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Abstract
In this paper, The Travels in West Africa (1897) by Mary Kingsley will be discussed in accordance with Frantz Fanon’s views based on violence. Fanon believes that colonial rule is maintained through the violence and repression imposed on the colonized by the colonizer. He also asserts that decolonization is always a violent phenomenon because violence is regarded as the natural state of the colonizer’s rule. Furthermore, according to Fanon, violence gives the colonized, who had previously been dehumanized, agency and allows them to rebuild themselves in a light that is not contaminated by the colonisers. According to Fanon, this may be achieved through the colonized’s overthrowing violence imposed on them both physically and psychologically by the colonized. Kingsley’s text is seen as a reflective of both physical and psychological violence projected on the natives when it is read under the light of Fanon’s concept of violence since she writes her text about the experiences of her meeting them after filtering her experiences through an Eurocentric view. Binary oppositions imposed on both the white and black races are explicitly stated by her discriminatory discourse, which utilizes "them" for the indigenous and "us" for the whites, as well as by her thoughts about the natives.
Keywords
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