Political Science: Decolonial theory

Student Name Professor Course Date Decolonial Theory Fanon's Conceptualization of Subjecthood and Objecthood In Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, within the chapter "The Lived Experience of the Black Man," he examines the complexities of racial identity through the lived, embodied experience of Black people under colonialism. Subjecthood for Fanon, the state of being a self-aware agent who can shape their destiny, is systematically denied to the Black people by the colonial order, which has forced them into objecthood and thus turned them into the dehumanized "objects" of the white gaze. "I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects"(Fanon 89)​. He brilliantly demonstrates this idea through the metaphorical experience of being seen by the Other. When the Black man is recognized as "Negro" by a white hand, his being is fixed and immutable, which Fanon called reification or the transformation of a person into an object. This look alienates the Black subject by making him unable to proclaim his identity. Hence, he becomes the mirror image of the dominating white culture's expectations and stereotypes. According to Fanon, this negates any sense of ontology or being in the world since being for others in the colony makes Blackness only the effect of colonial power being done to the subject (98). Such objectification embodies colonial Cartesian dualism that construes the colonized subject solely in terms of what the colonizer sees or envisions about them. Here, Fanon's political agenda is to expose the psychological dimension of the violence in such processes of rendering the natives objects and insist that genuine liberation must entail not just the freeing of territories from colonial control but liberation from colonial mentalities and subjectivities. Focussing on subjecthood in the struggle for revolutionary struggle, Fanon expands his analysis in the "On Violence" section of The Wretched of the Earth. To Fanon, violence is not so much a response to colonial brutality as a transforming route along which the colonized can regain the subjecthood they have lost and recast their existence in a new image. Fanon argues that violence breaks down colonial architecture, which violently reduces the colonized's capacity to act to reclaim their role as historical subjects in an active presence. He asserts, "Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. The praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end"(Fanon 25). The acts of revolution allowed the colonized to reenter history as active agents of change instead of passive objects, change their world, and create a new identity through self-liberation and resistance. Therefore, violence is presented as a strategy for restoring dignity, agency, and the capacity to decide one's fate against dehumanizing forces. Quijano's Analysis of Coloniality and the Subject-Object Relation Quijano's "Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality" explores the longstanding effect of colonial power structures through the idea of coloniality, which goes beyond formal colonialism and informs the current global power structures. For Quijano, the central claim is that Eurocentric colonialism was the driving force in establishing and maintaining a worldwide web of subject-object relations. This hierarchy prioritizes European rationality, culture, and power as the universal "subject." He asserts, "The relation between European culture and the other cultures was established and has been maintained as a relation between 'subject' and 'object'. It blocked, therefore, every relation of communication, of interchange of...