From Big Brother to the Colonial Gaze: Domination and Disalienation in George Orwell’s 1984 and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of George Orwell’s 1984 and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in order to analyze the mechanisms of alienation shaping modern subjectivity. Although these works emerge from distinct contexts — political totalitarianism in Orwell’s case and colonial domination in Fanon’s — both explore the same process: the transformation of external constraint into internalized servitude. In Orwell, surveillance, fear, and Newspeak lead the individual to become an agent of his own submission. In Fanon, the white gaze, the master’s language, and the fetishization of the Black body fragment the colonized subject’s identity and confine him within imposed forms of mimicry. A cross-analysis of gaze, language, and body reveals that domination operates primarily through symbolic structures of thought. In the digital age, these diagnoses acquire renewed relevance: permanent visibility, standardized language, and data capture reproduce, through technological means, the forms of alienation described by Orwell and Fanon. Ultimately, both authors converge toward the same imperative: reclaiming speech, memory, and the body as the foundations of inner freedom.