Nervous Conditions by Jack Moore

NERVOUS CONDITIONS UNMASKING IDENITITY

Edited by

JACK MOORE PUBLISHED BY McGILL UNIVERSITY PRESS MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC

PREFACE 12 REFERENCES 104 COLOPHON 107

Black Skin/ White Masks

The Wretched of the Earth

The Danger of a Single Story

Frantz Fanon

Jean Paul Sartre

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Frantz Fanon (b.1925 – d.1961) was a Martiniquais psychologist and academic known for his influential writings on postcolonialism and black identity. His writings have been credited as one of the prevalent founding texts of the Black Panther movement, as well as the Algerian liberation from France.

Jean Paul Sartre (b.1905–1980) was a French philosopher who was a dominant voice in the existentialist movement. In his introduction to the Martiniquais philosopher Frantz Fanon’s influential book The Wretched of the Earth, he coins the postcolonial phenomonon known as “the nervous condition.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b.1977) is a Nigerian writer, novelist, and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. Her writings touch on contemporary Nigerian identities, feminism and the colonial legacy that informs both subjects. This essay was initially given as talk at a TEDx event in Cambridge, England.

The Opiate of the Colonizer

The Prison as Colonization

Decolonizing Fashion

Sylvester Johnson

Angela Y Davis

Alice Pfeiffer

Sylvester Johnson (b.1970) is the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, Sylvester A. Johnson is a nationally recognized humanities scholar specializing in the study of race, religion, and technology. His writing is concerned with the sociological study of African American culture.

Angela Y Davis (b.1944) is an American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist in the 1960s working with the Communist Party USA, of which she was a member until 1991, and was briefly involved in the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement.

Alice Pfeiffer (b.1980) is a French writer and journalist based in Paris and London. She has written for Le Monde, The Guardian, and i-D Magazine. She writes mainly about the cultural influence of the fashion industry and aesthetic trends on global cultural movements.

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P R EFA C E Jack Moore

Our lives are not our own. We are controlled by the past lives lived before us and the way that those lives shaped the world we were born into. Racism, sexism, colorism, homophobia, all of those do not die and regenerate with each generation. The seeds from which these prejudices grew from began in time immemorial and have taken root in every person born from there on after. Each generation has shaped and contributed to such hatred. None are exempt from it. Never before have we as a culture and society questioned the way our history governs us. People question how such hatred and division could have come out of nowhere and the answer is that it was there all along. We just never thought to question the nature of our reality and the histories of violence that created it. Though we live in a time divorced from the overt displays of slavery and colonialism those atrocities are what have created the global culture that we currently live in. On the topic of colonialism and its aftermath, a field of academia called post-colonialism, French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre called the condition of the native a “nervous condition.” He came to this conclusion by studying the power that the colonizer has on the colonized person, which drives them to this condition, a sort of psychosis. He describes it as when the colonizer has demonized the culture of the native and made implicit that the only way the native can be deemed a member of the colonized reality is by assimilating to the colonizer’s culture and, not only casting off the native culture, but despising it and seeing it as lesser than that of the colonizer. Although in all cases this is an impossible thing to ask of the native, because it is impossible for them to completely cast off their inherent identities and assimilate into the one imposed on them. This state of existing between the unattainable goal of the colonizer and despising one’s native identity is the “nervous condition” that Sartre is describing. The “nervous condition” is an oft-returned to subject in postcolonial studies. It seeks to investigate how colonized persons faced the overt violence of forced “assimilation” and the continued covert violence that people face in post-colonial societies. The psychologist and colonial scholar Frantz Fanon contextualized this in his essay “Black Skin, White Masks.” There he describes the ways that persons who either lived or have lived

under colonial rule must adapt their identities to please the colonizer, which he says at its root is the impossible expectation to aspire to whiteness. The epic scope of the “the nervous condition” is why this book takes it as it’s title. With identity politics becoming the dominant discourse in the global zeitgeist The epic scope of the “the nervous condition” is why this book takes it as it’s title. With identity politics becoming the dominant discourse in the global cultural zeitgeist, and as neo-Fascisism has begun to take hold of global powers threatening the livelihood of persons of all different backgrounds the necessity of reclaiming identity has never been more prescient. The legacy of colonialism lives on in the expectation that those from the colonized world to adhere to a the “acceptable” form of participation in the global culture. This perception continues despite the lack of recognition that these countries, despite a western colonial presence, were and are not destined to Western ideals. The insidious presence of white supremacy across the globe has historically forced those outside its boundaries into the eternal predicament of assimilate or die. This demand has not been relegated to skin color, but sexual orientation, gender expression, language. As a result the postcolonial subject is relegated to wearing mask. That mask has been handed down from generations before from the colonizer and what was expected of the native, to be an acceptable other. To this day these masks are preserved in order to continue surviving in what is deemed acceptable society. The socio-political changes that have rocked the world in recent years have made people question these masks on an unprecedented level. At a time when everything is in flux, the entire notion of being an obedient native is being rebuked, and there is global struggle to find what belies the masks that have become so ingrained in cultural, and ethnic identities that to remove the mask is to remove the known identity altogether. What is explored in this book is the history of these masks and the contemporaneous methods by which we explore how to remove them, and reclaim stolen and forgotten identities.

BL A C K SK I N, W H I T E M A SK S Frantz Fanon

From whatever direction one approaches the analysis of abnormal psychogenic conditions, one very soon finds oneself in the presence of the following phenomenon: The whole picture of the neurosis, as well as all its symptoms, emerges as under the influence of some final goal, indeed as projections of this goal. Therefore one can ascribe the character of a formative cause to this final goal, the quality of a principle of orientation, of arrangement, of coordination. Try to understand the “meaning” and the direction of unhealthy manifestations, and you will immediately come face to face with a chaotic throng of tendencies, of impulses, of weaknesses and of anomalies, bound to discourage some and to arouse in others the rash resolve to penetrate the shadows at all costs, even at the risk of fi nding in the end that nothing has been gained, or that what has been gained is illusory. If, on the other hand, one accepts the hypothesis of a fi nal goal or of a causal finality, one sees the shadows dissolve at once and we can read the soul of the patient like the pages of a book. It is on the basis of similar theoretical positions that, in general, the most stupendous frauds of our period are constructed. Let us apply Adler’s individual psychology to the Antilleans. The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison: that is, he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the egoideal. Whenever he comes into contact with someone else, the question of value, of merit, arises. The Antilleans have no inherent values of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of The Other. The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respectable than I. Every position of one’s own, every effort at security, is based on relations of dependence, with the diminution of the other. It is the wreckage of what surrounds me that provides the foundation for my virility. I should like to suggest an experiment to any Martinican who reads this book: Find the most “comparative” street in Fort-de-France. Rue Schoelcher, rue Victor-Hugo—certainly not rue FrançoisArago. The Martinican who agrees to make this experiment will share my opinion precisely insofar as he can objectively endure seeing himself stripped naked. An Antillean who meets an acquaintance for the first time after five or six years’ absence greets him with aggression. This is because in the past each had axed position. Now the inferior thinks that

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

he has acquired worth . . . and the superior is determined to conserve the old hierarchy. “You haven’t changed a bit . . . still as stupid as ever.” I have known some, physicians and dentists, who have gone on filling their heads with mistakes in judgment made fifteen years before. It is not so much conceptual errors as “Creolisms” with which the dangerous man is belabored. He was put in his place once and for all: nothing to be done about it. The Antillean is characterized by his desire to dominate the other. His line of orientation runs through the other. It is always a question of the subject; one never even thinks of the object. I try to read admiration in the eyes of the other, and if, unluckily, those eyes show me an unpleasant reflection, I find that mirror flawed: Unquestionably that other one is a fool. I do not try to be naked in the sight of the object. The object is denied in terms of individuality and liberty. The object is an instrument. It should enable me to realize my subjective security. The Other comes on to the stage only in order to furnish it. I am the Hero. Applaud or condemn, it makes no difference to me, I am the center of attention. If the other seeks to make me uneasy with his wish to have value (his fiction), I simply banish him without a trial. He ceases to exist. I don’t want to hear about that fellow. I do not wish to experience the impact of the object. Contact with the object means conflict. I am Narcissus, and what I want to see in the eyes of others is a reflection that pleases me. Therefore, in any given group (environment) in Martinique, one finds the man on top, the court that surrounds him, the in-betweens (who are waiting for something better), and the losers. These last are slaughtered without mercy. One can imagine the temperature that prevails in that jungle. There is no way out of it. Me, nothing but me. The Martinicans are greedy for security. They want to compel the acceptance of their fi ction. They want to be recognized in their quest for manhood. They want to make an appearance. Each one of them is an isolated, sterile, salient atom with sharply defi ned rights of passage, each one of them is. Each one of them wants to be, to emerge. Everything that an Antillean does is done for The Other. Not because The Other is the ultimate objective of his action in the sense of communication between people that Adler describes, but, more primitively, because it is The Other who corroborates him in his search for self-validation that he is seeking through the colonial encounter and contact.

The phrase I Am A Man! has been a rallying cry for movements for racial equality from the time of slavery abolitionism in Britain and America to the Memphis Sanitation strike of 1968. In Memphis the large and simple typography was especially effective in how readable it was on the low resolution, black and white TVs at the time.

In April of 1937 two black men were indicted in the killing of a white storekeeper in Missouri. Before the trial the two men were taken from police custody by a mob of 500 people who chained them to a tree, whipped them, and gouged out their eyes with ice picks and then burned alive. A passing black man was pulled in by the mob and lynched after several people claimed he was an accomplice.

Now that we have marked out the Adlerian line of orientation of the Antillean, our task is to look for its source. Here the difficulties begin. In effect, Adler has created a psychology of the individual. We have just seen that the feeling of inferiority is an Antillean characteristic. It is not just this or that Antillean who embodies the neurotic formation, but all Antilleans. Antillean society is a neurotic society, a society of “comparison.” Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in the “soul” of the individual but rather in that of the environment. The Martinican is and is not a neurotic. If we were strict in applying the conclusions of the Adlerian school, we should say that the Negro is seeking to protest against the inferiority that he feels historically. Since in all periods the Negro has been an inferior, he attempts to react with a superiority complex. And this is indeed what comes out of Brachfeld’s book about the matter. The Antillean comparison is surmounted by a third term: Its governing fiction is not personal but social. The Martinican is a man crucified. The environment that has shaped him (but that he has not shaped) has horribly drawn and quartered him; and he feeds this cultural environment with his blood and his essences. Now, the blood of Negroes is a manure prized by experts. If I were an Adlerian, then, having established the fact that my friend had fulfilled in a dream his wish to become white that is, to be a man I would show him that his neurosis, his psychic instability, the rupture of his ego arose out of this governing fi ction, and I would say to him: “M. Mannoni has very ably described this phenomenon in the Malagasy. Look here: I think you simply have to resign yourself to remaining in the place that has been assigned to you.” Certainly not! I will not say that at all! I will tell him, “The environment, society are responsible for your delusion.” Once that has been said, the rest will follow of itself, and what that is we know. The end of the world. I wonder sometimes whether school inspectors and government functionaries are aware of the role they play in the colonies. For twenty years they poured every effort into programs that would make the Negro a white man. In the end, they dropped him and told him, “You have an indisputable complex of dependence on the white man.” Which is to say that he is dependent on Empire.

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being the meaning of his life is condensed. There is not an open conflict between white and black. One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave. But the former slave wants to make himself recognized. At the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural and more than natural reality. If I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I deprive him even of this being-for-itself. The only means of breaking this vicious circle that throws me back on myself is to restore to the other, through mediation and recognition, his human reality, which differs from natural reality. The other has to perform the same operation. “Action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both. . . .”; “they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.” In its immediacy, consciousness of self is simple being-for-itself. In order to win the certainty of oneself, the incorporation of the concept of recognition is essential. Similarly, the other is waiting for recognition by us, in order to burgeon into the universal consciousness of self. Each consciousness of self is in quest of absoluteness. It wants to be recognized as a primal value without reference to life, as a transformation of subjective certainty into truth. When it encounters resistance from the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire—the first milestone on the road that leads to the dignity of the spirit. Self-consciousness accepts the risk of its life, and consequently it threatens the other in his physical being. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life” that is merely about the ego.

FRANTZ FANON

Thus human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies. This risk means that I go beyond life toward a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth. As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity as I pursue something other than life. He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me. In a savage struggle I am willing to accept convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the impossible. The other, however, can recognize me without struggle: “The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master. Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where his masters stood. Like those servants who are allowed once every year to dance in the drawing room, the Negro is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master. When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters. One day a good white master who had influence said to his friends, “Let’s be nice to the niggers. . . .” The other masters argued, for after all it was not an easy thing, but then they decided to promote the machine-animal-men to the supreme rank of men. Slavery shall no longer exist on French soil. The upheaval reached the Negroes from without. The black man was acted upon. Values that had not been created by his actions, values that had not been born of the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl round him. The upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another. Just as when one tells a much improved patient that in a few days he will be discharged from the hospital, he thereupon suffers a relapse, so the announcement of the liberation of the black slaves produced psychoses and sudden deaths. It is not an announcement that one hears twice in a lifetime. The black man contented himself with thanking the white man, and the most forceful proof of the fact is the number of statues erected the colonies to show France stroking the kinky hair of this Negro whose chains had just been broken.

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

“Say thank you to the nice man,” the mother tells her little boy . . . but we know that often the little boy is dying to scream some other, more resounding expression. . . . “From now on you are free.” But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters. The former slave, who can find no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved and sitting before young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence. When it does happen that the Negro looks fiercely at the white man, the white man tells him: “Brother, there is no difference between us.” And yet the Negro knows that there is a difference. He wants it. He wants the white man to turn on him and shout: “Damn nigger.” Then he would have that unique chance—to “show them. . . .” The French Negro is doomed to bite himself and just to bite. I say “the French Negro,” for the American Negro is cast in a different play. In the United States, the Negro battles and is battled. There are laws that, little by little, are invalidated under the Constitution. There are other laws that forbid certain forms of discrimination. And we can be sure that nothing is going to be given free. There is war, there are defeats, truces, victories. “The twelve million black voices” howled against the curtain of the sky. Torn from end to end, marked with the gashes of biting into the belly of interdiction, the curtain fell like a burst balloon. On the field of battle, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes hanged by their testicles, a monument is slowly being built. For the French Negro the situation is unbearable. Unable ever to be sure whether the white man considers him consciousness in-itself-for-itself, he must forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no to much. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a reaction. To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.

Between 1920 and 1938, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) flew a flag from the window of its Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York City when a lynching took place. It stated, simply, starkly: “A man was lynched yesterday.” The flag demanded that the people of Manhattan, however far they were from the American south, bear some form of witness to the racist murders taking place in their nation.

FRANTZ FANON

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an international activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards black people. BLM regularly holds protests speaking out against police killings of black people, and broader issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.

BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

FRANTZ FANON

W R ET C H ED O F T H E E A RT H Jean-Paul Sartre

NOT so very long ago, the earth numbered two

colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and

thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men,

for that matter they do not read much of him, but they

and one thousand five hundred million natives. The for-

do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy con-

mer had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between

sciences are caught up in their own contradictions. They

the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bour-

will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discom-

geoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as

fort; nothing will come of it but talk. If they were, the

go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked,

experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their

but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with

wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no

clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the

question of granting that; the system, which depends on

way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to

over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. As to a

manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising

revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses

adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron,

would go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply

with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their

to become European as they are? In short, we encour-

mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand gluti-

aged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad

nous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in

idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro.

the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed.

That was before ’39.

These walking lies had nothing left to say to their broth-

1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies

ers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from

and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they

Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Broth-

are never done talking of Man, at the corner of every one

erhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would

of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For

open ... thenon! ... therhood!’ It was the golden age.

centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity

It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves;

in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone

the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism

is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man

but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened

from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe

without displeasure to these polite statements of resent-

now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running

ment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able

headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away

to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of

from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is

them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our

not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced,

ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them.

are we not in the marrow of our bones?

Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she

In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to

had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed,

itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homoge-

the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between

neous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still

ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl

to be found there, together with some who have achieved

their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark

a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are

don’t bite.’

still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who

A new generation came on the scene, which

have obtained complete freedom but who live under the

changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writ-

constant menace of imperialist aggression. These dif-

ers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and

ferences are born of colonial history, in other words of

the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and

oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep

that they could neither reject them completely nor yet

some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling

assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was

she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from begin-

this: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your human-

ning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the

ism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but

colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same

your racist methods set us apart.’ We listened to them all;

time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

In 2013, the movement began with the use of the #Black Lives Matter on social media after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of African American teen Trayvon Martin in Feb 2012. Black Lives Matter became nationally recognized for its street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans: Michael Brown resulting in protests and unrest.

groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial

lonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of

prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring

hot air; the ‘Third Forces’ don’t exist, or if they do they are

about and intensify the stratification of colonized soci-

only the tin-pot bourgeoisies that colonialism has already

eties. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us

placed in the saddle. Our Machiavellianism has little pur-

the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the

chase on this wide-awake world that has run our false-

two struggles form part of a whole. In the heat of battle,

hoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only

all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie

recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can command

of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat,

it; the native has only one choice, between servitude or

which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-pro-

supremacy. What does Fanon care whether you read his

letariat of the shanty towns — all fall into line with the

work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our

stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir

old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves.

of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries

It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our

where colonialism has deliberately held up development,

continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets

the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the rev-

go. It’s a good moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta,

olutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suf-

at Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole

fers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and

world does not hear about. The rival blocks take opposite

in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a

sides, and hold each other in check; let us take advantage

complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order

of this paralysis, let us burst into history, forcing it by our

to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if

invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start

its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over

fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife is

power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty,

more than enough.’

remains in the hands of the imperialists. The example of

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into

Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus the unity of the

it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers

Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in progress,

gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they

which begins by the union, in each country, after inde-

are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trad-

pendence as before, of the whole of the colonized under

ing-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them.

the command of the peasant class. This is what Fanon

They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking

explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin Amer-

among themselves, without even lowering their voices.

ica: we must achieve revolutionary socialism all together

This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy

everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our

creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it

former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses,

was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did

nor discords, nor mystification. Here, the movement gets

they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such

off to a bad start; then, after a striking initial success it

zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and

loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to a standstill,

sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at

and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw their

a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, night-

bourgeoisie overboard. For the only true culture is that of

bound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in

the Revolution; that is to say, it is constantly in the mak-

these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is

ing. Fanon speaks out loud; we Europeans can hear him,

you who are the zombies.

as the fact that you hold this book in your hand proves;

For when you domesticate a member of our own

is he not then afraid that the colonial powers may take

species, you reduce his output, and however little you may

advantage of his sincerity?

give him, a farmyard man finishes by costing more than

No; he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date;

he brings in. For this reason the settlers are obliged to

they can sometimes delay emancipation, but not stop it.

stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor

And do not think that we can change our ways; neo-co-

animal, is the native. Beaten, under-nourished, ill, terri-

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

fied — but only up to a certain point — he has, whether

the pressure put upon them. You said they understand

he’s black, yellow or white: he’s a sly-boots, a lazybones

nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence

and a thief, who lives on nothing, and who understands

is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that

only violence.

is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as

Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill those he plunders, as

when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.

they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he

Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this

must exploit them as well. Because he can’t carry massa-

bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present desire to kill

cre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degrada-

us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which

tion, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and

are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because

a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.

of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of

But it does not happen immediately. At first the

them — because of him, and against him. Hatred, blind

European’s reign continues. He has already lost the bat-

hatred which is as yet an abstraction, is their only wealth;

tle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet know that the

the Master calls it forth because he seeks to reduce them

natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would

to animals, but he fails to break it down because his

seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to

interests stop him half-way. Thus the ‘half-natives’ are

repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after

still humans, through the power and the weakness of

three generations their pernicious instincts will reappear

the oppressor which is transformed within them into a

no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that

stubborn refusal of the animal condition. We realize what

urge slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here

follows; they’re lazy: of course — it’s a form of sabotage.

recognize his own cruelty turned against himself? In the

they’re sly and thieving; just imagine! But their petty

savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his

thefts mark the beginning of a resistance which is still

own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through

unorganized. That is not enough; there are those among

every pore and for which there is no cure? The reason is

them who assert themselves by throwing themselves

simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power

barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Oth-

and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly

ers make men of themselves by murdering Europeans,

that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip

and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony

or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication

exalts the terrified masses.

of the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the conditioning

Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression

of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the

turns inward in a current of terror among the natives.

human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it;

By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience

and then, above all there is something which perhaps he

when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression

has never known: we only become what we are by the

but also that which their own fury produces in them.

radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have

They are cornered between our guns pointed at them

made of us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the

and those compulsions, those desires for murder which

second generation opened their eyes than from then on

spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do

they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric

not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence

terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these constantly

which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first

renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submis-

action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down

sion, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which

that hidden anger which their and moralities condemn

the European will pay for sooner or later. After that, when

and which is however only the last refuge of their human-

it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taught what

ity. You will learn how, in the period of their helplessness,

shame and hunger and pain are, all that is stirred up in

their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the

them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of

natives’ collective unconscious.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The Mau Mau Uprising was a war fought in Kenya between the indigenous Kenyan tribes and the white European settlers, mainly farmers and Pastoralists. Mau Mau was a term coined by the Winston Churchill-led British government to homogenize the identity of the Kenyan tribes, and make them seem more like a ruthless singular group rather than a diverse tribal alliance

The uprising led to the British and colonial Kenyan government imprisoning Kikuyu and tribal people in concentration camps (pictured left) as a way of deterring them from uprising. The British government is culpable in multiple genocides against entire towns and villages of indigenous Kenyan people.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The Ferguson unrest, sometimes called the Ferguson Uprising involved protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The unrest sparked a vigorous debate in the United States about the relationship between law enforcement officers and African Americans, the militarization of police, and the use-of-force law in Missouri and nationwide.

As the details of the original shooting emerged, police established curfews and deployed riot squads to maintain order. Along with peaceful protests, there was looting and violent unrest in the vicinity of the original shooting. According to media reports, there was police militarization when dealing with protests in Ferguson.[12][13] The unrest continued on November 24, 2014, after a grand jury did not indict Officer Wilson.

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns

unfortunates, that other witchery of which I have already

in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures

spoken: Western culture. If I were them, you may say,

themselves. In order to free themselves they even massa-

I’d prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis. Very

cre each other. The different tribes fight between them-

good: you’ve grasped the situation. But not altogether,

selves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you

because you aren’t them — or not yet. Otherwise you

can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries;

would know that they can’t choose; they must have both.

the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks

Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all

that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image

night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear

of their common degradation, even though these expi-

mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his

atory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood. They

brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do

can only stop themselves from marching against the

the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous con-

machine-guns by doing our work for us; of their own

dition introduced and maintained by the settler among

accord they will speed up the dehumanisation that they

colonized people with their consent.

reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they will take

Laying claim to and denying the human condition

the greatest precautions against their own kind by set-

at the same time: the contradiction is explosive. For that

ting up supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and

matter it does explode, you know as well as I do; and we

terrible myths, at others binding themselves by scrupu-

are living at the moment when the match is put to the

lous rites. It is in this way that an obsessed person flees

fuse. When the rising birthrate brings wider famine in

from his deepest needs — by binding himself to certain

its wake, when these newcomers have life to fear rather This photo is from Apart-

observances which require his attention at every turn.

more than death, the torrent of violence sweeps away all

They dance; that keeps them busy; it relaxes their pain-

barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massa-

fully contracted muscles; and then the dance mimes

cred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the

secretly, often without their knowing, the refusal they

third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us,

cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. In

and we do not realize any more than we did the other

certain districts they make use of that last resort — pos-

times that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are

session by spirits. Formerly this was a religious expe-

stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to

rience in all its simplicity, a certain communion of the

the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to

faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon

allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible;

against humiliation and despair; Mumbo-Jumbo and all

they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches

the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule over

and without sponsors to that very exclusive club, our

their violence and waste it in trances until it in exhausted.

species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t

At the same time these high-placed, personages pro-

spare them any more than the bad settlers. The Left at

tect them; in other words the colonized people protect

home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the

themselves against colonial estrangement by going one

natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to;

better in religious estrangement, with the unique result

they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that

that finally they add the two estrangements together and

we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same,

each reinforces the other. Thus in certain psychoses the

they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerril-

hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his

las should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous;

demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel

that would be the best way of showing they are men.

who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for

Sometimes the Left scolds them ... ‘you’re going too far;

all that; only from then on, they alternate with congrat-

we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a

ulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the

damn about their support; for all the good it does them

story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for

they might as well stuff it up their backsides. Once their

madness. Let us add, for certain other carefully selected

war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

heid South Africa. The Apartheid state, run by the white minority of the country, kept its power not only by penalizing black persons for entering white spaces, but also penalized (to much less harsh extents) white persons for entering black spaces. This was all done in order for the white civilians of the country to not see the black native people of the country as humans, to always regard them as others incapable of independence.

While we think of colonialism as being long ago the reality is that most of the people on Earth at this moment were alive during a time when America and European powers still had sizable colonies across the world. Most of the British Empire was liberated from colonial rule in the 1960s. The hasty hand over of power is consistently pointed to as one of the main factors for the depression of postcolonial nations. This is mainly due to the colonizer handing over power to corrupt indigenous rulers who were seen as being beneficial in retaining economic ties to the country.

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

of us has made his bit, has got something out of them;

ple, remember these fine words: ‘How generous France

they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant

is!’ Us, generous? What about Sétif, then? And those eight

favoured treatment to no one.

years of ferocious war which have cost the lives of over a

You know well enough that we are exploiters. You

million Algerians? And the tortures?

know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and

The old ‘mother countries’ have still to go the whole

metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and

hog, still have to engage their entire forces in a bat-

that we have brought them back to the old countries. This

tle which is lost before it has begun. At the end of the

was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces,

adventure we again find that colonial brutality which was

our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then

Bugeaud’s doubtful but though it has been multiplied

when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets

ten-fold, it’s still not enough. The national service units

were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed

are sent to Algeria, and they remain there seven years

with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to

with no result. Violence has changed its direction. When

its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accom-

we were victorious we practised it without its seeming

plice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have

to alter us; it broke down the others, but for us men our

profited by colonial exploitation. This fat, pale continent

humanism remained intact. United by their profits, the

ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls narcissism.

peoples of the mother countries baptized their common-

Cocteau became irritated with Paris — ‘that city which

wealth of crimes, calling them fraternity and love; today

talks about itself the whole time’. Is Europe any different?

violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us through

And that super-European monstrosity, North America?

our soldiers, comes inside and takes possession of us.

Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour,

Involution starts; the native re-creates himself, and we,

patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent

settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals we break up.

us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers,

Rage and fear are already blatant; they show themselves

dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal

openly in the nigger-hunts in Algeria. Now, which side

or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by

are the savages on? Where is barbarism? Nothing is miss-

such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dis-

ing, not even the tom-toms; the motor-horns beat out

honest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than

‘Al-gér-ie fran-çaise’ while the Europeans burn Moslems

a racist humanism since the European has only been able

alive. Fanon reminds us that not so very long ago, a con-

to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.

gress of psychiatrists was distressed by the criminal pro-

While there was a native population somewhere this

pensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each

imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the human

other,’ they said, ‘that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex

race we found an abstract assumption of universality

must be under-developed.’ In central Africa, others have

which served as cover for the most realistic practices.

established that ‘the African makes very little use of his

On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-

frontal lobes’. These learned men would do well today to

than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our status a

follow up their investigations in Europe, and particularly

thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the

with regard to the French. For we, too, during the last

elite for the genus. Today, the native populations reveal

few years, must be victims of ‘frontal sluggishness’ since

their true nature, and at the same time our exclusive ‘club’

our patriots do quite a bit of assassinating of their fel-

reveals its weakness — that it’s neither more nor less than

low-countrymen and if they’re not at home, they blow up

a minority. Worse than that: since the others become men

their house and their concierge. This is only a beginning;

in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies of

civil war is forecast for the autumn, or for the spring of

mankind; the élite shows itself in its true colours — it is

next year. Yet our lobes seem to be in perfect condition;

nothing more than a gang. Our precious sets of values

is it not rather the case that, since we cannot crush the

begin to moult; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that

natives, violence comes back on its tracks, accumulates

isn’t stained with blood. If you are looking for an exam-

in the very depths of our nature and seeks a way out?

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The union of the Algerian people causes the disunion

breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your

of the French people; throughout the whole territory

own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgement on

of the ex-mother-country, the tribes are dancing their

yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you

war-dances. The terror has left Africa, and is settling

did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted

here; for quite obviously there are certain furious beings

whether such things could be true; but now you know,

who want to make us Pay with our own blood for the

and still you hold your tongues. Eight years of silence;

shame of having been beaten by the native. Then too,

what degradation! And your silence is all of no avail;

there are the others, all the others who are equally guilty

today, the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights

(for after Bizerta, after the lynchings of September, who

up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there

among them came out into the streets to shout ‘We’ve

is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that

had enough’?) but less spectacular — the liberals, and

is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action

the toughs of the tender Left.

that does hot betray our disgust, and our complicity. It

The fever is mounting amongst them too, and

is enough today for two French people to meet together

resentment at the same time. And they certainly have the

for there to be a dead man between them. One dead man

wind up! They hide their rage in myths and complicated

did I say? In other days France was the name of a coun-

rites; in order to stave off the day of reckoning and the

try. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become

need for decision they have put at the head of our affairs

the name of a nervous disease.

a Grand Magician whose business it is to keep us all in

Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’

the dark at all costs. Nothing is being done; violence,

lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we

proclaimed by some, disowned by others, turns in a vac-

are bound hand and foot, humiliated and sick with fear;

uum; one day it bursts out at Metz, the next at Bordeaux;

we cannot fall lower. Happily this is not yet enough for

it’s here, there and everywhere, like in a game of hunt

the colonialist aristocracy; it cannot complete its delay-

the slipper. It’s our turn to tread the path, step by step,

ing mission in Algeria until it has first finished coloniz-

which leads down to native level. But to become natives

ing the French.

altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly col-

Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you

onized people and we must starve of hunger. This won’t

will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps. This is

happen; for it’s a discredited colonialism which is taking

the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do

hold on us; this is the senile, arrogant master who will

not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the

straddle us; here he comes, our mumbo-jumbo.

Algerian fighters. Then, perhaps, when your back is to

And when you have read Fanon’s last chapter, you

the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which

will be convinced that it would be better for you to be a

is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated crimes. But, as

native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be

they say, that’s another story: the history of mankind.

a former settler. It is not right for a police official to be

The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join

obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that rate, his

the ranks of those who make it.

nerves will fall to bits, unless the torturers are forbidden in their own interests to work overtime. When it is desirable that the morality of the Nation and the Army should be protected by the rigours of the law, it is not right that the former should systematically demoralize the latter, nor that a country with a Republican tradition should confide hundreds and thousands of its young folk to the care of putschist officers. It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name, it’s not at all right that you do not

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

The colonial model of taking authority and autonomy from the indigenous people carries on today in western countries amongst non white people and how theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re policed by whites.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The 1992 Los Angeles riots, also known as the Rodney King riots, the South Central riots, the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance, the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, and the Battle of Los Angeles, were a series of riots, lootings, arsons, and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California in April and May 1992. The unrest began in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a trial jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department for usage of excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King, which had been videotaped and widely viewed in TV broadcasts. The rioting spread throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area, as thousands of people rioted over a 6 day period following the announcement of

the verdict. Widespread looting, assault, arson, and murder occurred during the riots, and estimates of property damages were one billion dollars. The riots were a defining moment of the early Nineties, that shook white America and the World from the post-racism illusion of the Seventies and Eighties resulting from the Civil Rights Movement.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

III

T H E D A N GER O F A SI N GL E ST O R Y

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Black Venus, born Saartjie Bartmann; (1770s – 29 December 1815) was the most well known of at least two South African Khoikhoi women who, due to their large buttocks, were exhibited as freak show attractions in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus—”Hottentot” was the name for the Khoi people, now considered an offensive term, and “Venus” referred to the Roman goddess of love.

I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign book. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I wrote about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended

consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

I must say that before I went to the US, I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the US, whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as an African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.” So, after I had spent some years in the US, I had begun to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and ultimately waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. So, after I had spent some years in the US as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I would also think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. People in the United States would see Africans in the same way that I, when i was a child, had seen Fide’s family and village. Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa, a place of negatives, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child.” And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

professor, who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.” Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the United States. The political climate in the United States at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across and, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around in Guadalajara, watching people going to work, rolling tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself in doing so. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Bargh-

An infamous sequence from the Disney film Fantasia has been noted by cultural scholars for its usage of racist representations of black persons. Its images like this that show just how ingrained the acceptance of racist misrepresentation was that even Disney felt it acceptable to include a cartoon of a centaur servant in black face, as family entertainment.

Al Jolson was a prominent actor who used blackface in his act. Not only was blackface used to mock African Americanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s features, it made them appear simple to white audiences. Still to this day the repurcussions of these caricatures bleed into the perception of black people as unintelligent and incapable of handling their own affairs.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

This photo is from a protest against the Philadelphia city council’s decision to remove a black face character from its Christmas parade. This led to widespread outrage from white communities who believed it to be a Christmas tradition in the culture of Philadelphia.

outi writes that if you want to dispossess a people, way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them… Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity…The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.” I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

Despite the well-documented history of blackfaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s racism it is still a prevalent issue to this day. The practice of blackface and brownface is seen consistently on college campuses, mainly by white fraternity and sorority groups. Little disciplinary action is taken, beyond suspension, and seldom are the nature of the structures that allow this pattern to repeat itself called into question by the community of the colleges. In the Netherlands, for Christmas traditionally Santaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sleigh was pulled by African slaves.

To this day that tradition is kept alive by people dressing up in blackface for Christmas. Above people protest the tradition putting pressure on the Dutch government to outlaw the tradition as hate speech against the growing African population in the Netherlands.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

O P I AT E O F T H E C O L O N I Z ER Sylvester Johnson

Throughout the Southern antebellum period African Americans generated elaborate and sustained responses to slavery. Unlike the majority of whites who defended the benefits of slavery and who overwhelmingly identified with the institution, African Americans were uniformly opposed to racial slavery and did not need to be convinced of the humanity of black people or the intolerable, destructive nature of chattel slavery. The fact that the institution functioned as a system of sexual violence, moreover, also garnered religious and theological responses from blacks. Harriet Jacobs (1813– 1897), who wrote under the pseudonym of Linda Brent, endured years of sexual abuse and violation from James Norcom, the white doctor who enslaved her and her family. Her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, detailed the sexual trauma that regularly featured in the political economy of slavery. Jacobs publicly showcased what most Americans knew black women were routinely forced, even as children, into sexual service or harassment at the whim of those who had enslaved them all. Norcom, to whom Jacobs applies the pseudonym “Dr. Flint,” began to target Jacobs for sexual abuse when she was fifteen; he was almost forty years older than she. She describes crumbling under the powerful burden of shame and self-disgust. Part of the violence that Jacobs suffered was related to the moral universe that she inhabited. This was shaped by a Christian notion of purity and patriarchy that overdetermined women’s sexuality. To be a woman and a religious subject meant embodying sexual purity (virginity) until marriage. Neither virginity nor marriage were socially accessible for Jacobs and other enslaved women, however. Instead, they lived under a norm of Christian morality and social control that made moral purity an impossible pursuit. In this setting, it was victimized women rather than the sexual system of slavery that received private and public moral condemnation. In a related fashion, the African American minister David Ruggles (1810–1849) scathingly condemned the system of concubinage that defined THE OPIATE OF THE COLONIZER

the mainstream of American slavery. Ruggles charged white women with complicity in the system of slavery. He recognized that the white wives of slaveholders were all too familiar with the sexual economy of the institution, and he challenged them to boycott their churches and contest their husbands over sexual system in which slaveholders forced black women into sexual service, enslaved the offspring, and carried on sexual relations in the very presence of the white wives to whom they had pledged fidelity in holy matrimony. The religious consternation over slavery’s sexual regime was only one dimension of African American’s religious engagement with slavery. Even more expansive was the Negro Convention movement that began in the 1830s and continued into the 1860s. This church-based movement involved a series of annual national meetings that enabled black antislavery activists to collaboratively oppose slavery, assist refugees, promote black resettlement for self-determination, lobby white public officials for policy changes, and generate a larger social movement to persuade white Americans to oppose the institution. Activists such as Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany were representative of the many leading advocates of abolitionism who emerged from this movement and whose perspective on religion and politics was shaped by it. Perhaps more than any other single factor, this convention movement secularized African American Christianity by channeling the religious agency of free blacks toward addressing the political and social plight of millions of enslaved blacks, their lives hanging in the balance of a regime. In addition to institutionalizing their antislavery activism, African Americans also developed important theological reforms to reshape the way Americans understood race, religion, and social power. They frequently did so by developing and promoting distinctive interpretations of the Bible. For instance, they adopted the biblical motif of the Exodus, the narrative of ancient Hebrews escaping Egyptian slavery through divine assistance. Black

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his death in 1968. Born in Atlanta, King is best known for advancing civil rights through non violent actions , his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi..

religious activists applied this to the situation of slavery in the United States to assert that slavery was sinful. Given the fact that the Bible’s treatment of slavery represented the interests of patriarchal elites who dominated slaves and women. But that only heightened the urgency of a robust theological assault on slavery. Also important was Ethiopianism, a religious ideology that interpreted Psalm 68:31, which referred to princes coming “out of Egypt” and Ethiopia (for which this ideology was named) lifting “her hands” unto the biblical deity. By the 19th century, Ethiopia was commonly used as a racial designation for the black race. Thus, African American interpreters commonly employed this scripture as a prophecy predicting the black race would experience social uplift and mass conversion to Christianity in the present age. This theology was not without irony; Ethiopianism rendered the slave trade as a means of exposing African peoples to Christianity while simultaneously condemning the practice of THE OPIATE OF THE COLONIZER

slavery. Nevertheless, through the religious leadership of African Americans such as Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Alexander Crummell, this theology of prophetic racial uplift became an immensely popular aspect of the larger conflict over slavery. Related to this was African Americans’ interpretation of the Noah legend. No biblical legend was more important to proslavery activists than this story, which they interpreted to claim that Noah’s son Ham was the ancestor of blacks and had been cursed with slavery as a divine prophecy. African Americans actually identified with Ham because this character was identified with the grand ancient civilizations of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Babylonia. Such classical civilizations were renowned for developing lasting contributions in the arts, sciences, and statecraft. In this way, African Americans religious interpreters repurposed a racist tradition of justifying slavery in order to assert their humanity and to locate themselves within the history of civilizations that Western nations themselves lauded for cultural

In New Orleans and Afro-Caribbean culture the Ocean goddess Orisha of East African tribal religions is a central aspect of Black Christian culture.

and intellectual achievement. At the same time, black interpreters also rejected the claim that Ham’s descendants that deserved to be enslaved, arguing instead that American slavery was a contradiction of divine principles and needed to be ended swiftly. More than 400,000 blacks throughout the South exploited the instability created by the Civil War and rebelled against slavery. They fled to Union lines, overwhelmed refugee camps, and transformed a war meant to preserve the integrity of a white republic into a desperate struggle to end slavery. Such a massive slave rebellion—the largest in modern history—effected a monumental shift in African American religions. A civil rights movement ensued throughout the 1860s and 1870s, bringing an end to formal systems of chattel slavery and paving the way for black citizenship in what had previously been an officially and formally structured white racial state. The most visible consequences for African American religions manifested through the growth of new autonomous black denominations such as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (later renamed the Christian Methodist Episcopal) in 1870 and the National Baptist Convention in 1886. Both of these denominations flourished mainly in the South, largely because the vast majority of African Americans had been enslaved in the southern regions of the United States. By 1895, the National Baptist Convention would exceed three million members, well above one-third of the nation’s eight million blacks. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination, meanwhile, benefited from rapid growth as the independent sect drew on its decades of organizational experience to plant new churches among black Christians previously affiliated with white denominations and to missionize among the millions of blacks whose former slaveholders had typically prevented missionaries from proselytizing them. It had previously been limited largely to free Africans, who were most populous in the North. The abolition of chattel slavery, thus, immediately created a major source of prospective new members of the denomination. By 1880, AME membership swelled to 400,000 and remain the sec-

ond largest independent black denomination. Some religious trends encouraged significant interaction across racial boundaries while simultaneously engendering that autonomous black church. The holiness movement is a key example. It was rooted in Methodist teachings of perfectionism, which advanced that converts who exerted the requisite discipline (elaborate fasting and praying) could perfectly align themselves with divine will. This soon grew into its own religious movement and found a ready audience among African American Christians impressed by teachings of being baptized with not only water but also special spiritual abilities. Among those interested was a southern minister from Mississippi, Charles Mason. This energetic Baptist preacher was increasingly persuaded that the true from of Christianity lay in the fire-baptized holiness movement. Mason was especially impressed with the central role of fasting and praying and a sharp rejection of “worldliness”—typically associated with secular music, and using tobacco and alcohol. By 1895, he started a new denomination that he named the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), based on a phrase from the New Testament. Since he had grown disillusioned with Christian sectarianism, it was important to him that no “worldly” name grace the new church movement. When the Azusa Street Revival emerged in southern California in 1903, it caught his attention. The historic revival ran continuously for almost five years. Mason attended the event and returned to Mississippi with the spiritual gift of glossolalia as evidence of his sanctification. He partnered with other similar-minded ministers, and under his leadership COGIC became the nation’s largest black Pentecostal denomination. Among the other pivotal developments that shaped African American religions in the late 19th century was the club movement among black women. Club movements began as voluntary organizations among women of relative means. Women gathered to discuss diverse topics including literature, prominent public issues such as suffrage or race, and local activism concerning temperance and

SYLVESTER JOHNSON

THE OPIATE OF THE COLONIZER

Christian Culture in the African American community of the South was deeply influenced by indigenous cultures of East Africa. It was a way of taking the religion of the colonizer and slave holder and integrating it with African religions to make it their own. Depicted here are mother and child in Yoruba body paint. Yoruba culture is especially seen in New Orleans.

education. White women, however, excluded African Americans from their clubs. As a result, African Americans formed their own clubs. This was decidedly ironic because of how women’s clubs began as a response white men’s clubs excluding white women. As with the church movement among African Americans, the club movement among black women produced an institutional independence and progressivism that proved vital to black social agency. Black women’s clubs were formally secular. But like most secular movements of the time, they drew on a range of grammars and structures, and religion was consistently a prominent dimension. In 1896, African American women formed a national body—the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Mary Terrell (1863–1954), a professional educator and journalist with a graduate degree from Oberlin College, served as the chief executive. In a fashion similar to the Negro Convention movement, the NACW employed a public theology that promoted a view of divine destiny for black well-being. Members also affirmed the human dignity of blacks in the face of misogyny, anti-black terrorism, and lynching, and they inveighed that state racism and the myriad other forms of anti-blackness constituted a grave evil that would incur divine wrath in the absence of radical change.

SYLVESTER JOHNSON

THE OPIATE OF THE COLONIZER

SYLVESTER JOHNSON

T H E P R IS O N A S C O L O N I Z AT I O N Angela Y. Davis

In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In some countries-including the United States-where capital punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but signifi cant number of people are sentenced to death for what are considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished in most countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine. On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement also has a long history-one that dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. In fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison activists-even those who consciously refer to themselves as “antiprison activists”-are simply trying to ameliorate prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more fundamental ways. In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful pleas designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so “natural” that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it. The question of whether the prison has become an obsolete institution has become especially urgent in light of the fact that more than two million people (out of a world total of nine million! now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to rel egate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability? According to a recent study done at clinic at a university, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are imprisoned in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals across all of the United States in total.

THE PRISON AS COLONIZATION

When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded something like this: As racist and undemocratic as this country may be [remember, during that period, the demands of the Civil Rights movement had not yet been consolidated I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism.” That might have been my reaction thirty years ago. The reality is that we were called upon to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact that two million group larger than the population of many countries-are living their lives in places like Sing Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin, and Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States. In Elliott Currie’s words, “[t]he prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.” In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison, we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incar ceration. When the drive to produce more prisons and incarcerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued that “tough on crime” stances-including certain imprisonment and longer sentences-would keep communities free of crime. However, the of mass incarceration during that period had little or no effect on official crime rates. In fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison populations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system expanded, so did

The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The total incarcerated population in the U.S. is a staggering 2.4 million — a 500% increase over the past 30 years. One in every 108 adults was in prison or jail in 2012.

About as many people were returned to prison just for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted in 1980 for all reasons combined. Parole violators accounted for more than 35% of all prison admissions in 2000. Of those, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; the rest were returned for a technical violation, such as missing a meeting with the parole officer. Parole violations specifically target African American communities.

corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services, and use of labor. Because of the extent to which prison building and operation began to attract vast amounts of capital-from the construction industry to food and health care provision-in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer to a “prison industrial complex. “ Consider the case of California, whose landscape has been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The first state prison in California was San Quentin, which opened in 1852.4 Folsom, another well-known institution, opened in 1880. Between 1880 and 1933, when a facility for women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a single new prison constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for Women opened and Tehachapi became a new prison for men. In all, between 1852 and 1955, nine prisons were constructed in California. Between 1962 and 1965, two camps were established, along with the California Rehabilitation Center. Not a single prison opened during the second half of the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s. However, a massive project of prison construction was initiated during the 1980s-that is, during the years of the Reagan presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern California Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 and 1989. Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years to build the first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s, twelve new prisons were opened, including two more for women. In 1995 the Valley State Prison for Women was opened. According to its mission statement, it “provides 1,980 women’s beds for California’s overcrowded prison system.” However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners5 and the other two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded. There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty eight camps, sixteen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother facilities in California. In 2002 there were 157,979 people that were incarcerated in these institutions, including approximately twenty thousand people whom the state holds for immigration violations. The racial composition of this prison population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority, account for 35.2% African-Americans 30% and white prisoners 29.2 %. There are now more women in prison

in the state of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s. In fact, California can claim the largest women’s prison in the world, Valley State Prison for Women, with its more than the thirty-five hundred inhabitants there. Located in the same town as Valley State and literally across the street is the second-largest women’s prison in the worldCentral California Women’s Facility whose population in 2002 hovered around thirtyfive hundred. If you look at a map of California depicting the location of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the area north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the town of Susanville Pelican Bay one of the state’s notorious super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border. I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the California landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how easy it was to produce a massive system of incarceration with the implicit consent of the public. Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? What other reasons might there have been for the rapidity with which prisons began to colonize the California landscape? Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as “a geographical solution to sociaeconomic problems.” Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and capacity. At bottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we take prison for granted? While a relatively small proportion of the population has ever directly experienced life inside prison, this is not true in poor black and Latino. Neither is it true for Native Americans or for certain Asian-American communities. Sentences that especially young people-as an ordinary dimension of community life, it is hardly acceptable to engage in serious public discussions about prison life or radical alternatives to prison. It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and.

ANGELA Y DAVIS

THE PRISON AS COLONIZATION

ANGELA Y DAVIS

On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment. We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the “evildoers,” to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, criminals” and evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such dispro portionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, global capitalism. This is no reason to dismiss the profound changes that have occurred in the way public conversations about the prison are conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand the prison system reached its zenith, there were very few cri tiques of this process available to the public. In factI most people had no idea about the immensity of this expansion. This was the period during which internal changes-in part through the application of new technologies-led the U.S. prison system in a much more repressive direction. Whereas previous classifications had been confined to low, medium, and maximum security, a new category was invented-that of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax. The turn toward increased repression in a prison system, distinguished from the beginning of its history by its repres sive

THE PRISON AS COLONIZATION

regimes, caused some journalists public intellectuals and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbated by mass incarceration. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African-Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 black inmates-118,600 more than the total number of white inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prison expansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper’s, Emerge, and Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of the rising number of black men in prison when he spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention, which declared George W. Bush its presidential candidate. As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call lithe free world.” How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing”crime” and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

Three out of four young black men in Washington, D.C., can expect to serve time behind bars. This is despite the fact that people of all races use and sell drugs at the same rate. African-Americans comprised 12% of regular drug users, but almost 40% of those arrested for drug offenses.

DECOLONIZING FA SH I O N Alice Pfeiffer

On the twenty-second of September, 2018 San Francisco’s de Young Museum of Fine Art will unveil its latest large-scale fashion exhibition, Contemporary Muslim Fashions. From turbans to burqas, from the Nike Hijab to an Oscar de la Renta caftan special collection, it maps out diasporic and local religious wear. In doing so it also treads a thin line, tapping into the current growth of the modest wear market, as well as the west’s enduring fascination with the Arabic cultures. Max Hollein, the museum’s director, says that “there are those who believe that there is no fashion at all among Muslim women, but the opposite is true, with modern, vibrant and extraordinary fashion scenes, particularly in many Muslim-majority countries.” And while he may be right, Muslim fashion still suffers from much discrimination and dangerous assumptions in many countries in the west. In France and Belgium the veil is not allowed in public. Numerous other countries have partial bans in place. Regardless of Max and the museum’s intentions, we have to ask if this an honorable attempt at much needed diversification of fashion narratives, or another example of the west mistakenly imposing its own narrative on the “Other”? In his seminal text Orientalism Edward Saïd describes Europe and North America’s obsession with the east as fundamentally imperialist: “From the beginning of western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work… we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past.” His work is one of the bases for post-colonial theory today. It critically looks at science, history and art to understand how colonization has imposed its power by dictating its own norms and values around subjective notions heroism, gender interaction. How can this framework be applied to fashion, preconceptions of beauty, provocation, escapism that dominate the industry to this day? “From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.” Edward Saïd Historically, the eastern fashion industry descends from a European, aristocratic culture and its heteronormative, dominant views of social progress. Consequently, it followed evolutions such as

DECOLONIZING FASHION

sexual liberation and modernity from a very white, Christian point of view. Its citations of other continents were often a process of exotification and fetishization rather than fluid, horizontal multiculturalism. “Fashion has always provided a commentary on the rest of the world -- or how it was fantasized, as most designers hadn’t been to the countries referenced,” says Alice Litscher, a professor at Paris’ Institut Français de la Mode. “Fashion is a political tool to set a norm, suggesting that the west elevates, civilizes, ennobles and enhances the rest of the world -- the continuation and justification of a long colonial mentality.” As early at the 17th century we started seeing visions of faraway countries as trends in fashion: the Chinoiseries in the royal European courts popularized anything vaguely “Asian”. The same can be said of Turquerie and Indiennerie – visual elements and stylizations imported from the Ottoman Empire and India. Today, one look at fashion history reveals a long tradition of ill-fitting, approximate citations and appropriations that say more about how the west wanted to see itself than about the cultures they were appropriated from. Jeanne Lanvin’s kimonos; Elsa Schiaparelli’s fascination for “the exotic body” and of course Paul Poiret’s harem pants and turbans. Often these new shapes introduced new ‘fashionable’ norms. “Harem pants were a subtle way of bringing trousers into women’s wardrobes, kimonos an excuse to question the corset” Alice Litscher says. “In more general terms, fashion – both right now, and by reevaluating its history – needs to be rethought and deconstructed. We need to decolonise the fashion imagination.” This continued throughout the 20th century. Yves Saint Laurent’s frequent trips to Morocco led him to design Sahariennes, loose, pocketed, sand-colored outfits imagined for trips in the Sahara; John Galliano recreated Geisha makeup on models, and Jean Paul Gaultier presented an African Collection in 2005 that Vogue described at the time as “having more to do with rumba than Rwanda”. The examples are countless. A seemingly never-ending stream of cultural “inspirations”, from the Native American headdresses used by Victoria’s Secret, to the recurring blackface in fashion magazines, or Mango’s “slave earrings”. Although we are, slowly but steadily, becoming increasingly aware of cultural appropriation, and unwilling to stand for, and fashion houses targeting

The sneaker reflects at once the projection and stylization of black urban realities linked in our contemporary historical moment to rap culture and the underground political economy of crack, and reigns as the universal icon for the culture of consumption. The sneaker symbolizes the ingenious manner in which black cultural nuances of cool, hip, and chic have influenced the broader American cultural landscape. It was black street culture that influenced sneaker companies’ aggressive invasion of the black juvenile market.

a worldwide youth are following suit. In more general terms, fashion both right now, and by reevaluating its history needs to be rethought and deconstructed. We need to start to decolonize the nature of fashion’s imagination. The theorist Walter Mignolo has written extensively on what he calls “decolonial aesthetics” and recommends thinking critically of the borders between, say, high art and low art, the academic and the decorative. The same can be done with fashion, believes Mélody Thomas, a Paris-based fashion and culture writer and co-founder of inclusive newsletter What’s Good. “A classic example of western domination on fashion is that “foreign” clothes are considered “costume”, or at best “clothing”. It only becomes “fashion” once it has been re-appropriated and validated by a white gaze”, she said quoting, amongst other things, Kylie Jenner’s cornrows being labelled as an “edgy new look” by some. “When citing anything, one must keep in mind if the people referenced are given the means to speak DECOLONIZING FASHION

back and decide of their own representation, can participate in the process; one must always quote one’s sources, otherwise it’s not design it’s pillaging.” Another decolonial fashion project is Mille, an avant-garde online magazine aimed at Arab youth. Co-directed by Tunis-based Sofia Guellaty, a former editor at Style.com Arabia, and Samira Larouci, a London-based writer of Moroccan descent. It aims to provide an Arab outlook on fashion, beauty and underground culture. “Arabs see that they are being aggressively and opportunistically targeted by western luxury brands, who don’t even take the time to understand the different needs, all whilst imposing their idea of beauty, their norms,” Sofia explains, adding that notions such as emancipation, feminism, self-expression and rebellion all needed to be rethought locally, with religious and cultural expectations in mind, “rather than copy and paste a very white idea of rebellion and freedom” which creates more equality in fashion which has sorely been missing from the culture of the industry.

Left: Looters during the LA Riots of 1993 flee from a discount shoe store. The late 1980s and early ‘90s saw the rise of sneakers as a fixture in black culture with the release of the Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan sneaker brand. These sneakers were seen as a status symbol for low-income black communities Right: Young men queue for the release of a new sneaker. To this day the ideation of certain high quality brands of sneakers amongst black youth. This has been exacerbated by increasing use of the app Instagram.

“In On Beauty Zadie Smith writes, ‘Art is the western myth with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’” The aim, for the trilingual French, Arab and English publication, is to create a new media and fashion language that is rethought. Take the French case of “cheveux normaux” (normal hair) which usually means straight hair. Darker makeup is referred to as “peaux ethniques” (ethnic skin), and nude means beige. As for Moroccan designer Amine Bendriouich, he designed a collection named Touaregs du Futur, which mixed a North African futurism with traditional dress and high-tech textiles. “This is a dream vision of what North Africa could have been had it not suffered from centuries of colonization. It is a way of unifying but also celebrating the differences of the “Other”. I am Berber, I am African, there are millions of variations of Arab-ness”, he says. On his website, it states, “Thank you for your stereotypes, I am building my own aesthetics.” Thus affirming his

culture and identity. And then there is French brand Aswad (“black” in Arabic), founded by French-Moroccan designer Sonia Ahmimou, producing haute maroquinerie -A mix of brutalist and Islamic art and architecture, as a way to question high and low, aristocratic and functional. All this needs to be applied to the way fashion is taught, Alice Litscher believes. “It is a matter of rethinking how discourse and power is produced and transmitted, developing local industries, and mostly, looking at yourself critically: who are you, what are your privileges, in order to put into place a respectful design process.” In On Beauty Zadie Smith writes, “Art is the western myth with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves” -- let’s hope these projects allow for new, non-western mythologies to inspire generations to come. As early at the 17th century we started seeing visions of faraway countries as trends in fashion:

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DECOLONIZING FASHION

ALICE PFEIFFER

Racism within minorities has been a historical issue, in addition to external racism. Amongst the Afro-diaspora black communities have expressed what is known as colorism amongst other black persons. This internalized racism is perhaps most recognizable in the Brown Paper Bag Test. This was utilized by black communities and social institutions such as clubs, churches, sororities, fraternities, and even black-owned businesses. If a person was darker than a brown paper lunch bag they were often denied admittance to these places. This continues to the notion that those with darker skin, or more direct African lineage, were considered inferior, even amongst black communities.

the Chinoiseries in the royal European courts popularized anything vaguely “Asian”. The same can be said of Turquerie and Indiennerie – visual elements and stylizations imported from the Ottoman Empire and India. Today, one look at fashion history reveals a long tradition of ill-fitting, approximate citations and appropriations that say more about how the west wanted to see itself than about the cultures they were appropriated from. Jeanne Lanvin’s kimonos; Elsa Schiaparelli’s fascination for “the exotic body” and of course Paul Poiret’s harem pants and turbans. Often these new shapes introduced new ‘fashionable’ norms. “Harem pants were a subtle way of bringing trousers into women’s wardrobes, kimonos an excuse to question the corset” Alice Litscher says. “In more general terms, fashion – both right now, and by reevaluating its history – needs to be rethought and deconstructed. We need to decolonise the fashion imagination.” This continued throughout the 20th century. Yves Saint Laurent’s frequent trips to Morocco led him to design Sahariennes, loose, pocketed, sand-colored outfits imagined for trips in the Sahara; John Galliano recreated Geisha makeup on models, and Jean Paul Gaultier presented an African Collection in 2005 that Vogue described at the time as “having more to do with rumba than Rwanda”. The examples are countless. A seemingly never-ending stream of cultural “inspirations”, from the Native American headdresses used by Victoria’s Secret, to the recurring blackface in fashion magazines, or Mango’s “slave earrings”. But we are, slowly but steadily, becoming increasingly aware of cultural appropriation, and unwilling to stand for it, and fashion houses target.

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C O L O PH O N Minion, the display and body font of this book, is a serif typeface released in 1990 by Adobe Systems. Designed by Robert Slimbach, it is inspired by late Renaissance-era type and intended for body text and extended reading. Minion’s name comes from the traditional naming system for type sizes, in which minion is between nonpareil and brevier, with the type body 7pt in height. Slimbach described the design as having “a simplified structure and moderate proportions.”[6][7] The design is slightly condensed, although Slimbach has said that this was intended not for commercial reasons so much as to achieve a good balance of the size of letters relative to the ascenders and descenders. Calibre, the font used in the captions of this book, is a typefaces designed by Klim Type Foundry out of Wellington, New Zealand. Calibre is a geometric neo-grotesque, inspired by the rationality of Aldo Novarese’s seldom seen Recta. They were conceived as a pair but function independently of each other. The development of Calibre is based upon two ideas 1: “engineered geometry” and its application to street signage, 2: alternate letterforms in typefaces.

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R EF ER EN C E S Textual Sources Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.’ ” TEDx Cambridge, TEDx. Davis, Angela Yvonne. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Fanon, Frantz, and Charles L. Markmann. Black Skin, White Masks. 1967. Print. Johnson, Sylvester A. “African Americans and Religion.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. September 03, 2015. Oxford University Press. Pfeiffer, Alice. “How Can Fashion Be Decolonized?” i-D, VICE, 30 July 2018. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1965. Print.

Image Credits British Film Institute: page 32, 92, 93. Cohen, Robert: pages 26, 27. CNN: page 35, 36, 37. Davis, Angela: pages 52, 53. Ellerson, Betti: pages 92, 93. Enkone: page 39. Freyermuth, Nikki: pages 57, 62, 63. Guardian, The: pages 41, 60, 83, 91, 94, 95. Joelson, Al: page 49. Kha, Tommy: pages 78, 68, 71, 74, 75. Marie Claire: page 82. Medrano, Renell: pages 14, 15, 19, 79, 80, 88, 97, 98. Netflix: page 50. Twentieth Century Fox: page 58. Ramrakha, Priya: 22, 23, 24, 25, 29. Robert, Cam: pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Walt Disney Company: page 45.

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