The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi

1957

The Two Answers of the Colonized

The body and face of the colonized are not a pretty sight. It is not without damage that one carries the weight of such historical misfortune. If the colonizer’s face is the odious one of an oppressor, that of his victim certainly does not express calm and harmony. The colonized does not exist in accordance with the…

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Creator Bio

Albert Memmi

1920–2020

Best known for his fictional, autobiographical, and sociological studies of racism and colonialism, Albert Memmi was born in Tunis near the Jewish ghetto of Hara. After completing his secondary studies in Tunis, he studied at the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne, where he met his Catholic wife. During the war, Memmi was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp, from which he managed to escape. Following the war, Memmi taught at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis and published The Colonizer and the Colonized, a reflection on the decolonization of French North Africa, which has become one of the principal texts in postcolonial theory. Ironically, the anticolonialist agenda of the Tunisian independence movement led to Memmi’s expulsion to Paris in 1970.

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