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Abstract
This article is written to curtail historical elision, serving as a reminder of the horrors of colonial domination through an explication of how forms of colonialism - from Columbus to the objectification and mutilation of Sarah Bartmann - function at the discursive and ideological level of engaging in various disciplinary strategies that fix the colonized as savage, fit to be ruled, and animal-like. This explication elucidates processes of interpellation of the colonized through the colonial gaze as structured through the white/European imaginary. The European imaginary, shaped through a powerful Manichean divide, is shown to be parasitic upon the dehumanization of colonized others. European "civilizing," which is a trope for domination and exploitation, was deemed by Europeans as a form of "historical necessity, " even as it meant the social, psychic or physical death of the colonized.
My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification. "
-Aimé Césaire
Colonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once an "other" and yet entirely knowable and visible.
-Homi K. Bhabha
The European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
Some themes are written about as a way of countering various forms of historical elision. The process of remembering the horrors of colonial racism reminds us that, as Fanon (1963) argued, "When [we] search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, [we] see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders" (p.312). The above three epigraphs point to an additional profound Fanonian truth: "European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism" (Fanon. 1967, p. 90). The three epigraphs also point to a dynamic process of interpel- lation whereby the colonizer/ colonized become fixed through processes of affirmation/negation, respectively. The logic of this racist form of colonial establishment precludes mutual recognition as equals. Indeed, the two elements or poles of this relationship are paradoxically at once mutually exclusive and yet mutually dependent. Through the process of ideological structuring, the colonizer and the colonized are deemed opposites in an ontologically hierarchical structural relationship. The former are deemed naturally superior and the latter are said to be naturally inferior and fit for domination. The reality, however, is that...