Frantz Fanon
Related: black pride - African Americans
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) - Frantz Fanon [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements throughout the world for more than four decades. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz Fanon [May 2005]
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) - Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon on the Language of the Colonized
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man's comprehension of the dimension of the other.
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question...No one would dream of doubting that its major artery is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to prove that the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man....
...To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization. Since the situation is not one-way only, the statement of it should reflect the fact....
...The problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter--that is, he will come closer to being a real human being--in direct ration to his mastery of the French language...A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality--finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
[from Chapter One: "The Negro and Language"]