Memmi writes that colonizers are creatures of want while all who are colonized need change. The fact that the colonizers do not see this is due either to a lack of understanding of colonization or their own selfishness. If the colonizer is acting as the oppressor then the victim cannot live in peace.

According to Memmi, the first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to the colonizer. While this may seem like acceptance of colonization, it is actually their submission and an attempt to assimilate because they are rejecting who they are at the same time. The colonized try to change the color of their skin to be more like that of the colonizer and in doing so are fully accepting someone else’s values. The author gives an example of Negrophobia in a Negro, or anti-Semitism in a Jew, as being comparable to the colonized.

Once the colonist realizes that his assimilation will never be accepted by the colonizer he becomes angry because he sees that he has lost the values he once lived for. The next step the colonized takes is to revolt against their newly defined enemy. This is the only way out of the repressing status of the colony.

When colonized people view their colonize

Chapter 16: Ethnic and Religious Violence

Terry Eagleton, Preface, from The Illusions of Postmodernism

Chapter 15: Feminisms and International Women’s Movements

Basu writes that there are three broad tendencies that literature on women’s movements is characterized by. Number one is that it tends to omit postcolonial women’s movements and instead concentrate on Western Europe and the United States. Also, studies that are about the non-western world tend to put too much attention on developmental issues. The second tendency is to look at women’s movements as a product of modernization and socioeconomic change which gives the false impression that these movements are strongest in industrialized nations. The third tendency assumes a cross-national equivalence of women’s oppression and movements. Basu writes that the idea of global sisterhood is a myth because there are major differences in women’s lives and meanings of feminism.

And then there is the idea of the “other.” The only way to understand the other is to be willing to risk one’s own convictions and have a meaningful encounter with the other. That creates the question of how the self maintains differentiation from the other once this happens. The answer is that otherness is part of the ego because in order to understand the other you have to be part of the same as well.

Michael Ignatieff, The Attack on Human Rights

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