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Albert Memmi

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Summary

Theorist of settler colonialism whose The Colonizer and the Colonized (Beacon Press, 1967, as cited) supplies David Lloyd’s psychology of the settler colony: racism as consubstantial to colonialism, the Siege Mentality and its hardening, the disproportion of the settler’s response, and the opposed figures of the ‘colonizer who accepts’ and the ‘colonizer who refuses’ (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.1, 9-13 / printed p.59, 67-71).

Details

  • Lloyd’s thesis follows “a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism” (PDF p.1 / printed p.59).
  • On racism: ‘Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized’; it is not ‘an incidental detail’ but ‘a consubstantial part of colonialism’ (PDF p.9 / printed p.67, quoting Memmi, pp.70, 74). Its three ideological components are the gulf between the cultures of colonialist and colonized, the exploitation of those differences for the colonialist’s benefit, and the use of the supposed differences as standards of absolute fact (p.71 as cited).
  • On the reference back: what in Memmi’s terms was the constant reference back to the ‘mother country’ becomes in Israel’s case reference to a more diffuse ‘Western civilisation’ (PDF p.10 / printed p.68, citing Memmi, p.67).
  • On hardening: ‘Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom’ (PDF p.11 / printed p.69, citing Memmi, p.62).
  • On the ‘colonizer who accepts’: his reaction to the settler colony’s contradictions is ‘rage, a loathing, always ready to be loosed on the colonised, the innocent yet inevitable reason for his drama’ (PDF p.12 / printed p.70, citing Memmi, pp.66-67; see Righteous Fury).
  • On the ‘colonizer who refuses’: ‘the leftist colonizer is part of the oppressing group and will be forced to share its destiny’, and ‘colonial relations […] like any institution, determine a priori his place and that of the colonized and, in the final analysis, their true relationship’ (PDF p.13 / printed p.71, citing Memmi, pp.38-9).

Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Settler Colonialism, Siege Mentality, Righteous Fury, Racism

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