Must-Read Books About Colonialism

Fanon’s text is a revolutionary pamphlet and a psychiatrist’s diagnosis of French colonialism in Algeria, and it also makes a firm case that colonialism can psychologically impair the minds of colonizers. Wretched of the Earth has inspired anti-colonial movements, largely for its thorough analysis of imperial violence and for the ways that class is produced in the colonial context. This is a polemical text precisely because of imperialism’s attempts to degrade and discredit the colonized. Nevertheless, Fanon shows that freedom is possible when people resist through collective struggle and socialism. 

Professor Carby’s book is both a memoir and a historical text, one that takes an honest look at what it means to inhabit identities with direct links to the British Empire and one of its colonies. Imperial Intimacies considers how two places shape the person and how people are entangled, even when those relations are fraught by race and class. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the rural communities in Devon, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby charts the British Empire’s interweaving of capital, language, and sentiments. The book is also a confession, her attempts to recall, reflect, and cope with the unbearable—that she is a product of the empire.

In this vivid, committed, and empathetic historical analysis, Gopal illuminates how anti-colonial critique was born from critics’ direct or indirect witnessing of rebellions in the colonies, from the Caribbean to India. Gopal shows how intellectuals and elites from the British colonies used their language of freedom to advocate for their own self-determination. It is an essential read for those interested in the agency of the colonized and in how some tried to use the master’s tools against the empire.