Reciprocal Self-consciousness as an Antidote to the Fixity of Categorical Borders

What is it about?

This study incorporates insights from the cognitive approach to literature into postcolonial studies for the purpose of investigating the potential of the ongoing dialogue between these two fields. It analyzes the cognitive process of categorization intricate in the classification of people according to race, colour and culture, revealing how Fanon’s idea of reciprocal consciousness challenges the fixity of borders between categories and goes with the nature of the human mind that is capable of adapting to and realizing the changeability and adjustability of categorical schemas. Thus, the activation of reciprocal self-consciousness generates intercategorical coexistence, pointing out the obsoleteness of colonially categorical mentality sustained by xenophobia. According to the resilient nature of the human mind, this paper proves that categories of cultures and race are overlapping and fuzzy, so artificial borders between them are inconsistent and penetrable allowing mobility and change in terms of membership and belonging. This study tackles Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) in the light of Fanon’s treatment of the Hegelian theory of reciprocal self-consciousness, exploring possible forms of intersubjectivity, cultural fusion, acculturation and means of transcendental self-representation as illustrated in characters who are capable of penetrating the categorical fixity of cultural difference or the self and the other.

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Why is it important?

This paper presents an application of the approach of cognitive postcolonialism to a literary work. It incorporates cognitive literary criticism into postcolonialism in order to interpret a feature of the mental aspect of colonizer/colonized relation which is categorization.

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