Colonizing and decolonizing minds

Notes

Criticism of colonialism, accordingly, has shifted its focus to its more subtle and lasting manifestations. Prominent among these are the varieties of what came to be known as the ‘colonization of the mind’. This is one of the forms of ‘epistemic violence’

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the intervention of an external source – the ‘colonizer’ – in the mental sphere

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central aspects of the mind’s structure, mode of operation, and contents

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epistemic nature of mind colonization: What grants the colonizer (in this case the teacher) the right to intervene in the pupil’s mind, thereby colonizing it, is the fact that the former possesses and the latter lacks knowledge. This is a commodity that everybody is presumed to desire

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epistemic warrants that yield epistemic legitimacy

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they believe they are helping

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power structures capable, by a variety of means, of transmuting epistemic authority into social authority

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social authority alone, without an epistemic authority counterpart, isn’t sufficient, for it cannot per se generate the authority necessary for succeeding in the colonization of minds. Success in this endeavor cannot be achieved by coercion and fear alone, for it consists in inducing a set of beliefs in the colonized mind via some sort of inferential, persuasive process – a process that is cognitive in nature

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acceptance by the colonized of a ‘rule of inference’ that automatically grants superiority to the colonizer’s epistemic warrants

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colonialism is primarily an economic enterprise, 7 with no “moral or cultural mission” whatsoever

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“[i]t is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships”

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well-intentioned colonizer soon finds himself sharing his companion oppressors’ derogatory image of the colonized: “How can one deny that they are under-developed, that their customs are oddly changeable and their culture outdated?” (p. 24), even though one is aware of the fact hat this is due not to the colonized “but to decades of colonization”

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The colonized fights in the name of the very values of the colonizer, uses his techniques of thought and his methods of combat

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inheriting from the colonizer the dichotomous form of thinking that serves as the grounding of racism and xenophobia of all sorts

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mystic effusion in place of rationality

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Instead of envisioning a future for their nations, they “dream only of a return to a golden age

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decolonized’s ‘countermythology’

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endow a past, largely constructed culture with the epistemic authority (see 1.2) without which it would not gain its current political attraction

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demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs

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process of ‘deculturalization’

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selective set of mental contents and attitudes, which were adopted by Blacks and clearly valued European history, culture and thinking as superior to their African counterparts

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neither Fanon nor Hotep are aware of the double colonization of mind upon which their argument is in fact based

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One cannot but wonder whether, after decolonizing one’s mind through its complete cleansing from the foreign model, the following step in Fanon’s or Hotep’s strategy, namely re-filling the ‘liberated space’ with another set of contents, whatever their origin, does not amount to re-colonizing the just liberated mind.

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a degree of uncertainty that renders them problematic for guiding political action

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decolonization does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them

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“cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe”

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open examination of the epistemic authority of any set of beliefs

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“insist, in a frighteningly fanatical way at times, that rationality, rigour, objectivity, and self-criticism be properties of the African philosophy

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total elimination of any trace of mental colonization is necessary for accomplishing the return to the original traditions

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Trojan skeptical agent

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presume that the comparison between the mental sets of colonizer and colonized are objectively comparable and therefore can be treated as a rational choice. But this is far from being the case.

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assumption that a person, a nation and sometimes even a state have – or had, prior to colonization – a recognizable and stable ‘identity’. One of decolonization’s tasks is taken to be the rescuing of this identity

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fundamentalism notwithstanding, the history of religion and culture demonstrate that neither orthodoxy nor tradition are immune to the vagaries of multiple interpretation and should – no more than identity – be relied upon as solid anchors

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