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The “Retardation” of Unitarian Postcoloniality in North Africa: Psycho-Colonialism, Psycho-nationalism, and the Dismemberment of the Arab Maghreb Union.
Abstract
How can one link psychology/ psychoanalysis and post-colonialism? More specifically how can one link psycho colonialism and psycho nationalism in North Africa? The theoretical foundation of such interlocking goes back to the work of Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism in 1959, which concedes that colonialism breeds psychopathology. Edward Said has also helped our grasp of these intersections through his idea of the “Orient” as a topos of the Western academic fantasies. Since the publication of Foucault’s groundbreaking thesis, Histoire de la folie in 1961 postcolonial scholars have begun to excavate this dimension of medical/pathological history by examining social, political, technological, and professional aspects of psychiatry and collective/ institutional psychology. Psycho-nationalism underscores the latent and manifest psycho historic processes and mythologies (i.e., violence, depersonalization, stereotyping etc.) by which a nation state is carved out, sustained and reimagined to its citizenry. My aim in this paper is to deploy this problematic combination to discuss the perpetuation of “psychotic” operations within the post-colonial state in North Africa. More precisely I investigate the historic interconnectedness between the geopolitical condition created by the French encroachment in Algeria since 1830, and then by the postcolonial establishment of the Arab Maghreb Union in 1989. These accumulations represent a psychological field where the anti-colonial discourse of the postcolonial state is subliminally disconnected from the reality of national culture(s) and their embryonic shattering. My argument depends on the premise that psycho-colonialism and psycho-nationalism infect the geopolitical spaces between Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. On this account, I take the national mythology of martyrdom, cartography (i.e., adopting colonial borders and maps) and the national policy of over militarization as examples of how psycho nationalism breeds a postcolonial psychopathology that sustains the retardation of mental decolonization in the Maghreb. My analytical critique is based on an interdisciplinary treatment of psycho-colonization and psycho nationalism which includes drawing on postcolonial theory (Fanon, Said, Spivak), contemporary political philosophy (Anderson, Hobsbawn), and the French historical archives (i.e.., colonial maps of 1830 and 1954-1963). I ultimately argue that the movements of psycho-(post)-colonialism and psycho nationalism are what (re)structurate an endemic remission of this project of the Maghreb union, the prospect of reconciliation and national healing. Psycho nationalistic structures and its narratives have emerged to deepen sentiments of nationalistic affiliation and hegemonic exclusionary emotions geared towards contempt and violence. Such psychological dismemberment continues to persist as a permanent state of a colonizing disunity within the Maghreb’s geopolitical dynamics.
Discipline
Psychology
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Sub Area
None