On Fanon

'For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence' 

In his analysis of colonialism and violence, Fanon drew from a diverse range of Western intellectual sources from Marx to Freud. His view of the settle-native dyad owes much however to Hegel's master-slave dialectic, looking at the many subtle ways in which racism and exploitation worked on the colonised and how he/she internalised the Western standards of value. The colonial world being a Manichean one, Fanon argued that the imposition of this military, political, economic, cultural and psychological subjugation of one people to another was only possible through violence. The violence in the ordering of the colonial world leads to separation and difference, and it is here that the settler-native dynamic comes into play.

Colonialism is a system of domination that usually involves the transfer of population from the metropole to the colony. According to Fanon, these 'settlers' owe the fact of their very existence, their property (the natives) to the colonial system, for there would be no native without settler. Colonization influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally: the native is declared insensible to ethics, (s)he represents not only the absence but the negation of values in the purest Orientalist way. The colonial world is divided in this way into compartments, most evident through the geographical layout of the colonial sphere. The destruction brought about by colonialism created the native and through dispossession promotes her/his envy of the privileges and better lives of the colonizers. The settler-native dialectic is thus fully established when the native admits loudly and intelligible the supremacy of the white man's values, akin to how Foucault describes the operation of disciplinary power in society. By internalizing his/her oppression, the colonized native normalizes attitudes of desire and debasement towards Europe, white people and white culture in general, and a sense of no alternative predominates: colonialism is seen by the colonized natives as an all-encompassing system, limiting the imagination. The belief in fatality leads to avoidance of the realities of colonialism by the native, who manifests her aggressiveness against her own people instead. This alienation from each other rests on a false consciousness that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues, removing all blame from the oppressors, that is the settler. The settler-native dynamic thus illustrates the limits of Marxism when applied to colonial contexts: race has to be considered together with class in the creation of the settler-native dialectic.

But Fanon argues that the native knows (s)he is not an animal, and that it is precisely at this moment of recognition of their own humanity that she begins to sharpen the weapons with which she will secure victory. For Fanon, the settler-state apparatus, a structure of domination predicated on ongoing dispossession, is incapable of producing liberatory effects, and thus recognition by the native of her humanity does not lead to automatic freedom and dignity but rather opens the field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained and which can only be broken through violence. Fanon is aware that when delegated exchanges of recognition occur in real-world contexts of domination, the terms of accommodation usually end up being determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship. This is the structural problem of colonial recognition, the perpetuation of the essential qualities of the West which the native intellectual is always in danger of subscribing to.


Against this liberalized appropriation of Hegel (which continues to inform some contemporary identity politics), Coulthard has drawn from Fanon and has proposed a resurgent politics of recognition less oriented around attaining legal/political recognition (what Marx would call 'political emancipation') and more about indigenous peoples empowering themselves through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning ('human emancipation' in a Marxist framework). The aim is to prefigure radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power through self-affirmative cultural practices that go hand in hand with the generative material conditions that so often work to foreclose the realization of self-determination in the lives of ordinary citizens. This framework recognizes those 'glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order that indigenous cultural can provide.' It also seems a better answer to decolonization and the dismantling of the native-settler dialectic than the emancipatory violence advocated by Fanon, who seems to see decolonization as a kind of 'reverse colonization:' the creation of a tabula rasa with the 'social structure being changed from the bottom up.' This is not to deny the need for revolutionary strategies but is a call to recognize the nuances of (de)colonization and the difficulties in completely ridding oneself of one of the oldest practices of domination. This is perhaps what Fanon himself dreamt of, an identity founded independently of the white order, a truly radical anti-racist humanism with neither white supremacism, not black reactionary superiority: the end of the Manichean worldview.