Native informers sell wars domestically while collaborators provide battlefield intelligence.
Evidence
The most significant difference between Fanon and Said’s understanding of the term and my own is that I have moved my theoretical frame of reference from the colonies to the heart of the empire. The work of these native informers—for example, Rushdie’s and Warraq’s essays, Hirsi Ali’s and Nafisi’s memoirs—is principally for American and European readers, and thus it is written in English (Their Arabic and/or Persian translations become quite curious oddities). For this reason, I make a specific distinction between the figure of the native informer and that of the collaborator. The latter tells the conquering power what it needs to know in order to better dominate, while the former tells it what it wants to hear in order to better sell its wars, particularly to its domestic audience. The collaborator provides factual and strategic knowledge, the native informer provides emotive vistas and ideological slants with which to criminalize any mode of resistance to domination. Ephialtes of Trachis, the grotesquely degenerate Greek who reportedly helped the Persian army in the battle of Thermopylae, is the model of the collaborator: he showed the Persians a hidden road to the back of the Spartan army. Ajami and Nafisi, in contrast, are not of value on the actual battlefield. They are useful to the empire within the suburban, SUV-swollen comfort of the imperial home front in Fairfax and Chevy Chase, where they support the belligerent powers through the liberating languages of human rights and women’s rights. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 125
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the precise boundary between native informer and collaborator — factual knowledge vs. emotive, ideological slant for domestic audiences.
- XREF: The collaborator/informer distinction echoes and extends the informant categories in social anthropology and in Fanon’s own writings on colonial psychiatry.