Frantz Fanon. The prophet scorned. Fifty years after his death, this theorist of revolution still echoes sentiments pertinent today but whether they are relevant in an era of post-modernism is open to question…
…Fanon’s third theme is the betrayal of the masses by the native middle-class, which replaces the colonial power only to caricature it. The corruption of the nationalist bourgeoisie was something he had observed at first hand as roving ambassador for the FLN, Algeria, in black Africa. The bourgeois caste, he says, annexes for its own profit the wealth of the country. “To them, nationalization quite simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period.”
— He writes that this structural reality gives rise to an “imperialism in psychology,” one that effectively excludes “the poor, the dispossessed, the culturally different.” Mirroring critiques made by German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, Bulhan notes that modern psychology functions to emphasize social control and adjustment of individuals to extant social conditions rather than social change aimed at overturning the very institutions that perpetuate human alienation, madness, and oppression: colonialism, racism, capitalism, and the State, to name a few examples. Mainstream psychology can thus at best serve as little more than a “bandaging operation” to contain the unassimilated.—Read More:http://intlibecosoc.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/frantz-fanon-and-the-psychology-of-oppression/
After European colonialism came internal colonialism. Its as if Veblen’s hierarchy and socially stratified pecking order as base impulse will repeat the template by transforming itself within new contexts, replicating the dynamic in spite of what hoary socialist rhetoric may declare. Independence is not enough, Fanon warns: after the liberation of the territory must come the socialist revolution. But here again, history shows that the socialist revolution must come simultaneously with the liberation struggle, as it did in China, Yugoslavia, and Algeria, or not at all. In African countries, where the nationalist bourgeoisie has taken power, it has held it. ( to be continued)…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)… Well, you put Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Azar Nafisi, Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, et al together on one side and Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Theodore Adorno on the other and you can pretty much imagine what “topics, issues and literatures” I address! The principal topic is the role of comprador intellectuals in the ideological formations of a globalized imperialism — both in its North American and Western European contexts. The main issue is the rise of a group of exilic intellectuals who have no emotive connection to any home or moral principle by which they do what they do. They are aye-sayers to power, as Edward Said used to categorize them, or borrowing from Malcolm X, “House Muslims,” as I call them. They have immigrated into the bosom of power. They have realized that the fastest way to cut corners and get successful and prominent is to tell the dominant imperial power something or another about their “native” culture that facilities their subjugation. They are native disinformers. They don’t tell their employers what they need to know, but what they want to hear. Read More:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2369/new-texts-out-now_hamid-dabashi-brown-skin-white-m
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