Eco-Cosmopolitanism as Trauma Cure

Abstract

The fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic workBlack Skin, White Masks,titled “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” is a powerful critique of Mannoni’sProspero 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 ofProspero and Calibanis that colonial “situations” are the product of “misunderstanding, of mutual incomprehension.”1The 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”2while the colonized Malagasy, forced out of their own history, genealogy, and tradition and victimized by a failed European interpellation, develop a corresponding “dependence complex.”3Neither inferiority nor superiority, “dependence,” Mannoni claims, is Caliban’s reliance on colonizers fostered by a sense of abandonment.