مفهوم العقل السجين و إخوانه في ميزان مقاربة فكرية

Abstract EN

This article attempts to shed light on Said Hossein Alatas’ thought by examining his studies on what he calls ‘the Captive Mind’.

On the other, we highlight other close concepts to Alatas’.

Albert Memmi, the Tunisian French intellectual speaks about the personalities of the colonized and the colonizer.

As to Frantz Fanon, he focused on the black persons under colonial domination.

We propose here the concept of ‘linguistic confinement’ whose absence often leads ‘linguistic captive mind’ which shows linguistic alienation, attitudes of inferiority complex toward the French/ the colonizer among members of North African societies.

As such, the captive mind is the result of two patterns of Western domination in thought and language.

Yet, neither Alatas nor Fanon and other Southern thinkers have taken this into consideration despite there is a strong relationship between language and thinking.

Thus, the linguistic captive mind would strengthen the continuing presence of intellectual imperialism that hampers the emergence of independent social sciences particularly in Asian and African societies.