Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Black Skin, White Masks
The lived experience of Black people under the colonial gaze (Fanon’s “le Noir”).
Introduction
Fanon wrote the book while training as a psychiatrist in Lyon; it appeared in Paris in 1952 with a preface by Francis Jeanson. Combining psychoanalysis, phenomenology and personal experience, it examines language as a marker of status in the Antilles, relationships between Black and white men and women, and the psychology of colonisation, criticising the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni for presenting the colonised as dependent by nature. The fifth chapter describes being fixed by the white gaze as an object. Fanon also argues with Sartre’s essay on Négritude, “Black Orpheus”. The book ends with a prayer to his own body to make him always a man who questions.
Connections
Builds on
- Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre
- Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Taken up in
- I Write What I Like1978 · Steve Biko
- Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition2014 · Glen Sean Coulthard
More works by Frantz Fanon
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