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

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