POSTCOLONIALISM
The first colonialism per se was the conquest of America; after this colonialism, Europe colonized mainly Africa, Asia and some countries from the Arab world (I guess, after the conquest and colonization of the American continent, and after some European countries saw that nothing of economical or material value was left, then they just focused on other continents or territories like Africa). Africa was the continent that was completely colonized at the end of the XIX century and obtained their independence between the fifties and sixties of the XX century. I found it interesting how an Algerian psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, was the first one to establish a theory of the psychological and sociological consequences of colonization: alienation and exclusion. He introduced (coined) the term "manichaeism" that refers to function of the colonial point of view by binary opposites: good-bad, black-white, etc. Fanon started his theory from the word "negritude" created by black intellectuals like Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire; they tried to describe and exalt the values and culture of African ancestry that were considered many times as savages and tribals by the influence of western world thought. The intention of the colonizers was to "help" and "save" the peoples from their material and spiritual "misery", so the negritude movement is a reaction against this imposition and tries to defend the roots of the original culture. The leitmotif of all kind of colonization is economical, the colonizer justifies the action by ideological or humanitarian arguments that portray the colonized through stereotypes: if they are lazy they deserve a low salary; if they are weak, they deserve to protected and be ruled. This portrait leads to negation and the standstill of the colonized society. Then, the point of the postcolonial theory is how the other is represented in the imaginarium of the western world thought. How should we react toward the other? is he/she the same as me, worse than me, better than me or indifferent? How is the other going to lead toward me? Who is the other? Who am I?
