The colonial psychopathology of slavish identification with power becomes career opportunism in the metropole.
Evidence
The principal function of these theories—from Fanon to Said and on to Cesaire, Memmi, and Nandy—has been to liberate the colonized mind from the trap of that slavish identification with power. One sees much of that slavish disposition in the native informer, but on the imperial home front, where consensus is being manufactured, that psychopathology has now transformed into career opportunism. Native informers have immersed themselves in the white-identified culture and they now serve it out of pure careerism. Good native informers are paid well. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 115
Categorization
- APHORISMS: The compressed diagnosis—a psychoanalytic pathology converted into market opportunism—functions almost as a cautionary life lesson about the lure of rewarded self-demonization.