor but
also authoritarian despots and pre-scientific irrationality.
Today,
we see much of the same in pundits labeling Muslims as a violent and
unreasonable people. Bush saying “They hate our freedom” rather than
looking to economic oppression originally structured through colonialism
and now alive and well in spite of decolonization is a perfect example.
Rather than understand September 11th as a result of colonialism, it
is presented as a clash of civilizations between the reasonable and free
West and the ignorant and authoritarian Islamic Middle East. Asia and
China, as Russia was, is seen in a similar light. Russia was the East,
vs. America and Britain as the West openly in the rhetoric. My
professor Ken Jowitt, a specialist in Eastern Europe during and after
the fall of the Soviet Union, told a full auditorium, his political
science classroom, that since the fall of the Soviet Union America needs
a new enemy, and that it is either going to be Islamic terrorism or
communist China. This was less than a year before September 11th. He
had argued this in 1990 in a piece included in his book, New World
Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, published in Berkeley. This was 10
years before September 11th, and we are still involved in multiple wars
in the Middle East 10 years after.
Especially
given this situation today, Said is hip on campuses around the world,
his work spawning many followers including the author of the book Said
and the Unsaid, a joke only funny to humanities graduate students. The
TV show Lost, which names several characters after philosophers and
scientists, named its Iraqi character Said, a name which means 'happy'
in Arabic.
You can watch Said speak on YouTube. We will be watching these clips in class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlRR-qRkcc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo
