Alice Walker's Politics or the Politics of the Color Purple

Abstract

I know very well that after this diagnosis the reader now expects remedies. I did not conceive of this book as a work of protest or even as a search for solutions. It was born out of reflections on an accepted failure [Memmi, 1965: 145]. Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much of barbarism. M. Mannoni has something better: psychoanalysis.... Follow him step by step through the ins and outs of his little conjuring tricks, and he will prove to you as clear as day that colonialism is based on psychology, that there are in this world groups of men who, for unknown reasons, suffer from what must be called a dependency complex, that these groups are psychologically made for dependence ... [Cessaire, 1972: 39-40].