Frantz Fanon has been the subject of significant postcolonial debate. In particular, his claim that postcolonial freedom comes at the hands of mimicking the oppressor has ignited scholarship. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that postcolonial tactics (i.e. achieving “wretchedness” by using the tactics of the oppressor against the oppressor) are both necessary and achievable for the colonized. He writes: “Get this into your head: If violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on Earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict” (Goodreads excerpt, 17 January 2026). By labeling violence “only a thing of the future”, Fanon argues that violence does exist in the present and cannot exist in the present. Where Fanon makes an error is in his idea of violence as only a futuristic concept. The “boy genius” trope implies, almost singlehandedly, that the violence not only exists in the present but is a kind of present because of its prevalence in the lives of those who fit into the “boy genius” trope.
In previous scholarship, I have defined the “boy genius” as a child who is both academically advanced but whose body is colonized frequently by bullies who both terrorize and scare the “boy genius”. As a result, it is both easy and comforting to look to scholars like Fanon who specialize in studying the rebellion of the colonized as a regurgitation, conscious or not, of the tactics of the colonizer. My previous chapter discusses an episode of the cartoon Dexter’s Lab in which he plays dodgeball with several bullies. The bullies take pleasure out of using dodgeballs as a weapon with which to pulverize Dexter repeatedly. This episode ends with Dexter taking out the bullies with a dodgeball, only to be expelled from the game by his sister.
The typical postcolonial thinker might say that Dexter repeats the behaviors of his colonizers by consenting to play dodgeball. Not only is that wrong but it is blindsighted by the facts: The gym teacher forces Dexter to play dodgeball by calling his gym excuse–an excuse claiming that because of a medical condition, Dexter is not allowed to play dodgeball–”crap”, and as a result, forces Dexter to play dodgeball against his will. When the colonized gets pushed into a postcolonial space, it is natural but not necessary to play into the tactics of the colonizer. Dexter could have at any point refused to play dodgeball. When he does play, he plays by using a robot to throw the balls for him. The fact that he relies on technology to accomplish what the colonized used to accomplish with his fists show that his postcolonial tactics are not only atypical but not in line with the postcolonial teachings of Fanon.
