One of the key authors in this transition is undoubtedly
the late Frantz Fanon, whose influential Les Damnés de la
Terre (The Wretched of the Earth)37 argued that the major
weapon of the colonizers was the imposition of their image
of the colonized on the subjugated people. These latter, in
order to be free, must first of all purge themselves of these
depreciating self-images. Fanon recommended violence as
the way to this freedom, matching the original violence of
the alien imposition. Not all those who have drawn from
Fanon have followed him in this, but the notion that there is
a struggle for a changed self-image, which takes place both
within the subjugated and against the dominator, has been
very widely applied. The idea has become crucial to certain
strands of feminism, and is also a very important element in
the contemporary debate about multiculturalism.
The main locus of this debate is the world of education in
a broad sense. One important focus is university humanities
departments, where demands are made to alter, enlarge, or
scrap the “canon” of accredited authors on the grounds that
the one presently favored consists almost entirely of “dead
white males.” A greater place ought to be made for women,
and for people of non-European races and cultures. A second
focus is the secondary schools, where an attempt is
being made, for instance, to develop Afrocentric curricula for
pupils in mainly black schools.
The reason for these proposed changes is not, or not
mainly, that all students may be missing something important
through the exclusion of a certain gender or certain races
or cultures, but rather that women and students from the excluded
groups are given, either directly or by omission, a demeaning
picture of themselves, as though all creativity and
worth inhered in males of European provenance. Enlarging
and changing the curriculum is therefore essential not so
much in the name of a broader culture for everyone as in