# Conclusion  
Far from being marginal in the emergence and arc of our modern world, North Africa and its contiguous regions were central to the initial formation of modern conceptions of alterity, as well as to resistance against this emergent world system and its structures of difference and inequality. While the fixedness and relentlessly hierarchical organization of modern identity categories is axiomatic, paradoxically the fluidity within these structures remains a central axis of contestation and negotiation. Western epistemology, built on fundamentally oppositional categories such as civilization and savagery, whiteness and blackness, continues to draw from the deep well of African, Arab and Islamic alterity to construct not only its Other, but also its relational self-conception. These underlying structures explain the longevity of these categories, opportunistically used in myriad ways, always contested, and always indicative of both power and the extent of subaltern agency.  
Simply inverting these tyrannical systems is insufficient, as Fanon (1961 [1966]) made plain, though such impulses spring from a very comprehensible place in the context that produces them. Western demagogues continuously, and resurgently in recent electoral cycles, return to the conception of an inherently colonial civilizational model that pits the entire Western edifice, real and/or imagined, against the rest of humanity. Powerful elements within the West are also busier than ever inventing, supporting and funding non-Western agents who share this falsely antagonistic formula and gladly play the part of the Other, the false doppelganger that helps legitimize the whole relationship and the systems of hegemonic power and thought (Mamdani, 2004). Similar dynamics are seen in the internally colonized domestic populations of Western nations. As Wynter explains, this reflects the 'Era of Man', in which some men designate themselves superior to, and therefore rulers over, other men, women, and even nature itself - over all that they literally and figuratively survey. Reconfiguring