Neurocolonization

Feeling the Occupation of Our Nervous Systems

Neurocolonization may be most precisely understood not as a metaphorical extension of political domination into the body, but as a historically produced and physiologically instantiated condition in which human nervous systems are gradually trained, through repetition, tempo, and reward structures, to organize themselves in accordance with extractive colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal logics, such that patterns of urgency, hypervigilance, dissociation, and collapse come to be experienced not as imposed adaptations but as intrinsic features of the self, a process consistent with what Frantz Fanon described as the internalization of colonial order at the level of embodiment and affect (Fanon, 1963).