Interpellation in the Colonial Context: Louis Althusser's Theory of Interpellation and Frantz Fanon's Account of the Race-Marked Colonial Person

This paper examines the intersection of Louis Althusser's theory of ideology and Frantz Fanon's account of the race-marked colonial person to explore how interpellation functions—and fails—in a racialized world. Althusser's notion of interpellation describes how individuals are transformed into subjects under the ruling ideology through material practices. Yet while Althusser treats this process as universally reproduced under a given economic system and of "absolute guarantee," Fanon reveals its limits: colonized subjects are not "always-already" interpellated as subjects. Drawing on Fanon's phenomenological descriptions, I argue that under white supremacist ideology, the black person is not constituted as a universal subject but as a race-marked person whose status as a human being is shaped by the colonizer's imposed imaginary. The default category of subject in the colonial order is the white subject, while the colonized person is treated as a "nonbeing." Reading Fanon alongside Althusser exposes a structural asymmetry: ideology both constitutes subjecthood for some and denies it for others, producing what I term non-interpellation. Fanon's philosophy thus challenges Althusser's assumption of a shared field of subjectivation by showing that, in the colonial context, interpellation's "obviousness" relies on racial exclusion. Ultimately, I contend that confronting the colonial and racial limits of ideology requires rethinking the category of the subject—not as a fixed, reproducible universal, but as a historically contingent product of a material world divided between those who are interpellated as subjects and those who are denied subjecthood.