Africa functions as a signifier for repressed racialized experience

Evidence

The soil, which only a moment ago was still a tamed steed, begins to revel. Are these virgins, these nymphomaniacs? Black Magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant to commit myself. Aggression was in the stars. I had to choose. What do I mean? I had no choice… . — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 474 (#expands, via linked claim)

A.C.: Universalizing, living values that had not been exhausted. The field was not dried up: it could still bear fruit, if we made the effort to irrigate it with our sweat and plant new seeds in it. So this was the situation: there were things to tell the world. We were not dazzled by European civilization. We bore the imprint of European civilization but we thought that Africa could’ make a contribution to Europe. It was also an affirmation of our solidarity. That’s the way it was: I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Martinicans and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 344 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Africa of diaspora memory differs sharply from the African present; The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 474; Negritude affirmed diasporic black solidarity across colonial and postcolonial geographies — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 344 (+1 more)

Related

• Negritude affirmed diasporic black solidarity across colonial and postcolonial geographies (similarity 0.86)
• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt (similarity 0.85)
• African disinclination to violence was misread as racial inferiority (similarity 0.83)
• Depicting Africans as primitive legitimized colonial invasion and plunder. (similarity 0.82)
• Negritude was born as a rejection of colonial self-alienation among Antilleans (similarity 0.81)
• Western definitions of Africans served domination rather than understanding. (similarity 0.81)
• The Africa of diaspora memory differs sharply from the African present (similarity 0.81)
• Fanon’s analytic aim is freeing blacks from colonial-produced complexes (similarity 0.79)
• The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization (similarity 0.79)
• Shared African culture, not tribal origin, is what resisted European dehumanization (similarity 0.79)
• The coloniality concept erases African agency by treating all colonizers alike. (similarity 0.79)
• The Negro in Europe is made inferior, not self-made inferior (similarity 0.79)
• Europeans hold a fixed, condescending concept of the Negro (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial accusations of indolence and insolence were codes for racial unfitness. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial racial thinking dehumanized Africans as they assimilated colonial culture (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 474
• The Africa of diaspora memory differs sharply from the African present #qualifies (0.75)
• Negritude affirmed diasporic black solidarity across colonial and postcolonial geographies #exemplifies (0.70) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 344