Dana Benlakhdar

Colonial oppression penetrates histories, discourses, psyches and geopolitics, and poses a hopeless challenge for the Western intellectual tradition.  All the While the Native Exists is comprised of two free-standing essays ‘How to Give Up Your Ancestors’ Land’ and ‘Decolonising the Mind’. Both of which explore the functions of colonial and neoliberal oppression and violence in the African continent through two European documentaries: We Come as Friends (2014) by Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper and Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence (2014) by Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson.

Instead of deconstructing Sauper’s and Olsson’s films as cultural objects, I employ them as catalysts to raise broader socio-political questions of the nature of (neo)colonial violence and its role in disowning the Other. The first essay ‘How to Give Up Your Ancestors’ Land’ considers epistemic violence in the politically volatile South Sudan through the Jungian psychoanalytical structure. The latter essay focuses specifically on Frantz Fanon’s famous work ‘Concerning Violence’ and its contribution to the discourse on psychology of oppression.