Frantz Fanon as Democratic Thinker
Frantz Fanon and Black Conscousness in Azania
Frantz Fanon: The Marx of the Third World
Frantz Fanon and the African Political Class
Frantz Fanon and the African Revolution
Frantz Fanon and the Lumpenproletariat
Rescuing Fanon from his Critics
Some Aspects of the Political Philosophy of Frantz Fanon
Race Nation: Ideology in the Thought of Frantz Fanon
Machiavelli and Fanon: Ethics, Violence, and Action
Mapping the Unconscious: Racism and the Oedipal Family
Martin and Malcolm on Nonviolence and Violence
Ndebele, Fanon, Agency, and Irony
Negritude and Black Cultural Nationalism
Orientalism: A Black Perspective
Primitive Accumulation and Traditional Social Relations on the Nineteenth Century Gold Coast
The Evolution of the Attitude of Malcolm X Towards Whites
The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo
W.E.B. DuBois: A Perspective on the Basis of His Thought
Intersecting Oppressions (Patricia Hill Collins)
The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Foreward by Cornel West)
Seeing the Light: Visionary Feminism (bell hooks)
The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism
-
"The native, as a political identity, was a creation of the colonial state."
-
-
"Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it."Chinua Achebe in response to Ngugi Wa’Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind (via browngirlinorange)
-
"
It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.
If these “facts” were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the “worlding” of what is now called “the Third World.” To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.
It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an information-retrieval approach to “Third World” literature which often employs a deliberately “nontheoretical” methodology with self-conscious rectitude.
"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Three Women’s Texts and Critique of Imperialism (via heteroglossia) -
"The grimmest examples of germs’ role in history come from the European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus’s voyage of 1492. Numerous as were the Native American victims of the murderous Spanish conquistadores, they were far outnumbered by the victims of murderous Spanish microbes."Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
-
Indigenous peoples and why you shouldn’t say shaman, stone age people or Indian chief
Next time you read an article about indigenous people, pay attention to the language used to describe indigenous cultures. I am not merely talking about articles that refer to indigenous cultures as being Palaeolithic or as being Stone Age cultures (yes, two words denoting the same thing, the first pretends to be scientific, and the second has strong links to the use of the word primitive, both are wrong), but rather to the way in which we talk of native communities, and the way they are structured.
Nowadays nobody in their right mind would refer to a Native American woman as a squaw without having a number of fairly upset people after them, yet, to denote the president of a Native American community as a chief is somehow right. A Native American traditional doctor is not a doctor, he is somehow ‘just’ a shaman, and this despite the fact that shamans never existed in the Americas, but rather in Siberia.
And then there’s the question of referring to an entire indigenous community - depending on where said group of people lives, one will hear terms such as tribe or nation, where the former still has colonial undertones, and the later is more appropriate. Yet, some NGO:s working with indigenous people have started to use the term tribal peoples as a way to distinguish between different indigenous communities; where indigenous has a broader meaning, tribal refers mainly to societies that still follow traditional rules, and who are largely uninfluenced by Western communities. The problem here is that these NGO:s realise the bad in using a colonial term - colonial in that you wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if someone talked about the Yanomami tribe of the Amazon rain forest, but you’d wonder if someone suddenly started to talk about the Soho tribe of London). Western societies and communities are never tribes, whereas indigenous communities in what used to be the colonies somehow lack the right to refer to themselves as communities. By referring to the president of an indigenous community as a chief, and by denoting the doctor as a shaman, the indigenous community is somehow rendered less of a civilisation than our own. By using language, something as simple as words, we promote differences that don’t exist in the first place, and by referring to an indigenous community as Palaeolithic we reinforce the belief of a society that is based on different stages, and who will always, in the end, become a Western society, as “we”, the Westerners, are more evolved, and civilised than “them”.
All bollocks of course, but few people realise how much damage these words can make.
And the argument that “they call themselves these things” doesn’t hold up in court, unless you yourself is part of a specific community you are disqualified from using offensive terms to describe said community. In other words, you don’t refer to an Afro-American as a n****r or a homosexual person as a fag without it being offensive, consequently a traditional doctor isn’t a shaman - (though if you want to, use the word used by the group in their native language, e.g. waphíya wičháša in Lakota, hatałii in Navajo, sangoma in Zulu, or noaiddi if you’re speaking Saami) .
-
"Race theory, ideas about primitive origins and primitive classifications, modern decadence, the progress of civilisation, the destiny of the white (or Aryan) races, the need for colonial territories - all these were elements in the peculiar amalgam of science, politics and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was always to raise Europe or European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind. There was general agreement too that, according to a strangely transformed variety of Darwinism sanctioned by Darwin himself, the modern Orientals were degraded remnants of a former greatness; the ancient, or “classical,” civilisations of the Orient were perceivable through the disorders of present decadence, but only (a) because a white specialist with highly refined scientific techniques could do the sifting and reconstructing, and (b) because a vocabulary of seeping generalities (the Semites, the Aryans, the Orientals) referred not to a set of fictions but rather to a whole array of seemingly objective and agreed-upon distinctions…It was assumed that if languages were as distinct from each other as the linguists said they were, then too the language users - their minds, cultures, potentials, and even their bodies - were different in similar ways…The point to be emphasized is that this truth about the distinctive differences between races, civilisations, and languages was (or pretended to be) radical and ineradicable…it set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, and civilisations were constructed; it forced vision away from common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organisation, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins."
- Edward Said, Orientalism.
Reading this book changes your life, pretty much.And it’s a shame when I see so many of these created boundaries upheld within and between POC communities too.
(via itsbeenablast)
-
Atahualpa was the last Sapa Inca or sovereign emperor of the Tahuantinsuyu, or the Inca Empire
-
Passage from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
-
“This is where my family is and I won’t give up my lands. Where will I go if they take my lands?”
Imagine a land of 14 million hectares, bigger than Switzerland and Austria combined. Populated by millions of farming families that together practice shifting cultivation. Now imagine a foreign consultant saying that all of these are abandoned lands. Another foreign company saying it will come to farm all of it. Yet another foreign company saying it will ship everything produced out of there. And a president agreeing to all of this, selling this 14 million hectares for a dollar per hectare. Can’t be true? It’s happening in a part of Mozambique.
via farmlandgrab.org
learn more at http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4626-brazilian-megaproject-in-mozambique-set-to-displace-millions-of-peasants
