Fanon and Said: Postcolonial Political Thought

Fanon: The Psychology of Colonization

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinican psychiatrist who fought on the side of Algerian liberation. His works “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952) and “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961) are key texts of postcolonial thought.

“Black Skin, White Masks”: Colonization creates psychological trauma in the colonized. The Black person internalizes white standards of beauty, values, and language—and begins to see himself through the eyes of the colonizer. This is a pathological “splitting”: to be Black and to strive for whiteness. Decolonization requires not only political independence, but psychological liberation.

“The Wretched of the Earth”: Fanon justified violence in the liberation struggle—not as a norm, but as psychotherapy for colonized peoples who have internalized their own inferiority. This is Fanon’s most controversial argument: Sartre supported him in the preface, but most critics did not.

Said: Orientalism as Knowledge-Power

Edward Said (“Orientalism”, 1978) applied Foucault’s conception of knowledge-power to relations between the West and the “East”. Orientalism is not a description of the “East”, but a discourse that creates the “East” as a construct: exotic, unchanging, irrational, sexualized, and in need of Western governance.

This knowledge serves power: the “East” is constructed in such a way as to justify Western control. Colonial knowledge is not neutral science, but a political tool. Academic studies, museum collections, newspaper narratives—all participate in the production of “Orientalism”.

Critics of Said: he creates a mirrored simplification (a monolithic “West”), ignores the complexity and heterogeneity of academic disciplines, and disregards “Orientalism” in non-Western discourses.

Question for reflection: Said showed how knowledge about “others” is constructed to serve power. How does your field construct images of clients, consumers, “target audiences”? Who is excluded from this construction?