Resistance and the Moral Transformation of the Oppressed

Oppression transforms people, and so does resistance. This insight was not lost on anticolonial thinker-activists, who saw anticolonial struggles as generally encompassing two aims: first, to overthrow and replace colonial institutions, and second, to transform oppressed colonial subjects into sovereign democratic citizens. The two was seen as jointly necessary for postcolonial emancipation, and yet these thinkers did not take for granted that achieving the first would automatically entail the second. This paper identifies a distinctive kind of injustice faced by members of oppressed groups and explores the role of resistance in overcoming it. Specifically, the appropriation of ideas and practices from one’s oppressors is often seen as an important mode of resistance deployed by subaltern actors in remaking the world (Getachew 2016; 2019). But appropriation can also transform oppressed agents themselves. In several essays collected in 'A Dying Colonialism', Fanon identifies what he calls the greatest tragedy of the colonial situation: colonial subjects’ inability to endorse the good without reinforcing their own oppression. Doing so legitimizes the colonial project and/or comes at the moral cost of self-respect. In this tragic situation, Fanon argues, colonial subjects’ capacity to know and to endorse the good is undermined. To escape this tragedy, Fanon points to political resistance that utilizes these very ideas and practices against the colonizer. This paper explores the promises and limits of appropriation as a practice for restoring oppressed agents’ capacity to know and endorse the good.