| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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However, as Fanon himself was well aware, it is a very difficult endeavor to access the reality of the subjectivity of the colonized because it is exactly this very question—the question of who the colonial is—that is part of the oppressive tools wielded by the colonialist system. As Fanon says:
The notion of the subjectivity of the colonial being simply outer garments is not to suggest that the colonial “wears” the stereotypes that are hung on him by colonial discourse. Rather, the important point that Fanon makes is that the life of the colonial cannot be simplified into a “stock of particularisms.” The inside (which is masked by the external discourse of colonial oppression) is forever moving, is never static, and is “perpetually in motion.”
The violence of the expression of the colonized through colonial discourse, then, is not simply that they are presented as stereotypes (though this is often the case as Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul realize when they explode the stereotypical representations they recorded in their novels) but that these stereotypes are presented as fixed representations. This is precisely the case in the often requoted story in which Fanon describes how a small boy pointed at him in a street and brands him a Negro and through that process, detaches Fanon from himself, separating him from any real expression of his living self.5
A similar understanding of stereotype is Bhabha’s first and foremost contribution to the post-colonial scene. Bhabha says that stereotype is “a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible.”6 The stereotype (within its fixed form that will allow no flexibility or difference to threaten its stability) is a means to control and naturalize the dangerous difference as presented by the colonized and their culture.