Colonial identity formation proceeds through refusal of the dominant cultural models on offer.

Evidence

Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 556 (#expands, via linked claim)

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil. What was an undifferentiated element in a homogeneous whole acquires a taboo character, and the attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Frantz Fanon tells how modern medical techniques, when they were brought in by imperialism, were resisted and rejected by the Algerian population—“ignorant, obstinate, backward” according to the cultured imperialists who were baffled by this rejection. But these same techniques were accepted with dizzying haste when the revolution adopted them. Culture, like truth, is concrete. And for the masses the most elevated form of culture, that is to say, of progress, is to resist imperialist domination and penetration, although this might come wrapped up in valid forms of “culture” or “civilization.” The Algerians kept their women behind veils, rejected the doctors, would not accept the radio. But they were not backward. In their way, they were defending civilization as well as they were able. Civilization, for them, meant first of all to resist imperialism and second to cast it into the sea at whatever cost. And they were right. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 24 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial subjects resist the amputation of their identity yet find agency impossible — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 556; The FLN deliberately refused to showcase European participants to avoid colonial-style tokenism; The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165 (+3 more)

Related

• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial subjects resist the amputation of their identity yet find agency impossible (similarity 0.85)
• Colonized people reject the occupier’s values even when objectively worth choosing (similarity 0.85)
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance (similarity 0.83)
• Colonized populations reject imperial medicine not from ignorance but as political resistance. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial domination itself, not tradition, shapes native resistance to medicine (similarity 0.81)
• Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial attacks on a cultural practice determine where resistance crystallizes (similarity 0.81)
• Resistance itself transforms the colonized subject so that colonial rule becomes unmaintainable (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial conditions make life an incomplete, ever-menaced death (similarity 0.81)
• Algerians rejected colonial medicine not from ignorance but as resistance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonized subjects reconstruct their identity by hand after it is shattered (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism occupies the individual’s psyche, not merely the territory (similarity 0.80)
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial subjects resist the amputation of their identity yet find agency impossible #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 556
• The FLN deliberately refused to showcase European participants to avoid colonial-style tokenism #exemplifies (0.80)
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance #exemplifies (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165
• Colonized populations reject imperial medicine not from ignorance but as political resistance. #exemplifies (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 24
• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry #expands (0.75)
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. #exemplifies (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 396