Part of my journey of understanding this dark history has involved reading and re-reading books on this ever-present historical tragedy, and that’s how I approached a closer study of Glen Sean Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Legacies of Recognition (2014). This campaign has resulted in social dislocation, loss of resources (including land and natural resources) and inter-generational trauma and marks the fact that the dark history of colonialism is still an eternal present in post-colonial Canada. The schools were just one of the tools used by settlers, and their superstructure, to impose control over the totality of economic, social, cultural, and extractive relations. The government and mainstream Christian Churches acted in strategic solidarity in a long campaign structured to annihilate Indigenous cultures, both figuratively and literally. Residential Schools, the last of which closed in the mid-1990s, were an instrument purposefully designed to undermine the culture and nuanced connections of Indigenous Peoples to time, each other, and the environment. Overall, this chapter is yet another tragic dimension in the history of settler colonialism in Canada. Many of the children who did return home were scarred for life, and this trauma then had an impact on the psychosocial wellbeing of future generations. They knew that some of their children never came home from these institutions but their concerns went unheard or were dismissed. The unearthing of the graves shocked many non-Indigenous Canadians, but it came as no surprise to Indigenous Peoples themselves who had long maintained that the graves were there and more would be discovered. This unusual occurrence was in recognition of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing the remains of Indigenous children on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools. If you enjoyed The Wretched of the Earth, you might like Edward Said's Orientalism, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.From the end of May until a few days before Remembrance Day (November 11) flags at Canadian public buildings were flown at half-mast. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. Fanon was a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now of purely historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers and the 'Third World' is just as illuminating about the world we live in today.įrantz Fanon (1925-61) was a Martinique-born French author essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization, The Wretched of the Earth made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century.
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