100 Books Like Discourse on Colonialism

Fanon is one of my heroes.

He was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, political activist, philosopher, and a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front involved in the fight against French colonialism. He sadly died following a short illness when he was just 36 years old. He wrote two seminal books that had a profound effect on my understanding of the psychological impact of discrimination and colonisation on both the coloniser and the colonised.

I found his writing to have a visceral quality, and having come from a colonised country (Iraq) to live in the coloniser country (Britain), I could "feel" in my body and mind the psychodramas he was describing.

The first time I read Cleaver, I winced at his controversial personal history of sexual violence, but when I re-read the book, I found Cleaver to be a fascinating prison intellectual with compelling theories about literature, history, and human nature. 

Because I read the book philosophically rather than for its literary merits, I found the organization of the book—which begins with personal letters—difficult to follow. The second time I read the book, I essentially read it backward, starting with the theoretical essays and moving to the examples, and the book made more sense. 

I do not fully accept Cleaver’s theories of race, gender, and sexuality, but there are enough nuggets of truth in his writing that I come back to this book over and over again. 

I love Allen’s book for two reasons: his exceptional documentation of the Black Power movement and his innovative sociological contributions. 

As a student of African American intellectual history, I learned a great deal from Allen’s clear explanation of the similarities and conflicts between Black Power organizations—Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Black Panther Party, and others. Allen’s first-hand account of these movements provided me with powerful insight into the political and intellectual history of Black Power. 

What’s more, Allen’s innovative notion of “domestic neocolonialism” provided me with a new, powerful tool of critique for the post-Civil Rights era. Using Allen’s domestic neocolonialism model, I have been able to make sense of why integration seems to have simultaneously ushered in racial progress and new forms of racial oppression. 

Thomas’ book taught me that, when we adopt a colonial analysis, we have to rethink every category of analysis: “masculinity” and “femininity,” “heterosexual” and homosexual,” and so on. I also came to accept that there is a deeply sadistic eroticism in all racial and colonial oppression.  

I learned that Western colonialism simultaneously positions African-descended people outside the category “human” while also projecting Western categories of gender and sexuality onto these colonized peoples in order to unjustifiably blame them for the worst behavior imaginable.  

Thomas convinced me that modern theories of gender and sexuality not only fail to provide sufficient critiques of oppression but that they re-inscribe oppressive conceptions of identity by smuggling colonial ideology in the back door, inspiring me to rethink everything I thought I knew about identity.

I could not bear to put this book down. Each time I reached the end, I started again from the beginning. It lived on my bedside table for months. It was only after three readings that I could let it go.

Gregory Day had drawn me right into the places and times of early settler colonialism; his characters formed, against the odds, a way of life that was creative—poetic, musical, sensual, and, above all, ecological. They listened to the earth and found their place as part of it, belonging to it and belonging to the Earth. 

This travel diary by the Nobel Prize winning French writer was published in 1927 and expertly translated by his lifelong friend Dorothy Bussy. Gide dedicated his book and its sequel, Return from Chad, to Joseph Conrad, whose Congolese itinerary Gide retraced in part. In 1926 and 1927, the Frenchman spent ten months in Equatorial Africa with his lover Marc Alégret, making no secret of his sexual preference for young men and boys. In these travelogues, Gide fiercely criticized French colonialism and especially France’s “concessionary companies,” the large monopolistic firms that cruelly exploited Congolese laborers forced under inhuman conditions to harvest raw rubber. France’s Congo colony reproduced the excesses of its Belgian counterpart, despite the efforts of Gide and other prominent French figures to reform it.

In this tour de force history of Great Britain’s 19th century ‘liberal empire,’ Elkins demonstrates the glaring contradiction between the official claim that British society and its colonies were governed by liberal principles of ‘the rule of law’ and the systematic violence that lay at its core. “Violence,” Elkins argues, “was not just the British Empire’s midwife; it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.”

In an age when liberal rights were ostensibly universal, race became how the empire was able to exclude black and brown people (which included ‘racialized’ groups such as the Irish and Afrikaners) from the ranks of ‘civilized’ peoples. The so-called ‘civilizing mission,’ in which ‘uncivilized’ peoples would be welcomed into the ranks of the ‘civilized’ at some unspecified point, was draped in the trappings of noble enterprise and moral duty. However, while this thinly veiled ideology may have served the interests of… show more.

A great voice, an interesting take on fantasy, a non-white hero and heroine, rich mix of traditional fable and myth, and lots of Austeneque language. This story also takes on colonialism. I loved this book so much. It was a delight from start to finish and I’ve gone on to read other books by this author and I went to a coffee talk at the World SF Convention in Dublin. I was so thrilled to meet her.

I was a lonely child and when I discovered my uncle’s childhood adventure books at my grandmother’s house I found a world of excitement, adventure, and bravery that thrilled me to the marrow. Although all the active characters in these books were male, I managed to insert my imaginary self into the tales of shipwrecks, daredevil flights, and chases through Amazon jungles as the protagonists bravely and indefatigably fought for survival. Martin Rattler was the first of these books I read and it’s still a breathtaking read, with plenty of moments when your heart is in your mouth and you are almost too scared to read on. I recommend it as a true heart-stopper. 

You may be shocked by some of the racist and sexist attitudes in Martin Rattler. It was written in the colonialist and intolerant England of the times, and I find it heartening that no one… show more.

Whenever I see suddenly this remarkable book on my bookshelves, I wonder how the author, writing in later years of his life, was able of combining his practical experience in Africa with his theoretical engagement of Africa. The author narrates sympathetically how African political elites who embraced Western alien institutions and state ideals failed to reconsider the reconfiguration of the nation-state on their continent.