Colonial apparatuses manufacture inferiority in the colonized, leading them to serve colonial agency.

Evidence

In his pioneering 1952 study of the relationship between racism and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), Frantz Fanon relied heavily on psychoanalytic theory to understand the traumatic sense of inferiority that overtakes those who fall prey to the racist assumptions of the supremacist forces dominating their homelands. Fanon conducted his study during the French occupation of Algeria, in the twilight of European colonialism; his principal objective was to see through the desubjection that colonized people experienced—the process by which normatively divided, self-alienated black subjects internalized their anger and redirected it against themselves. The colonial apparatus, Fanon believed, successfully manufactures a profound sense of inferiority in the colonized subjects that leads them—actively or passively, consciously or subconsciously—to identify with and seek to serve the colonial agency. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 112

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Fanon’s concept of desubjection: how colonized subjects internalize anger and redirect it against themselves.

Related

• The colonized’s inferiority is created by the racist, not innate (similarity 0.81)
• Fanon’s method seeks the meaning of racist phenomena, not their mere collection. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism occupies the individual’s psyche, not merely the territory (similarity 0.80)
• The racist creates the inferiority of the colonized. (similarity 0.79)
• Fanon treats colonized subjects as historical agents, not mere projections (similarity 0.79)
• Fanon argues colonial subjects show psychotic-adjacent symptoms. (similarity 0.79)
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance (similarity 0.79)
• The colonizer is himself a victim of the colonial system he organizes (similarity 0.79)
• Colonized peoples acquire inferiority complexes through suppression of local culture (similarity 0.79)
• The colonizer is simultaneously the organizer and victim of the colonial system. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial trauma produces a feeling of nonexistence, not mere inferiority (similarity 0.79)
• Fanon’s closeness to the alienated barred him from scientific objectivity (similarity 0.79)
• Educated colonial subjects doing well assimilating get punished with inferiority when rejected (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial domination is undone first in the colonized subject’s inner life (similarity 0.78)