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"Colonization and Canonization:
Colonial education further accounted for class oppression by creating "schizophrenia" in culture, politics, and language. The system achieved this creation through a rapid process of displacement and dispossession. In describing the Irish colonial system, Seamus Deane claims that "colonialism is a process of radical dispossession. A colonized people is without a specific history and even, as in Ireland and other cases, without a specific language" (10). Indeed the natives were displaced from history and the community (Memmi 91), and this displacement resulted in madness, mimicry, cultural suicide, revolt, and genocide. Those who survived this genocide were driven into the jungles of their respective countries and were now seen by the colonizers not only as a lower class, but as a primitive, savage, and violent class; one that must be controlled by violence. A vicious structure took shape from such an educational portrayal as Sartre points out: "Conquest occurred through violence, and over-exploitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so that the army is present" (xxiii-xxiv). But the hypocrisy and violation of human rights existed because terror reigned in the colonized camp, according to Sartre, and while the colonizer enjoyed democratic rights in the mother country, the colonialist system refused the natives any such right (xxiv). Colonized people, therefore, started an "endless search for a lost communal or even personal identity," but the search realized further futility (Deane 11). The educational system which "is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content," has contributed to this futility. And "by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it" (Fanon, The Wretched 210). |
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