Fanons The Wretched Of The Earth and Foucaults Discipline and Punish :: Wretched Of The Earth Essays

FanonsThe miserable Of The Earth andFoucaults illuminate and Punish Fanons book, The offensive Of The Earth like Foucaults Discipline and Punish question the basic assumptions that underlie society. Both books writers come from immensely different perspectives and this shapes what both authors see as the technologies that keep the populace in line. Foucault coming out of the French intellectual class sees technologies as prisons, family, genial institutions, and other institutions and cultural traits of French society. In contrast Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) born in Martinique into a lower middle class family of mixed race argument and receiving a conventional colonial education sees the technologies of maintain as macrocosm the white colonists of the third macrocosm. Fanon at first was a assimilationist thinking colonists and colonised should try to build a future together. But quickly Fanons assimilationist illusions were washed-up by the gaze of metropolitan racism both in F rance and in the colonized world. He responded to the shattering of his neo-colonial identity, his white mask, with his first book, Black Skin, washcloth Mask, written in 1952 at the age of twenty-s point and originally title An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks. Fanon defined the colonial relationship as one of the non designation of the colonizeds humanity, his subjecthood, by the colonizer in order to justify his exploitation. Fanons next novel, The Wretched Of The Earth views the colonized world from the perspective of the colonized. Like Foucaults questioning of a disciplinary society Fanon questions the basic assumptions of colonialism. He questions whether violence is a play that should be employed to eliminate colonialism. He questions whether native intellectuals who fool espouse western methods of thought and urge slow decolonization are in fact part of the same technology of control that the white world employs to exploit the colonized. He questions whether the c olonized world should copy the west or develop a whole new set of values and ideas. In all these questionings of basic assumptions of colonialism Fanon exposes the methods of control the white world uses to hold humble the colonies. Fanon calls for a radical break with colonial culture, rejecting a hypocritical European humanism for a pure revolutionary consciousness. He exalts violence as a necessary pre-condition for this rupture. Fanon supported the most extreme wing of the FLN, even opposing a negotiated transition to power. His book though sees the relationship and methods of control in a simplistic light he classifies whites, and native intellectuals who have adopted western values and tactics as enemies.