It marks an internal civic critique of France, in a manner akin to Wright and his fellow expatriate James Baldwin toward the United States. No more than the white man,” he declared, underscoring the illusory, damning qualities of race, whether as a source of imposed inferiority or feigned superiority.īlack Skin, White Masks is undoubtedly a complex work-his most psychiatric by far-and he does not call for decolonization in the direct manner of his final book. Similar to the mutual dehumanization that resulted from colonialism, Fanon emphasized the mutual dehumanization that resulted from racism. Indeed, the problem of race cut both ways for Fanon. It is on this point-the juridical promise, yet social limits, of citizenship-that continuities can be drawn between Fanon’s world of the 1950s and our world today. Though citizenship had been granted to all Martinicans, regardless of race, following the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, Fanon understood, similar to his African-American contemporaries like Richard Wright, that equality was not possible due to his “epidermal” condition. As examined by Lewis Gordon, Ato Sekyi-Otu, and Reiland Rabaka, Black Skin, White Masks is primarily concerned with the limits of French citizenship-the fact of blackness in the face of French nonracial claims to the contrary. Less appreciated when it first appeared, this book has arguably surpassed its famed successor. This recognition of a shared dehumanization is first explored in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was all too aware of the costs borne by both Algerians and the French, combatants and civilians, women and men, and adults and children, as his diverse set of patients attested. Indeed, his critics often overlook his practice as a psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia and his deliberate inclusion in The Wretched of the Earth’s penultimate chapter of medical cases regarding the physical and psychological trauma of total war. The colonized of Algeria were faced with a decisive choice: either accept continued dehumanization by a colonial power or fight for their dignity.īut this focus on violence also obscures Fanon’s other contributions. Anti-colonial violence was, in a Sartrean manner of speaking, an anti-violence violence. Many have correctly pointed out that Fanon defined violence in a specific sense, as a distinct response to the sheer violence of French colonialism. Violence has consequently been a troublesome topic for Fanon’s admirers-an issue intrinsic to his politics, yet one often handled carefully. His rationalization of anti-colonial violence has served as a source of inspiration and condemnation both, with Hannah Arendt, among other critics, remarking on the “rhetorical excesses” and “irresponsible grandiose statements” of Fanon and his supporters like Sartre, who wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Published just days before his death, The Wretched of the Earth established Fanon’s reputation.īut Fanon has remained a polarizing figure for many precisely because of his advocacy for armed struggle. He completed three books, most famously The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which detailed his argument for anti-colonial revolution based on his experiences serving the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during its long struggle against French rule. Despite its brevity, Fanon lived a full and complex life, studying under the famed Negritude poet Aimé Césaire, serving in the French resistance during the Second World War, earning a medical degree at the University of Lyon, and circulating with esteemed intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Fanon remains vital not only for his bracing anti-racism and anti-colonialism, but equally for the less-recognized, empathetic politics of solidarity he cultivated and exemplified.īorn on the island of Martinique in the French Antilles, Fanon died from cancer at the age of thirty-six in 1961. I want to stress this last point in particular. His arguments speak to the persistent problem of racism, but, more significantly, the importance of activism beyond our own, often self-imposed, limits. “I am resolutely a man of my time.” Yet, over sixty years later, the presence and influence of Fanon appears to be everywhere, from student movements in South Africa to racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and other parts of the United States.įanon’s interrogation of racial attitudes-white and black alike-and his commitment to the Algerian independence struggle-a country not his by birth-continue to offer lessons for our political present. In no way is it up to me to prepare for the world coming after me,” Frantz Fanon writes in his classic first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
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