From the Analytic to the Post-Colonial

Abstract

One could say Frantz Fanon (1952) started a revolution in the intellectual effort to understand and conceptualize the colonial condition. He introduced psychoanalysis into this field by discussing the psychic dynamics that the colonial condition creates, a dynamics which always re-produces the identities of oppressor/oppressed. Over and beyond the expressive power of his writing, what impresses me in Fanon’s work is the depth of his understanding of the dialectic of identification and the way taking a certain social position — that of either oppressor or oppressed — issues in an identificatory constellation from which the individual cannot extricate her or himself without an ongoing conscious effort — a determined effort, we may say. As part of this enterprise, Fanon succeeded — better, I believe, than the empirical research — to show the black person’s identification with the white person, and, by extension, the implicit identification of the oppressed with the oppressing outgroup (Duckitt, 2006). Fanon also described the role of visibility in the perception of a person as Other. Here, external difference does not remain external only and becomes an incessant reminder of the other’s alterity. In that sense, the visual presence of the mark of alterity obliterates the difference between other and Other.