In the Colonial model, the body is both a site of conquest and a
site of resistance. While the body of the colonizer is glorified,
the body of the native is abused. Imagery relating to bodies is
prevalent and symbolic in this model.
The individual colonizers and their mother country
are often conceptualized through deliberate imagery and language,
as one , dominating body. This strategy is particulary effective
in cultivating a more unified and strong appearance than that
of the natives, who have been fored to disperse in space
and through cultural impositions.
Colonizers may objectify and ossify
the bodies of the colonized into statuary, leaving them condemned
to exist immobile and without agency. Conflating the native body
with the natural, and animal worlds, also strips the natives of
their subjectivity; "the terms the settler uses when he m
entions
the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian
motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms,
of foulness, of gesticulations." (Fanon, The Wretched of
the Earth, 34)
In this scenario, for the colonized
body, premeditated motion becomes a form of resistance.
Although during the initial period of contact and conquest bodies
are forced into a polarized system of colonizer and native - as
Fanon describes it, into a Manichean set of oppositions, pure body
vs. contaminated body, superior body vs. inferior body, man body
vs. animal body - as time progresses, the bodies of the colonizer
and that of the native encounter each other - culturally and physically
- and produce hybrid
bodies, further complicating and charging the notion of body
in the Colonial system.
