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  • Essay / The impact of French colonial expansion on Frantz Fanon

    Passion for post-colonialism and colonial injustice/ Frantz Fanon's passion for post-colonialism was sparked by the unjust treatment of French soldiers towards the people of Martinique where they raped and sexually harassed women. These disturbing events caused Fanon to despise French rule. The colonialist had such influence that physically, psychologically and culturally, the colonized were dominated. Another reason for Fanon's strong resistance to postcolonialism was that during his tenure as a psychiatrist in Algeria, the Algerian revolution broke out where Algerians sought independence from France. His testimony to victims tortured in hospitals pushed him to act. He severed all ties with France and joined the revolutionary cause by declaring himself a member of the revolutionary army. He then became ambassador of the Algerian movement in Ghana. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay As a colonized individual, he followed what was expected of him as an individual fully integrated into the colonialist system . He received a quality French education, served in the French army during World War II, married a French woman, and worked for the French government as a psychiatrist. Therefore, as WEB Du Bois theorized, he had a sense of double consciousness. This double consciousness is the origin of his most famous book, Black Face, White Masks. The colonized black man must struggle against a social structure according to white and colonial norms and mores, while trying to accept his unique indigenous identity. This contradictory dichotomy inherent to colonialism could have been generated and reinforced by his education since he was raised by mulatto parents: his mother has European blood while his father was Afro-Martinique. Inspired by his Martinican teacher, Aimé Césaire, Fanon trained in colonial studies and embraced the nascent cultural and literary movement, Négritude, a genre that rejected French colonial rule and at the same time identified with African culture specific to the African diaspora.Frantz Fanon stands out from the body of postcolonial critics since he applied psychology and psychiatry to colonial, imperialist and colonized thought and attitude; we can therefore read him as a psychoanalyst critic. He incorporated the theories of psychoanalytic critics such as Carl Jung's collective consciousness, collective cartharsis, and Sigimund Freud's id, ego, and superego to support his position on the black man's consciousness perverted from childhood to because of his contact with the white world. Linguistically, Fanon agrees that language can be used as a tool or weapon in the mouths of colonized peoples to resist conformity and forge an identity. The language of the colonist is learned and spoken by the colonized, resulting in a partial erosion of identity since the subject speaks the language of his oppressor. As a result of perceiving the world expressed solely in terms of his colonist, the colonized black man comes to undermine his race, desiring to be like his colonist. Fanon also decried the association of blackness with evil, sin, vice, and whiteness with good, purity, light, etc. Therefore, Fanon's goal was to deconstruct the binary of color, quality, and race established by the settlers where the white settler is at the center. and the black colonized are on the margins. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article now from our expert writers. Get a Custom Essay The Disappearance of Frantz.