34 chApter one
her” (1967g, 180). Hegel and Fanon make funny bedfellows here: While
Africa was, as I discussed in the introduction, absolutely unknowable for
Hegel, he nevertheless fabricated and produced decisive readings of it that
contributed to the imperial project on the continent.^2 Fanon produced psy-
choanalytic readings of Algerian women in the struggle for decolonization
even while he professed that he “knows nothing” of black women, whose
sexual desires and psychic constitutions appear too inconsequential and
confounding to be folded into his larger narrative of decolonization.^3
In “Algeria Unveiled” (1965), Fanon illustrates how the “liberation” of
women’s bodies in the colonies became central to the colonial enterprise
through a process of domination that Spivak would famously come to for-
mulate as “white men... seeking to save brown women from brown men”
(1988, 305). Fanon argues that the figure of the veiled woman became for
the colonizer both the symbol of cultural savagery in the colonies and the
most effective tool for controlling the colonized body politic. If the veil
was the most glaring sign of the Algerian woman’s oppression, it became
the unrelenting task of the colonial administration “to defend this woman,
pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered” and in urgent need of lib-
eration from the barbaric Algerian man (1965, 38). She became a means by
which the colonizer could gain full control over Algerian culture: “In the
colonialist program, it was the woman who was given the historic mission
of shaking up the Algerian man. Converting the woman, winning her over
to the foreign values, wrenching her free from her status, was at the same
time achieving a real power over the man and attaining a practical, effec-
tive means of destructuring Algerian culture” (39). Here we see the “civi-
lizing mission” of colonial practice framed precisely and most effectively
through the mastering of the female body. This body reflected for the colo-
nizer a barbarous patriarchy that itself needed to be brought to full sub-
mission. Unveiling the Algerian woman would thus not only “liberate” her
but would perversely bring her into a pseudomasterful role (always under
the authority of the white man) by empowering her to hold a “real power”
over Algerian men. By being laid bare, brought into the fold of Western
femininity, she would become able to emasculate the Algerian man who
had enslaved her. This emasculation would in turn make the Algerian man
more easily dominated by colonial power, “destructured” by his woman
into a form ripe for full submission to the “real” (white) Man. In his reading
of colonial logic’s confounding contradictions, Fanon emphasizes how the