Frantz Fanon, Alienation, and the Psychology of the Oppressed (original) (raw)

The details in the above excerpt sets the context of this treatise, as it will centralize its focus on Frantz Fanon and his interpretive psychoanalysis on the vitality of Alienation. Fanon transparently show how pervasively dangerous alienation can be among the colonized populace. Historically, the compartmentalization of the colonial world has been systemically divided into a dichotomous milieu, befittingly placing one group superior over another. As a socially constructed phenomenon within the colonial world, alienation creates an undying paradigmatic Apartheid-based realism. In a similar vein, "apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world…the world of the dominator, guarded by the army and the police." 2 Fanon embarked on a mission to de-pathologize the Third World peoples whom were trapped in this world of colonialism, while simultaneously, attempting to politicize those whom were oppressed. In this respect, Fanon's rationality of counter-memory enhanced his capacity to think critically and dialectically formulated a commitment, dedication, and responsibility to facilitate dialogue, discourse, and spaces to build capacities to revolutionize the psyche of the "wretched of the earth." According to Judith Butler's book Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon, "Fanon's work gives the European man a chance to know himself, and so to engage in that pursuit of self-knowledge, based upon an examination of his shared practices, that is proper to the philosophical foundations of human life." 3 In other words, Fanon wants the European colonizer, the European elite, to see his complicity in systemic violence inflicted upon the colonized.