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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2019
The fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic work Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” is a powerful critique of Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956). Born in France of Corsican parents, Dominique-Octave Mannoni had come to know the African colonial condition primarily through his ethnological work in Madagascar, where he spent twenty years. The argument of Prospero and Caliban is that colonial “situations” are the product of “misunderstanding, of mutual incomprehension.”1 The situation, Mannoni observes in the introduction, is created the very moment a white man appears in the midst of a tribe, and he goes on to elaborate on its distinctive and varied features: dominance of a majority by a minority, economic exploitation, the seemingly benign paternalism of the civilizing mission, and racism. The colonizer’s “grave lack of sociability combined with a pathological urge to dominate” gives him a “Prospero complex”2 while the colonized Malagasy, forced out of their own history, genealogy, and tradition and victimized by a failed European interpellation, develop a corresponding “dependence complex.”3 Neither inferiority nor superiority, “dependence,” Mannoni claims, is Caliban’s reliance on colonizers fostered by a sense of abandonment.
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2 Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, 102.
3 Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, 41.
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6 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 67
7 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 70, 72.
8 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 73.
9 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 78.
10 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 84. Fanon here cites testimonies given at a trial in Tananarive.
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17 Forna, Happiness, 10.
18 Forna, Happiness, 24.
19 Forna, Happiness, 11.
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21 Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez ( London and New York: Verso, 1996), 5 Google Scholar.
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26 Forna, Happiness, 251, 228.
27 Forna, Happiness, 216.
28 Fassin, Didier and Rechtman, Richard, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
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