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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
A Jew born in Tunisia, Memmi (1920–2020) rose to fame with The Colonizer and The Colonized, prefaced by Sartre. Educated in Tunisia, Algeria and France, he settled in Paris, where he wrote novels and essays alike. His main topics include colonialism, the Jewish condition and Tunisia.
An early theorist of decolonization, he used a sociological approach, getting to psycho-sociologist, working through portraits—the orignal title of the book is Portrait of the Colonized, Preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer—trying to describe "rendings of the spirit" as "introjections of social conflicts", according to Sartre in his preface.
Published in 1957, this work aims to shows the interweaving of the colonizer's and the colonized's mind, clearly sketched out by the binary structure of the essay.
Memmi starts with the economical aspect of colonization, describing how the fundamental inequality of colonization gives the colonizer a much more favorable material situation. One of his key thesis is the interdependence of the colonizer and of the colonized, trying to go beyond Marxism and psychoanalysis. He characterizes the consciousness of the colonizer through three discoveries: "profit, privilege, and usurpation". To this duality, he adds several third parties: nationals of other countries, assimilated minorities, Jews, colonized participating in the colonial administration, etc, giving a vivid account of the entanglement between both subjectivity and objective structures, and colonizer and colonized.Comment: Memmi is a good complement to a class on colonization as he brings in a specific North-African Jewish point of view. His influence on existentialist philosophy also makes him appropriate for political philosophy. Can go with readings of Sartre, Said or Fanon.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: The concept of disidentification is Muñoz' way of capturing the subversion of the token identities assigned by dominant cultural discourse. While this subversion is a common everyday practice for most members of minoritized groups, Muñoz contends that it is in art where it could achieve the political weight that leads to social change. One of the examples Muñoz uses is of gay Latino artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres whose work resists the dominant "representational economy" - it is not explicitly inflected towards and/or recognizable within the traditional symbolic parameters of sexual or ethnic marginalization. In fact, Muñoz sees Gonzalez-Torres' art as exemplary of "tactical misrecognition," i.e. the intentional obfuscation of pre-constituted identification. Performance art is the most natural medium for such misrecognition.Comment: Best used in classes on sexual or ethnic marginalisation, and the social and political function of art, as well as on the social and political context of art.