good morning.
going to try and make some progress on The Wretched of the Earth
managed to finish reading the chapter titled "On Violence"
idk what about it but I find the writing hard to parse sentence to sentence, feels like the writing shifts ideas and concepts abruptly
I also started on Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall and the writing there is much easier to understand (and more direct)
so I think I'll finish this first
going back to the Fanon text, "On Violence" as far as I can understand what I've read today is about the use of violence against colonialism but its also talking about redistribution of wealth and reparations
the end of the chapter talks about what happens when colonial powers withdraw and what it means to rebuild a country ravaged by colonialism
also the concept of the Manichaean world which Fanon apparently talks about in his text Black Skin, White Masks (I haven't read that one though I am aware of it)
"The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil."
that paragraph goes on to explain the dehumanization process inherent to colonization - "[..] dehumanizes the colonial subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal."
okay maybe I'm understanding the Fanon text a bit better than I immediately thought
its still hard to grasp at in the moment of reading though
there is also the mention that just Marxist analysis is not sufficient to "addressing the colonial issue", he says it needs to be "slightly stretched"
""It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the "ruling class." The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, "the others.""
I don't really have a grasp on Marxist theory because I haven't read it but if I'm understanding right what Fanon is saying here is that class is not the most important aspect that defines the colonizer but it is part of it
@packetcat this is picked up upon by later Marxist thinkers as well; for example Mao distinguishes between colonialist interests and those of the “national bourgeoisie”, explicitly saying that an alliance between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie is necessary initially to overthrow colonialism
however you can’t ignore class either, because what you see is that as colonial power weakens, the national bourgeoisie will flip-flop and ally with the colonizers in order to remain in power
