Abstract
From experiencing Europe’s colonial violence to birthing Pan-Africanism and playing a significant role in the Non-Aligned Movement, Africa has been a privileged vantage point to witness the complexities of coloniality and decoloniality. As western colonialism is inherently a White supremacist project, Africa has also been a privileged vantage point to study how colonial anti-Blackness can inform Black Africans’ perception and treatment of one another. Yet, while many geopolitical, economic and epistemological consequences of western colonialism are commonly theorized, its psychological impacts on Africa and Africans in postcolonial times are relatively less examined. Save for some seminal work on how the colonially oppressed can become the colonial oppressor (e.g. Fanon’s writings), psychoanalytical approaches are rarely mobilized in contemporary times when interrogating coloniality and decoloniality in Africa. In this paper, I share data from my doctoral research in psychology which analyzed Black South Africans’ violence against foreign Black Africans in South Africa. Using a decolonial Africa(n)-centered framework, I evidence how western colonial violence can foster a trauma-bond between colonized Africans and European colonizers and their proxies, ultimately leading the former to morph into an iteration of the latter. I put that phenomenon in dialogue with several historical precedents to underscore colonial identity erosion as a predictive factor of long-lasting coloniality. Using as a possibility model the leadership of Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island, I conclude by reflecting on how decoloniality can help cultivate restorative transformative relationships among Black peoples and solidarity with Indigenous peoples.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Decoloniality, Race, Anti-Blackness, Colonial violence, Psychology, Identity
