Can Europe undo the epistemic violence of the past?

Can Europe undo the epistemic violence of the past?

What is an undisputed fact is that the epistemic violence that accompanies any Eurocentric discourse about the Other, enables and allows for the emergence of an unfathomable kind of a civilizational difference, where the writing Self-Subject and the Other are always caught in static binaries. There is a large body of theoretical scholarship that examines the nature of western colonial encounters with the colonies. For the most, postcolonial theory has tended to focus on the engagement between Europe and the colonies they acquired in Asia and Africa. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), for example, in his works arrives at a disenfranchised Alegrian identity which underwent absolute rupture in the presence of the French colonizer.^[1] In Black Skin, White Mask, he writes that the black psyche undergoes alienation in the presence of the superior French culture. He describes the black man in the following manner:

The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with the white man and with another Negro. That this self division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question. …

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. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.^[2]

For Fanon, European cultural engagement leads to a complete erasure of his black African identity. What we draw from Fanon, who was writing around the 1950s, is a kind of an idea of the hybrid subject, where he describes a socio-psychical situation where the colonial subject was absolutely at the mercy of the colonial powers.

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[1] His following works are representative of his ideas: Black Skin, White Mask, Reprint of Peau noire, masques blancs (London: Pluto Press, 1986) and The Wretched of the Earth, Reprint of Les damnes de la terre  (New York: Grove, 1968).

[2] “Remembering Fanon, Introduction,” in Black Skin, White Mask, ed. Homi Bhabha, pp. 17-18.