Diversity Reading List

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.