COLONIZATION: PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

I mentioned before that colonization and decolonization go hand in hand. They do, and the relationship between the two is quite complex. I'm a little bit stoked because in the following posts I'm going to get into some of the good stuff! In the various books we read there were often two characters, if you will, that portray the relationships that occur as a result of colonization: 

Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique, discusses two "protagonists": the colonist and the colonized, the outsider and the indigenous populations ("the others") (Wretched of the Earth, 1961).

Albert Memmi, a French writer born in Tunisia, discusses the colonizer and the colonized (The Colonizer and and Colonized, 1965).

Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator, discusses the oppressor and the oppressed (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968).

Edward Said, a Palestinian literary theorist born in Jerusalem, discusses the Occident and the Orient; the West and the East; the European and "the Other" (Orientalism, 1978).

You can also add the civilized and the uncivilized; the European and the savage; the American and the native.

What comes to mind when you look at these words? When I see these words I think of power: the power one holds over the other. That much is evident. But it is a lot more complex than that. There are also the notions of human and less human; to humanize and dehumanize; to lose or regain one's humanity; humanization and dehumanization. When we examine more closely Paulo Freire's concepts, there are also notions of exploitation, domination and transformation.

Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, defines oppression as "any situation in which 'A' objectively exploits 'B' or hinders his pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person..." (40).  He also states that when the oppressor dehumanizes the oppressed, the oppressor also becomes dehumanized (42). Ahhhh...so the act of oppression dehumanizes both the oppressor and the oppressed. 

Freire continues by stating that for the oppressors,  the concept of "human beings" only applies to themselves; other people are not human but are "things" instead. He also adds that for the oppressor, humanity itself is just a thing and the oppressors possess it as their exclusive right (45).  And for the oppressors, there exists only one right: for the oppressors to live in peace (43). 

Freire brings up another aspect of colonization, that of exploitation. Freire states that the oppressor wishes to transform everything in its surroundings into an object of domination. This includes the earth, property, production, and humans themselves (p. 44). I know that there are often confrontations between Alaska Native hunters and government employees over hunting and fishing rights. I once had a conversation with a man from Kivalina who expressed this very idea of exploitation. He had had a confrontation with a government employee, probably a National Parks Service officer of some sort, who had told him that he could not be out hunting, to which he replied: "You want to control everything. You want to control the land, the animals, the ocean, everything. What's next? Do you want to control the air too?" 

Voila. Exploitation in a nutshell.  

I find it interesting that Freire uses "transform" in both a negative and positive light - that the oppressors wish to transform their surroundings via domination and that the oppressed must transform their reality (via praxis, but I'll get into that later). Freire's ideas provide a nice introduction to some of the underlying concepts of colonization, something I wanted to explore before I got into some of the other works!