ABSTRACT
Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was born in Martinique, educated in France, and worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria. He became a leader of the Algerian National Front and wrote several books, the most well known of which is The Wretched of the Earth (1961). In the present essay, the principal subject is the status of women in colonial society, already discussed in the introduction. Fanon’s essay might be productively read together with Jiweon Shin’s article (Chapter 17) on the status of Korean women under Japanese colonialism. Apart from the gender issue, Fanon’s essay also seeks to grasp the symbolic hegemony of colonialism and the ways to perceive resistance to it. He argues that while colonial powers seek to dominate cultural signs such as the veil, the resistance is also able to resignify the meaning of the veil (or its absence); it is thus able to elude and oppose this domination in a kind of semiotic guerilla war against the colonizer. More on Fanon’s conception of the struggle against colonialism may be found in Chapter 11 by Kelly and Kaplan (which also contains an extended discussion of Gandhi).
