Psychopolitics, Cultural Syncretism and Untranslatability in Albert Memmi's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1974) and Paulo Freire's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1970)

This article is concerned with analyzing Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), as postcolonial critical works that roam around the whirlpool of psychopolitics, cultural hegemony, and untranslatability. It phenomenologically looks at culture as a latent leavening agent wielded by the oppressor for the ongoing process of oppression in which the oppressed still bear their colonial pathologies and pathogens. The analysis uncovers how the colonial toxin has seeped in their cultural vessel and infected the black lymphocytes that are the main agents for the psychological, economic, political, and cultural immunization of the oppressed. These dangerous methods, labelled psychopolitics and cultural syncretism legitimately operating under the aegis of imperialism, deserve serious and meticulous reflection, for they embody the worst weapons of cultural invasion and ethnocide. Resting on the theories of psychopolitics and psychoanalysis, and untranslatability and syncretism as concepts, the paper brings to light the social inadequacy and alienating structure of cultural imperialism through the medium of the legislation of their intrinsic incivility.